Stickers and Rub-ons

We all have them, right? Probably more than we care to admit to anyone too! LOL

I recently packed up some scrappy supplies to bring with me on vacation to scrap. I tried to choose items that I do not normally reach for, be it due to my laziness or poor memory, or both! Two of those said items are stickers, specifically alpha stickers, and rub-ons. I love both products but I just seem to forget to reach for them when I am in the midst of creating. And when the nearest scrappy store is 3+ hours away by car, I find myself finding new ways to use these scrappy staples.

Below are a couple of layouts from today (I guess I was feeling extra creative today!)

Firstly, I used some less than perfect pictures that captured our summer family vacation rituals, cropped out the distracting elements and then put them all together in a snappy collage. Then I used some leftover scraps of BasicGrey's Offbeat collection to frame my photo collage.

At that point, it still seemed unfinished to me...and I still had the full BasicGrey Olio Book which matches the Offbeat collection. My first thought was to place a rub-on in an "empty" area on a photo. But divine intervention by my youngest took over! As I was getting a glass of iced tea, she decided to "help" me put on the rubs that I had cut out of the book. Well, if I'll be darned, I really liked that tone on tone look! It adds some interest and texture to the otherwise "neutral" paper. So I finished rubbing on the rest of the vines!

On top of the vines, I put some rubs on cream cardstock and fussy cut the images. These images were adhered ontop of the rub on vines. Below is a detailed look at this technique.

With my other layout, also using the Offbeat collection and shown below I layered rub-ons right on top of each other and I also grouped elements together.

Here is a close-up of the layering and grouping; there are 7 rub-ons used.

These same techniques can be applied to stickers. In the close-up photo below, I used some of the left-over Thickers numbers and alphas from 3 different American Crafts remarks books. (And I have to say it felt fantastic to use up all those sheets!)

I hope you will give these techniques a try and if you have tips to share, please post them here!