STUDIO NOTES ✦ BEHIND THE STICKER
This sticker started as a pile of felt
Every landscape sticker in our shop began life as a real, physical felt scene: cut, layered, glued, stitched, and framed on my worktable before it ever met a printer. This is the story of A Long Walk, the little castle scene from our sticker collection.
Studio notesReal felt, real threadA 2 to 3 day build
It starts as a pile of pieces
Some scenes come together in as little as an hour, but most take two or three days to fully figure out. A lot of that time is spent on layout. I’ll try two or three different arrangements before I’m ready to commit and glue anything down. Pieces get shuffled, trimmed, and occasionally exiled back to the scrap bin as I test out different ideas.
Glued down and committed. No turning back now.
Bringing it to life
Once the glue commits me, the fun part starts! I love adding embroidery, and other small details like rhinestones that bring a scene to life. With the castle, I knew from the beginning that I wanted a long road winding through it, which is also why the finished piece is titled A Long Walk.
The frame makes it a picture
The last step is the outer frame. It finishes the raw edge and turns a stack of felt into a picture-perfect scene. Excuse the messy (glue stained) background please.
From felt to vinyl
To become a sticker, the finished scene has to be digitized. This round was photographed with an iPhone and a light box. The printing was done by YellowDog, a Denver print studio, on a durable, tactile vinyl they recommended and we love. We’ve been able to pull up a sticker from a water bottle and reposition it and still have it look like new, so it’s a really cool material.
We’re also curious about printing and finishing stickers in house, so you’ll likely see more from us as we learn about that process. As a first step, we’ve been experimenting with scanning the scenes instead of photographing them, and it’s showing real promise.
More scenes on the worktable
A Long Walk isn’t alone- there are a total of 4 scenes available currently. Each one went through various drafts before it was sticker ready. The lighthouse was an early draft of the sailboat that I want to come back to at some point.
If the mountains become a sticker, the newsletter hears about it first.
TAKE A SCENE HOME
The stickers (were) real felt, really
Our Mixed-Media Landscape Stickers are photographs of these actual felt scenes, embroidery, rhinestones and all, printed on durable vinyl that feels as good as it looks.
See what’s on the worktable
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Keep exploring
More from the worktable and the supply shelf: