Recycle Wednesday

I have so much stuff in my studio, it's hard to know what to play with. And I find myself going back to the same old stuff... or should I say new stuff. Do you work that way?

I decided for this year I want to work on the 'reuse/ reduce/ recycle' concept a bit more. So every Wednesday I'll showcase a project that has something recycled on it. It might be the base of the whole project, or it might be something as minute as a small piece of paper... like today's project.

During Virtual Stamp Night (VSN) at Splitcoast Stampers last fall we were given a challenge to use 'recycled' wrapping paper in our card. We couldn't take it off the roll new. It had to be some that was 'saved' from a previous Christmas for whatever reason. Come on, admit it... you have some!

My plan was to have a Christmas tree with presents around the base. All the presents would be from recycled Christmas wrap. I spent the entire evening (notice I didn't say 'wasted') trying to make my plan work. The presents just didn't work right. So I went to my trusty PrintShop program and found an image of a stacked row of presents.

Thankful I'd just put in a colored ink cartridge, I sized it to fit a 4x 5.5 greeting card, printed it out and then cut the strip out. Okay... got my presents, but how do I incorporate the 'recycled' gift wrap? These presents come pre-wrapped LOL

Can you spot my wrapped packages in the card below?

One is easy to spot... it's the Santa on the far left. The other one is the blue package right under the 'creative' part of my watermark.

I cut the shapes of those two packages out of white card stock then adhered them to scraps of wrapping paper and glued them into place over the existing packages in the preprinted strip.

The card base is SU Pacific Point. I used a scalloped oval from Cricut cart: Lacey Labels. The tree is from an Original Sizzix Die (retired). I added the garland with Red Stickles. The star is a small snowflake punch. I determined it's position on the mat and chalked behind it with SU Daffodil Delight. The package strip is popped out with pop dots to give them a bit of dimension.

Okay, not a big recycle project but it's where I'm at as I try to get caught up after being off work for so long.

Remember: every piece we reuse isn't sitting in a landfill contaminating Mother Earth.