Recycled Christmas Card ATC

It's always a little sad to me to just toss out beautiful Christmas cards.  Being an avid recycler I jumped at the chance to join a recycled Christmas card ATC swap
 over on SwapBot.

I wish I'd thought of taking a picture of the original card, but here's what I salvaged from the recycle bin post-cutting for a comparison.

It really didn't take much to change it up into an ATC.  I added some glass bead gel medium to the bottom, diecut some pine bits from watercolor paper and added some frosty glitter to them and finished off with a little washi tape on the side.  Easy breezy!

Do you recycle your cards into art?

Cardboard Buttons

Oh my.  It's been a while since I blogged.  I'm still here.  Things have been busy in the shop - that's a good thing - but haven't left me much time for playing around.  Today I saw a post over at the Pretty Little Things blog showing buttons made from egg cartons.  They were so cute and colorful I wanted to pin them so I'd remember to make them.  Alas, a no-pin website so I immediately set about making my own.

I made mine from an empty cereal box.  The base coat is Distress Paints and then I used paint pens to add dots and stripes.  Not sure what I'll use them for - tags, cards, canvases...  Who knows?!

Paper Posies

I love using recycled items and am especially drawn to projects that use old books.  I originally saw this idea on Pinterest and thought they'd be pretty in my workspace.  I grabbed an old copy of the USA Hockey Official Rules of Ice Hockey (my husband is a coach - this is not something I would casually peruse on long summer afternoons).  It struck me as kinda funny to use hockey pages for pretty flowers; I'm quirky that way.   I had some old floral wire and floral tape laying around and then hot glued some buttons in the centers.

Here are my pretty posies:

I also made the following card for the CASual Fridays Back in Black challenge. 

I've had the alterations texture fades sitting around unused and yesterday I stumbled across a video of Tim Holtz demonstrating them.  It had never occured to me to use the sticky back canvas squares I had purchased for a home decor project.  I ran the canvas through my Big Shot with the sunburst texture fade then inked it up with some Distress Inks and roughed up the edges a bit.  I wanted to keep the black background but create a subtle mat so I cut a black mat and misted it with gold glimmer mist to make it stand out just a smidge.  "Happy Trails" is also embossed in gold.  The final touch was to dry emboss a wavy line for the horse and cowboy to gallop along.

Thanks for stopping by to take a look and my creative endeavors today.