If you're a scrapbooker you have them. Maybe they are stuffed in a shoebox, or still in the bag you brought home from the scrapbook store. Or maybe you have them all organized in a binder. All scrapbookers have them; some have a little while most have a lot. I'm not sure about you, but lately it seems they just sit in my binder collecting dust. Yes, I'm talking about stickers. I love stickers. There are so many out there that are just plain adorable, but lately I've been ignoring that binder full of stickers every time I scrapbook. So I decided to give myself a challenge. I would create some layouts using my stickers and using them in different ways.

When using stickers the obvious comes to mind. You could stick the sticker on the background paper and leave it. Most often the sticker looks a little lost on the page or there are way too many stickers on the paper to begin with. This has been affectionately called "sticker sneeze." Try to avoid this at all costs.

The easiest technique to use is to place the sticker on a square or rectangle of cardstock and mat it. In my layout entitled "First Grade" I did just that. Otherwise my stickers might have just been aimlessly floating on the page.



Another technique is to cover your stickers with vellum. Any color can be used, but I used white vellum in my "Love is..." layout. Vellum softens and can tone down the color of the stickers it covers. I mounted Mrs. Grossman's Paper Whispers heart stickers on green cardstock and covered them with white vellum. I used eyelets to secure the vellum to the cardstock.



I absolutely love letter stickers. There are so many different types hitting the market every month and I love them all. You can mat your letter stickers on cardstock, use them plain, mix and match them; the list goes on and on. One technique I like is using regular stickers to take the place of certain letters. For my "Football" layout I replaced the O's with two footballs



Tags are a hot item right now. And what better thing to place on a tag then a sticker? For my layout entitled "Spring" I took plain white tags and covered them with patterned paper. Then I placed the frog stickers on top. These were kept pretty simple but you can get as elegant as you want.



In "It's a Girl" I also used stickers on round metal rim tags. I covered them with cardstock and placed my stickers on top. I also used a short piece of a sticker border on the bottom of my photo mat.



One of the newer things I've noticed lately are poems and quotes already made into a sticker for you. There is no more searching through quote books to find the perfect quote or poem. The stickers are already premade for you, to pop on the page.



So don't be afraid, grab that sticker binder, blow off the dust and get ready to make some quick and easy pages that look cute too. You might just be inspired and make a run to your local scrapbook store to stock up on some of the new stickers they have.