Leftover Scrapbooking Letter Stickers

When it comes to scrapbooking, leftover letter stickers are one of my biggest time-wasters. By the time I've created a title or two from a sheet of letter stickers, the sheet is likely to be missing most of the vowels and common letters-- maybe even all of them. I don't like throwing the leftover letter stickers away, but at the same time it gets harder and harder to squeeze out another title when I'm missing all the common letters. I can't tell you how much time I've wasted trying to create a title without using any a's or e's.

If this is something you get hung up on too, try one of these solutions:

Avoid Buying Letter Stickers

The first possible solution is obvious, but not much fun: Don't buy letter stickers to start with.

This is the only way I know of to completely avoid ending up with leftover letter stickers. This is not a solution I like, by the way. Letter stickers are easy to use, and I love the way they look. Most of the waste-free alternatives require more effort.

Some of the waste-free methods I like:

Rubber stamping titles
Printing titles out on the computer
Hand-cutting letters using a stencil.

Some of the waste-free methods I would like if I had the tools to do them:

Creating letters using a die-cutter
Printing out letters using a label maker

These are all ideas to consider if you're tired of having leftover letter stickers. But if you decide that you'd rather not give up your letter stickers, perhaps some of my other ideas will help.

Buy Multiple Sheets of the Same Letter Stickers -- End up With Fewer Leftovers

Buy more sheets of the same letter stickers. This accomplishes two things; it coordinates the look of multiple layouts. It also allows you to use up more stickers overall than if you'd bought two completely different styles of letter stickers. This is a solution that has worked well for me.

When I do buy letter stickers, nowadays I try to buy several packages of each style. I've found that they go much further that way.

Here's a theoretical example: Let's say you can get two titles out of each package of letter stickers. If you buy two packages of the same letter stickers, you can get four titles out of them and then you'll probably be able to squeeze another title out of the combined leftovers.

If you buy three packages, you might even be able to squeeze two titles out of the combined leftovers. Make sense?

In contrast, if you were to buy three packages of different letter stickers, you'd end up with a mishmash of leftovers.

Combine Your Leftover Letter Stickers

For those times when you do have a mishmash of leftover letter stickers:

Create an alphabetical letter filing system that has a space for each letter of the alphabet.

Cut out each individual letter that is left over, and file it.

Do this for all of your leftover letters; just file them all together in one big happy file.

Use these filed letters for creating random mismatched titles, words and phrases on your layouts.

This solution works OK for some layouts and not as well for others, but in my opinion it works better than wasting time hunting through dozens of different sheets of picked-over letter stickers.

Combine Letter Stickers With Stamped Letters to Create Titles

There's no rule that says your page titles have to all use the same sort of letters. You can combine rubber stamped letters with letter stickers, and the scrapbooking police will not arrest you. I promise!

Leftover Letter Sticker Lottery

Contact all your friends who scrapbook, and put together a leftover letter sticker lottery. The stakes: everyone bets their entire stash of letter sticker leftovers. Whoever wins, wins the entire pool.

Use Up Your Letter Stickers in Unexpected Ways

Take all the leftover letter stickers and do something silly with them. Stick them down randomly on a piece of cardstock or patterned paper, and then scrap overtop of them as if they were part of the paper design. Form random words to stick onto die-cuts, then add the die-cuts to your stash to use in future layouts. Pretend you're playing with magnetic poetry. Have fun!