If you've got a collection of washi tapes and stickers growing faster than you can use them — rolls tumbling around in a box, loose sticker sheets buried in a folder, little torn-off pieces stuck to your desk because you didn't want to throw them out — this tutorial is for you. I'll show you how to make a small plastic-paged swatch booklet that holds washi tape swatches and stickers you can peel off and use whenever you need them, then refill as you go. The whole thing is made from upcycled plastic packaging, bound with a five-hole pamphlet stitch, and small enough to tuck into a bag for travel.
What we cover
This tutorial covers building a compact swatch book from repurposed plastic folder pockets or similar packaging materials, folding and scoring the pages, binding with a five-hole pamphlet stitch using embroidery floss and an awl, and filling the finished book with washi tape swatches and stickers. I also talk through what plastic materials work (and which ones don't), how to hang a charm from the spine, and how to use the booklet as a portable washi tape catalog.
What you'll learn
How to choose the right plastic material for the pages — the key is finding something with enough body to hold its shape but flexible enough to bend when you're peeling a sticker off. Thin food packaging is usually too flimsy. Rigid card sleeves or thick plastic folders are often too stiff to peel from cleanly. The sweet spot is something like the inner pockets from an expanding file folder, acetate sheet offcuts, or flat plastic garment packaging — materials that bend easily in your hand but don't crumple.
How to cut and score plastic pages so the booklet sits flat, including:
- Cutting sheets in half to create a portable size
- Scoring the fold lines before assembling so the book closes naturally and doesn't keep springing open
How to bind a five-hole pamphlet stitch, including:
- Placing all five holes — centre, two outer holes about half an inch from each edge, and two in between
- Threading from the inside out at the centre hole, working a figure-eight pattern through each hole
- Skipping back over the centre hole on the return pass so the two thread ends meet inside and can be knotted off
- How to start from the outside instead if you want the knotted finish visible on the spine
Why I use embroidery floss for the binding — it's soft enough to pass through plastic without tearing the hole wider, and it adds a nice bit of colour at the spine without needing anything special.
How to add a charm to the booklet — a single awl hole at the top of the spine before you start filling the pages, so you can thread a bead charm or dangle through it.
How to fill the pages with washi tape swatches and stickers, including:
- Laying washi tape strips as swatches so you can see the pattern and peel a length off when you need it
- Using the booklet as a catalog for a collection — keeping tapes from the same pack together so you can see what coordinates
- Sticking loose sticker sheets or individual stickers directly onto the plastic pages
Why plastic pages work so well for stickers and washi tape — stickers stay put on the surface but peel off cleanly when you're ready to use them, exactly as they would from their original backing. The stickiness doesn't transfer away.
How to use the tab edges from folder pockets as built-in page details — rather than trimming them off, I leave them in as natural dividers or decorative tabs within the book.
Tips & gotchas
Score your folds before assembling the book. Plastic has memory — if you fold it without scoring, it wants to spring back open. A bone folder or even a fingernail along the fold line before you assemble makes a real difference in how the finished booklet sits closed.
The middle-ground thickness matters more than you'd expect. Too flimsy and the pages won't hold their shape or support the stickers cleanly. Too rigid and you can't bend the page down to get underneath a sticker when you want to peel it off. Test any candidate material by folding a corner — if it kinks badly or feels like it might crack, it's too stiff.
Cardstock-weight stickers behave differently on plastic. Thinner sticker films transfer beautifully. Thicker, cardstock-style stickers tend to lift at the edges as soon as the page bends — they just don't conform to a curved surface the way thinner ones do. I always add a tiny amount of glue when I'm actually using those heavier stickers in a journal anyway, so it's not a dealbreaker, just worth knowing going in.
Don't stick things on the back of a transparent page if the front page has a busy pattern. When you open the booklet, designs bleed through from one side to the other and it gets hard to read what you've got where. Either leave transparent pages single-sided, or tuck a piece of scrapbook paper behind a page to give it a solid background.
Use washi tape to label your pages — not masking tape. Masking tape leaves a sticky film behind after you remove it, especially if it's been sitting for a while. I learned this the hard way. A small piece of washi tape peels cleanly even months later, which is the whole point of the booklet in the first place.
Stickers won't lose their stickiness from being in the booklet, but don't transfer them back and forth repeatedly. The idea is to store them here until you're ready to use them in a project, not to move them around multiple times. One transfer from booklet to journal page works perfectly. Several transfers back and forth will eventually degrade the adhesive.
I originally came to this idea while trying to find something useful to do with a broken expanding folder, and the plastic pockets ended up giving me a whole series of journal page ideas beyond the swatch book itself. It's one of those projects where the material leads somewhere.
