I’ve tried various types of adult activity book. The earliest trend I remember was for detailed colouring books for adults. Then, I found a connect-the-dots book with hundreds of dots per image. These activity books are great as stress relief, a good one to try if yoga or meditation aren’t your thing. They’re also fun to do!
One of my early childhood memories is of the textbook we used in preschool. The book had a single page full of stickers in the middle, and some (rare) exercises involved placing stickers in correct places. The days when we got to do those exercises were every child’s favourites! Needless to say, the inner child in me jumped with excitement when I saw this activity book and I decided it was worth breaking my resolution of not buying any arts/crafts/activity sets for a while, until I’ve used up a good portion of those I already have sitting at home. The condition I set for myself was that I would start completing the book the same day and make sure I finish all the pictures in a reasonable time. I kept my promise.
There is eight pictures in the book, and each picture is made up of over 100 elements. Each area is marked with a number. The stickers are on the last pages in the book, and each sticker is marked with a number too. It was actually a bit of a challenge to locate the right place for each sticker in the picture!
I labelled this activity book as a stress relief, like adult colouring pages or adult versions of connect-the-dots exercises. Truth be told, though, handling stickers can be a stress generator instead of a stress relief. My hands were shaking as I was scared of making a mistake, and the closer I was to finishing the picture, the more anxious I got. Fortunately – and don’t ask me how I found out! – the stickers and the type of paper used in this book were forgiving when it came to small mistakes noticed immediately.
I started with the first picture, one of a neon horse. It actually took quite some time to finish it.
Almost there…
… and done!
And here’s a sneak peek of other pictures in the book.
There is one picture per page (with a blank back), and all pages are perforated, easy to tear out of the book if you wish to frame the completed picture!
Alphe's Corner 