Best Adhesive for Scrapbooking, Papercrafts, and Card Making

Want to know how I know? Because like many others, when I first started, I used my kid's low-cost and low-quality gluesticks for sticking bits and pieces down. Rookie error!

These days when I'm purchasing scrapbook adhesives, I look for words such as pH-neutral, acid-free, or archival safe. Knowing what glue to use for scrapbooking is crucial.

Wet adhesives are what we usually think of as ''glue'' and come in pastes, liquids, or spray cans. A lot of paper crafters limit the use of wet adhesives as paper that is even slightly too wet turns quickly into warped paper when it dries. There are safer adhesive alternatives out there!

Dry adhesives are tapes, photo corners, sticky dots, and tabs. These are great for scrapbooking and papercrafts and allow you to be just that little bit more creative.

Low tack adhesives are much less sticky and are generally used for temporarily holding things in place. They usually come in the form of sheets or tape.

Now that you know about buying acid-free and steering clear of too many wet type adhesives, let's talk about the best adhesives for scrapbooking, cardmaking, and papercrafts!

Photo corners are a beautiful decorative touch when it comes to scrapbooking, cardmaking, and papercraft. They are a triangular-shaped piece of paper or card that comes in a variety of pre-made sizes, colors, and patterns with a sticky adhesive on the back.

Photos corners are used to - you guessed it - attach a photo to your project! They are great because they allow you to adhere your picture down without actually damaging the picture.

Photos can even be swapped out for another one as it sits inside the triangle itself and it's the corner triangle that is stuck down to your scrapbooking page or card.

Photo corners also act as a nice design feature on your page!

Washi tape is a durable, flexible tape that comes in a variety of beautiful patterns and colors. It acts as both an embellishment and an adhesive for sticking things down and is often used on the page as a design element whether you actually need to stick something down or not.

Glue dots are a super handy adhesive and a lot of fun. They are great for adding a dramatic 3-D effect to your page embellishments!

I love it for creating backgrounds where I'm basically covering the whole page with another layer of paper.

For e.g. If I want to create a background using torn up paper scraps, then I can lightly spray my card stock with the spray adhesive and layer my strips of paper down quickly and easily.

Just stick a few squares on your embellishment (or cut a piece from your roll), peel the protective sticker off the side that's exposed, and stick it down. Just make sure it's on the right spot before you press down and completely adhere it!

It's amazing for sticking both photographs and flat paper embellishments down and it dries quickly too.

You can even buy them with an applicator box, where you just hold it down on your page and press down to transfer the photo tab to your paper.

Happy scrapping and card making!