How to Recycle Your Chrismas Cards into New Craft Materials

The decorations Christmas season has past and you are putting all the Christmas decorations away. The task is daunting, but you get to sit down and read all those great greetings from all those Christmas cards. These are memories that need to be saved, but not in a dusty box in the basement. How about turning those cards and memories into new crafts?

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Old Christmas cards
• Knife

How to Recycle Your Chrismas Cards into New Craft Materials

1. The first thing you need to do is organize the cards into batches of the ones to keep for the handwritten greetings and the ones that can be used for material.

2. The second thing you need to do is to cut some of the cards' tops off. Make sure that you save any Christmas card that has a solid color front and the ones that might have raised objects.

3. On the card that you have cut the tops off of, determine what your eyes focus on. I have a Christmas card that had the words Merry Christmas raised with foil on the words only and the background is a silver color. I used an X-acto knife and cut out the Merry Christmas. Then I used the background, cut with a border cutter, to make borders for scrap booking pages.

4. The inside cards usually have the greeting, poem or saying. I cut out each word so I can use them to create a crazy font poem.

5. I gather all my solid colored cards and repaint the front with a new color and apply a new coat of color on the inside, to cover all the words. Now, your card is ready to make either a new card or a pop-up card.

6. If cards have scenes on them, I cut out each item to be used in my scrap booking or as bookmarks. You can also use these in creating three-dimensional pictures. You can also glue them to the tops of your paper clips or magnets, for you refrigerator.

7. Recreate some of those card cutouts into next year's Christmas ornament that you can later send to the person that sent you that great card. I received two cards that were the same, the card that had a Christmas tree with present around the tree. So I cut out the Christmas trees and folded them in half, glued the folded edges together, cut out all the gifts and placed them back to back to each other. I placed an adhesive foam block between the fronts and backs. It creates a 3D gift. I put a split ring on the edge of the gift and punch holes on the ends of the tree. Connect the gift to the tree and continue until you have the tree decorated. I placed this Christmas on a circle of red felt. Punch a hole at the top and place an ornament hook at the top. You now have a new ornament.

Tips & Warnings

• Now, don’t forget to create a scrap book page with all those handwritten notes. I suggest that you use some of the cut outs from the cards to create great borders.