Don't Throw Out Your Sticker Scraps - Use Them To DIY The Cutest Mini Frames

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Whether you're using stickers to plaster your water bottle or fill a scrapbook, one thing is inevitable: at the end of your project, a page of scraps will be left behind. Custom die-cut stickers and stamp sheets alike will leave a lot of negative space, the borders around which your adhesive accessories are shaped that are made from the same material but not intended to be removed. For crafty DIYers, this excess material can be more than just trash. It's plenty easy to lift the border material off its page and use those die cut shapes as tiny photo frames. In fact, this upcycling project is a great place to start junk journaling.

Junk journaling is a practice in repurposing the sentimental scraps of everyday life to draw meaning out of the mundane. Junk journal aficionados take old items like receipts, concert ticket stubs, vintage cards, or even the remnants of a cute plant encounter to design a unique daily journal, planner, or scrapbook. It's easy to see how the scrap borders of old sticker sheets can fit into this recycling philosophy, especially if you've already gone out of your way to turn travel stickers into a meaningful piece of home decor. The only thing you need to do for this DIY is cut the images you're framing into roughly the shape of the removed stickers so they can adhere to the borders while leaving room for other sticky frames. Once all your sticker frames are set, you can either reattach it to the original sheet or move the piece wholesale into a junk journal or other medium of your choice.

If you've purchased or ordered a particular sticker set, the page will likely have a unique design to frame your photos. However, if you have a blank white border, that affords its own opportunity to draw or write notes on the periphery of each image and add your own flare — as is the goal of junk journaling writ large. In fact, the customizations can go one step further. If you have your own Cricut, or a comparatively cheaper option such as a Likcut Vinyl Cutter Machine, it's possible to design your own die cut shapes with the intent of using its scraps to frame other miniatures. Going into a project intending to use every part of the proverbial buffalo is a great way to practice sustainable interior decor habits at home.

Creating a book of memories is the obvious use case for recycling sticker sheet scraps as DIY frames, as it's easy to imagine how cute pictures of you, your family, and your friends would look with unique die cut borders. But this concept is just as useful for ideas like creating a mood board. For example, you can consider getting started on a home design vision board by putting images of prototypical furniture or colors beneath the sticker scrap borders. If you have a lot of extra sticker sheets, it might be worth collecting the border scraps in a book, and then passing that off to see all the ways your friends (or strangers) decide to fill the negative spaces.