Hello Kitty is a very popular brand – not sure why but there you go, each to his or her own. The thing is, I was thinking about how to make my own 12″x12″ scrap booking paper that would be substantial enough to use to make a mini-album.
I find 12″x12″ papers can be quite expensive and in any case, I quite like having something different to work with. You can create loads of your own 12″x12″ sheets out of one roll of wallpaper if you have the time, patience and desire to do it. The ‘desire to do it’ is the key here – so if you don’t have that may I suggest you move on because without it you will just get annoyed when you get to the part where the double-sided tape gets a bit tricky to work with. Projects involving heavy-duty double-sided carpet tape take commitment, as anyone who has ever had an argument with it will know.
The Hello Kitty wallpaper was on sale at my local B&M store and as I know someone who absolutely LOVES Hello Kitty stuff, I bought a roll to cover the boards of a full size album cum scrap-book for her. That leaves me with a practically whole roll of the paper which I am unlikely to put on my walls because I don’t have daughters who go ga ga over a pretend cat.
Hello Kitty wallpaper works really well for ‘off the wall’ projects
So this week, when I got to thinking about experimenting with making my own 12″x12″ scrap booking paper, I decided to try it with the Hello Kitty wallpaper I have sitting here doing nothing. I wanted to make a folding mini album for someone I was sending a few photographs to.
The paper turned out to be a good choice. Actually, any high quality wallpaper would be a good choice because when it is stuck together in two layers to make it double-sided, it becomes heavy-duty enough to act almost like card stock.
So here is my Hello Kitty mini-album which took about 45 minutes to make from start to finish, and that included measuring, cutting and sticking the wallpaper back to back to make the 12″x12″ scrap book paper. You may notice that the pictures are of little boys but as our family is devoid of girls, I had no choice – but you get the picture anyway. I just use glue dots to attach them. You could go fancy and use photo corners so you can take the pictures in and out.
To see the full tutorial on how to make the Hello Kitty mini album, go to: http://www.instructables.com/id/Hello-Kitty-Mini-Album/
If you arrange your pictures specifically to be the right way up when the album is standing up, you can also use it as a display stand on a shelf or window sill. Makes a nice alternative to a birthday card, with a few surprises inside.
Amazingly, when I made this 12×12 paper, I didn’t have one double-sided tape ‘incident’ so the whole thing was stress-free. Makes a change from the last album I made when I accidentally laid one sticky surface down on the beautiful front cover I had just completed and found out the hard way just how stubborn carpet tape is. Oh how I swore.
Back to the Hello Kitty wallpaper – for those of you who sell crafts at fairs and online, I think using themed, branded wallpaper or wrapping paper such as Hello Kitty or Superman or Spiderman or Frozen etc would get you out of copyright troubles if you wanted to make ‘branded’ albums to sell. My understanding is, if you are simply taking the product and using it as it is and not scanning it to make copies, you can make and sell as many as you want.
But hey, don’t take my word for that, I’m not a solicitor and if you go to prison for selling products made with Disney wallpaper just don’t mention my name in court. Do your homework first. I really don’t see how anyone can stop you buying a roll of branded wallpaper and using it for crafts to sell, if there is no scanning involved.
Or is there a Misuse of Wallpaper Act? Wouldn’t surprise me in today’s world.
I bought my paper at B&M but I did find some (more expensive than what I paid!) on Amazon. It is slightly different from the design I bought but maybe even better because the images are smaller.