Scrapbooks are the latest rage in crafts. Serving a variety of purposes, they catalogue photographs, events, and journaling, as well as organize mounds of papers and stacks of pictures that have taken up space around your home. In addition to serving these concrete purposes, they are artistic and perhaps even therapeutic. Allowing crafters an outlet for their creations, they incorporate paper crafting skills. Putting order to words and photographs, they help focus and clear the mind. Taking these two pluses into consideration, why wouldn’t everyone start creating a scrapbook?

For some folks the reason is fear. They aren’t artistic enough. They don’t have a flair for creating. They have a genuine fear of the metal tools and gadgets that accompany the craft. Future scrapbook enthusiasts, take heed. There is a trick so simple and popular that it is often overlooked. Spend a few minutes in the sticker section in your local craft or department store. You’ll come away with ideas galore.

Stickers

Why stickers? What purpose could they possibly serve? The answer isn’t simple. In fact the purposes stickers serve in creating scrapbooks—whether elaborate or simple—are too numerous to list. The following is a sample of ideas for scrapbooks using stickers. These ideas will undoubtedly generate some original ideas as well.

Themes

If you like baseball or have a passion for riding horses, you may choose to select these categories as themes for your latest scrapbook or scrapbooks. It is simple to bring all of your scrapbook pages together with a like theme by affixing a few stickers on each page. They can be stuck between pictures, adjacent to journaling, or randomly throughout your pages.

Lettering

This is one of the best ways to use stickers—at least as far as those who feel a bit artistically impaired are inclined to believe. Rather than drawing—or even stenciling—your words as headers or titles in scrapbooks, rely on the multitude of stickers to do this job. From large and ornate to tiny and simple, there are letters for every facet of creating scrapbooks that one can imagine. The sharp, uniform look of similar letters brings together the overall achievement of a themed scrapbook.

Embellishment

If you don’t like to draw—or perhaps just aren’t very good at it—consider using stickers to simply embellish your pages. The variety of stickers available will most likely coincide with the themes you’ve opted to use. For example, a recent scrapbook of a family vacation was embellished with travel stickers. From suitcases to road signs, it was obvious that the people featured in this scrapbook had just returned from a fun family trip.

Colors

Since scrapbook pages follow color schemes, stickers are the perfect way to enhance these schemes without appearing overbearing or tacky. Stickers are available in various patterns, shapes and colors. They don’t necessarily depict a “thing.” Randomly stuck throughout your scrapbook pages, they create subtle hints of color that help bring the color scheme—as well as the scrapbook theme—clearly into focus.

Stickers can be expensive. Watch for sales in craft or department stores. Online venues like E-Bay frequently have hundreds of listings for large varieties of stickers. Buy seasonal stickers at their least expensive immediately after a particular season has ended. Christmas stickers are frequently available just above cost during the first week in January. Even if you’re an expert artist, stickers can still play a vital role in creating your scrapbooks.

Take a few minutes to peruse the sticker aisle the next time you head out for card stock or scrapbook page protectors. The ideas you generate will likely be plentiful!