Becksta's list of things that were right and things that were wrong about the 80s got me thinking, once again, about my sticker collection. It must be fate, because earlier this week I decided to bust out the remains of my collection this weekend and Do Something About It.

Oh, how yesterday's obsessions become today's useless, emotionally fraught clutter.

Back in the early 1980s there was a big fad among tween girls (of which I was one) for collecting stickers. Now I grant you, stickers are fun and pretty and an interesting way to spice up your Pee-Chee folder or a greeting card or whatever.

But why on Earth would you just, like, COLLECT THEM? What kind of madness led to keeping stacks and stacks of photo albums with untouched stickers (still on their backing paper, ready to be used [in theory]) lovingly entombed within?

Looking back on it, I honestly don't know what any of us was thinking. With most collectibles, there is some kind of promise of implied future value. Beanie Babies, for example. Stamps. Baseball cards. Not true with stickers. None of us cared about the value of our stickers, except in so far as some were more rare (read: difficult to obtain) than others.

In fact, one of the prime forces behind the sticker collecting mania was the low price of stickers. Even a twelve year old girl could afford to buy stickers at the mall on a Saturday afternoon. None of us had any real money, but that's okay - there were sticker stores where you could buy individual stickers off giant rolls of them. Two cents apiece. A nickel apiece. Some of the larger might be a dollar or more, but those were for special occasions.

We traded stickers among ourselves. This led to the practice of buying multiples - one for your own collection, and one to trade. As you can imagine, we all had a lot of multiples. Because I grew up in Alaska, for pity's sake, and there were only about four places you could buy stickers in the first place, so we all pretty much bought the same stickers to begin with.

And what did we do with our stickers? Well, we collected them. We organized them by category (unicorns, flowers, food) and then re-organized them by type (prismatic, scratch 'n sniff, puffy) or artist (Lisa Frank, Sandylion, Garbage Pail Kids).

Some of my favorite stickers - and I confess, I still like them today - were made by Hambly Studios. These were simplistic designs, die-cut, with bright colors and clean graphic design. Most of the Hambly stickers were sold on the roll, and I remember spending ages at the stationery store contemplating the rolls, choosing my stickers, carefully tearing them off, and bringing them up to the counter.

I did some Googling and found that Hambly Studios is still in the business, still making stickers, and still has that classic screenprinting style. They work with the scrapbooking market for the most part, and I suppose a lot of erstwhile sticker collectors became modern-day scrapbookers.

Now I'm torn between getting rid of the last collection, or buying more! This time around I'd use the stickers instead of just keeping them in photo albums though, I promise.

Photo credit: Flickr/Enokson