Making your letter stickers go further

Since gas prices have been going up up up, my already small scrapbook supply budget has gone down down down! I've been trying to make my supplies stretch further and I came up with a cool idea today.

Something I use a lot of is letter stickers for titles, especially American Crafts thickers. I was looking at some of my half empty sheets today and noticing that when a sticker is peeled off, there is still a little outline of the letter on the backing sheet. I thought about cutting that out and using it on my page, but unless I always want to use white lettering that's kinda boring. So, I came up with an idea!

To do this, you will need:



(o) The backing sheet from your letter stickers
(o) Small scissors (I use cutter bee) or a craft knife, whichever works best for you for cutting detailed areas
(o) Loose glitter or flock. I have even used loose eyeshadow or crushed up powdered eyeshadow to do this. (I was/am a makeup artist so I have alot of eyeshadow sitting around that I need to use up). The loose glitter shown in my photo and used on the letters is from the dollar store and cost me $1 for 5 colors!
(o) Glue. A glue pen will work, or for an even cheaper alternative use white elmer's glue and a small paintbrush.
(o) A nail file or sandpaper.
(o) I forgot to put this in the photo, but an embossing tool or ballpoint pen with no ink left in it.



First, cut your letter out of the sheet. Next, take your pen/embossing tool and go over the outline of the letter while applying pressure. The outline is usually very faint so I find this just helps to make your outline a little bit more visible when applying the glue. Don't use a pen with ink in it or your outline will smudge once you apply the glue.

Second, gently file/sand the letter. The backing paper is smooth so the stickers can be easily peeled off and the glue doesn't like to stick to it.

Fill in your letter with glue, and then apply the loose glitter or flock. Shake off the excess. I usually blow on them a little to get the rest of the glitter that shaking doesn't remove.

Trim the white from around your letter. If your outlines were a bit shaky or you went out of the lines with the glue a little, you can fix that during this step.

Tada, your result:



If you wanted a thicker chipboard look, you could glue your letter to a piece of cardboard and then cit it out. Try a cereal box or kleenex box!

So - yay! You save that sticker backing from going into a landfill, add an extra handmade touch to your pages, and have beautiful titles in custom colors. Try printing off your titles on plain white paper using fancy fonts that you downloaded for free online and using this same trick for an even cheaper alternative to stickers!

Also - here is a layout I did today/last night. I'm going to be framing this one and giving it to my mom as a late mother's day present (on Father's day - kindof ironic lol)



And some gratuitous cuteness for the heck of it..