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Saturday 24 September 2011

Recycling greetings cards

I have just recieved around 200 used greetings cards - which always give me a flutter of craft organising.

When I recieve a large batch of files, I immediately sort them into a few batches
  • Nativity christmas theme
  • Religous Easter theme
  • Non-religous Christmas scene in different sizes
  • Cards that can easily be turned into tags with a couple of guillotine snips
  • Birthday and other greetings cards
  • Mens greetings cards (as this is usually only a small amount)
  • Backs of cards
  • Used coloured envelopes
  • Used inserts
Next I look whether I have any cards that are the same and these are put together to do decoupage. I also look for any cards that have inserts as the inserts can easily be taken out and a new insert added.

Then when it comes to crafting I can go to the different boxes according to what Im crafting for.

The nativity scene and Easter religous scenes I cut down and send as prayer tags for the Uganda project I support.

The non-religous Christmas cards are the ones I get most often through Freecycle, they are so useful.
  • I make little gift boxes out of them.
  • The scenery ones I make into inspirational tags to leave around the town and on the buses to lift people's spirits. 
  • I find these are most often the ones where I can decoupage at its simplist two layer.
  • I cut out the little characters to use as embellishments/stickers for the Uganda project, which means I can send out a shoe box for the kids to make cards without it damaging the environment or my pocket. I usually stick in a PVA glue bottle, some double sided mount tape and scissors with paper or card depending on weight allowed.
  • These are the ones I bring out when I have children crafting, they are always popular

The backs of cards you can sometimes find half of the card with no writing either side - this can easily be sizzixed or stamped or punched. It is espically good when the backs of cards are of different colours. Sometimes though you can only get a small amount of blank card from this method, but still useful for small stamps.

The coloured envelopes I have shown before can be stamped or punched or if really frugal background paper for your cards.

The used inserts can be checkd for any nice design or for the edge strips which can then be used in your design (not for commercial use)

These recycling ideas are good for any toddler groups or schools or churches to take up. I would be very interested to hear if anyone finds this useful in their crafting.

1 comment:

  1. What a great crafter you are with a heart of gold. Keep going...

    xxx Monica

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