Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Recycled Christmas Card Ornaments

I hate to throw away any Christmas card I get, but only a few special ones really need to be saved. I love to find uses for rest of them! Here are two more ornament ideas to reuse your old Christmas cards:

Dig through your pile and find some cards with cute or pretty designs on the front and cut out that design. It's best to use a regular shape like a circle, oval, square, or rectangle around the design. This was a great exercise in shapes and cutting for my daughter, Molly (4). Now you have the option of gluing a second design on the back in the same shape, or a piece of colorful scrapbook paper or construction paper instead. If you use paper as opposed to another card, you can add your own message or your child's name and the year.

Draw a line of glue all the way around your shape, preferably along the very edge. Sprinkle on some glitter and shake off. Let this dry and then attach a string to the top! Try using old-fashioned looking Christmas cards and some course silver glitter for an antique look! We also started using glitter to decorate the designs themselves, like adding decorations on a Christmas tree.

While we were working on these, Molly came up with a wonderful idea: to use the old cards as frames!! She cut out a frame from a metallic card and used it to frame a picture of a kitten she cut out from another card! Right now her creation is taped up on my living room wall, but meanwhile I took her idea and applied it to real pictures! I found some old Christmas cards with frames on the front: the kind you can see through to the image on the inside of the card. I cut them out and taped my photos to the back. Then I added glitter like normal and included the year and my kids' names. I was so happy with them and couldn't believe it was all Molly's idea!

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