This review of Sticker Therapy: Nature by Dr Gareth Moore makes me feel a bit nostalgic. Does anyone else remember those books you could get from the Disney Store in the 90’s that were like painting by numbers but with stickers? I used to love them so much, and guess what? They’re a thing again, and best of all they’re for grown-ups!

Mindfulness:

Leading on from the trend in adult colouring books, Sticker Therapy: Nature aims to bring on a meditative state of mind through creative focus. So just like when concentrating on colouring in-between the lines, stickering in the lines takes up all your focus so there’s no room for pesky thoughts. In this book there are 12 puzzles based on nature, some take less than 100 stickers to complete, whilst the most complicated takes over 230!

How it works:

Each pattern is made up of a grid of numbered shapes. Turning to the sticker sheet section, you find the labelled sheets for the pattern you are working on. You can see above that all of the stickers are numbered, and it’s that easy, just match up the sticker to it’s numbered grid shape and stick it on. The numbers on the grid are not in order, so it’s quite fun searching for the sticker needed each time and finding the right angle to fit it into it’s grid space.

Tried and Tested:

So far I’ve tried out two of the puzzles, Leaf and Fish. They are the simplest in the book and took under an hour each to complete (I measured this by the number of Twin Peaks episodes watched!) I’ll be honest, I thought I would breeze through these puzzles as it’s just sticking down stickers right? However there were a couple of times I thought they had printed the wrong sticker for the numbered grid, but it was just me being a bit simple! Turning the sticker around and around, I eventually found the right angle to make the sticker fit the grid. So it is possible to get a brain workout from this book.

Final Thoughts:

If you’re like me and don’t have the patience for colouring books, I’d definitely give Sticker Therapy: Nature a try if you’re looking for a way to practice creative mindfulness. The author, Dr Gareth Moore has written many books on brain training and various puzzles, so you can rest assured that finishing the patterns in this book will do your brain some good!

The actual act of completing the puzzles is quite involved and it’s very satisfying to see the picture building up. When they’re done, I think the puzzles look great, very bold, colourful and quite modern and graphic. However, if you’re not into puzzles and textiles is more your thing, have a look at my review of Crochet Therapy by Betsan Corkhill.

If you have sticker therapy books that you love, please let me know as I think this might be my new thing!