Cards made with Stickers - my way!

I love using stickers and people are always asking me how I get the results I do with pre-made products. Well, it's not a secret and it's actually very simple: I don't treat a sticker as a finished product. I have no problems cutting stickers apart and re-arranging them to get as much use as I can out of each individual one or to get the finished look I want. I do this by placing the sticker I want to cut up on wax paper and use a very sharp craft knife to cut it apart. I also have no problems coloring stickers to match my specific needs. Most paper stickers can be colored with markers; however care must be used to make sure the marker does not bleed through the sticker and dissolve the adhesive quality of the back side. As I said to me a sticker is a starting point not a finished product. To illustrate my "secret" for this blog I made the following three cards but there are other examples on my blog such as the February 1, 2011 post.

The first card uses two of the same two bloom Iris sticker (Mrs. Grossman's). For the central image I wanted one to create a fuller stalk with flowers at various levels of the stem. To start I took one sticker and cut it apart. I separated the leaves from the stem and then split the remaining portion of the stem with the flowers into two pieces so that each piece contained a flower and a piece of stem. I then arranged the full sticker and all the pieces of the cut up sticker on a piece of wax paper to create the fuller flower stalk before I moved it to a piece of light blue paper. By underlaying and overlaying the various parts the finished stem takes on the illusion of depth and fullness. To finish the card I trimmed the blue paper, mounted it on a purple paper matching the color of the flowers, trimmed that panel with a lace edge sticker (Mrs. Grossman's) and added a purple line (Mrs. Grossman's). I mounted everything on a lavender card and to finish the card I added the text (Deja View Wonderful Words) below the flower image.

The second card I made uses a left over piece of a 12" long ocean scenery sticker (Mrs. Grossman's). The original sticker is only about 1" high and I didn't want to have just a narrow band of either the ocean or beach across the bottom of the card. To start with I cut up the sticker in two pieces, overlaid two of the pieces to create a wider and more dramatic looking band which allowed me to have both the wave and the beach as my background. To complete the scene I added the background clouds and gulls; which are all parts of the same scenery sticker. The white tag was made using a border punch with a matching corner punch (Martha Stewart/E.K. Success) while the blue wave trim was made using an edge punch (Fiskars). The text is a sticker (Cloud-9-Designs/Fiskars) which is now also available as an acrylic stamp from the same company. The third card started with one laser cut texted and lace sticker (Mrs. Grosssman's) that I mounted on a piece of burgundy paper and then trimmed down. I covered three of the laser cut flowers within the sticker with other flower stickers (Mrs. Grossman's). To create the river of flowers I started by locating the panel I made in the lower right hand corner of the card and then tracing around it in pencil. This creates a space around which the river of flowers (Mrs. Grossman's) goes through but does not need to actually be covered with flowers. Matching the flowers I used on the panel I started the river by laying down the largest of the flowers from the upper left corner to the lower right corner of the card in an uneven pattern and spacing. To maximize my stickers I cut some of the individual flower stickers in pieces and used them around the marked off area of the panel which creates the illusion that the flowers continue behind the panel. I also re-used the portions of the flowers that I trimmed off along the edge of the card around the panel. To complete the look I filled in the river with different sized flowers. The panel was then attached to the card with raised adhesive dots.

These were all done with flat one dimensional stickers but I use the same techniques with 3D stickers.