Top Tips Tuesday: Recycle your old greeting cards

Today’s top tip comes from one of our members, Zoe W.

I mostly do paper based crafts, so when I’m crafting I’m always looking for ways to recycle.  Every birthday card, postcard, scrap of ribbon or even card from junk mail or brochures suggests possibilities to me.  They can become decorations on scrapbook pages, mounting backgrounds for photographs, gift boxes, new greetings cards or bookmarks.  Calendars are another good source of beautiful photos, which can be used either just as they are glued to card as notelets, or using punches to get fantastic colours from skies or sea for shapes. Here are some examples:

I took a pile of cards from my birthday last month. Some were cartoons or pictures that made good postcards. I also made two bookmarks.

Using a small guillotine I sliced the backs off, always checking if any part of the back is re-useable.  I then look for anything else I can salvage. This is an ideal card.

It has not only three fabric parcels on the front, but an area of colour embossed card too.  There is also a printed parcel on the back and a large area of blank card.  I then re-created these cards.

The cupcakes on the first card originally had little red birds on the top.  I trimmed around them and added a red sequin to each hide them.  They are all raised using sticking pads.  Even these are scavenged, as I used the left over edges from the star shaped pads I used on another card.  I did the same with the flowers on the second card.

On the purple card, the stars are punched out of three different coloured areas from other cards, and the purple backing is from the back from another.  It originally said ‘The text inside this card reads:’ and I cut that off, just leaving the ‘Happy Birthday’ bit.

The three parcels are stuck on a strip from the back of another card and the printed parcel from the back of the original card is now on the front of a matching envelope.

Do you have a member’s top tip?? Let us know via email or in the comments!