busy book: stickers, stickers, stickers!

on our last major car trip, one of the activities that can keep the happy toddler busy for the longest stretch of time (15-20 min, maybe?) was… stickers!  for the trip, i’d made him a sticker book inspired by this one by shiso mama.  it was actually the second sticker book i’d made (the first one was very similar to the one at the link above and the first thing he did with that one was to rip the pocket halfway open trying to get at the stickers.  plus, he liked to stick the stickers on the inside of the (paper) front cover, rendering the stickers one-use-only (whereas if you stick them on the shiny pages you can peel and stick them over and over)) and it had a felt cover.  although i did the binding wrong and it sort of fell apart, he still loved the sticker book concept and so do i.  if you’d like to see a tutorial on how to make a separate sticker book like the one i made, let me know in the comments and i’ll see what i can do.  back to this busy book page:

neither of these pages is without imperfection (i was in a hurry, it was a short nap day!) but they’ll both still work just fine.  the basic concept is:  pocket to hold your full sticker sheets and a page (made of freezer paper, shiny side out) to stick your stickers to.  although the happy toddler’s sticker book had multiple pages, he mostly just wanted to stack the stickers on top of each other in a big pile, so he didn’t really care about using all the pages, so one page should be plenty.  although you could make a page that tucks several sticker pages into the quiet book if your recipient would enjoy that.

i noticed on our trip that he was most successful with sturdy, plastic stickers that weren’t completely flat (i.e. “puffy stickers” or similar).  they’re easier to get off the page without ripping and if you stack them in a tower, you can usually pull them back apart and re-stick them elsewhere if you want.  i found these cute hamster stickers (the hamster is actually a loose piece that floats around inside the clear “hamster ball.”  is this a licensed movie character?  it reminds me of a movie, but i didn’t see mention of it on the packaging at all.)

my nephews are into sports (their dad is a soccer coach), so i think they’ll like these stickers!

this two-page spread is simple enough that i don’t think i need to include a pattern (do i?), but if you’d like to learn more about the sticker book i made, let me know!