Recycled, Reused, Reduced

I have been making my Christmas cards since 1988. And like most calligraphers, I think, I am a hoarder when in comes to paper. Not just luscious sheets of beautiful paper, but SCRAPS! I have saved the tiniest bits of paper left over from projects from years gone by. I’ve managed to keep them somewhat organized (by color) so for my Christmas card for 2012, I decided to use nothing but items already found in my studio. All I had to do was buy the stamps! Here’s a look at how the cards turned out.

I embossed on heavy foil (left over from some whim of a purchase)

The quotation for my card chosen, I then decided to have the “base” of my card be the heavy card stock inserts that are used for those small escort card envelopes. I had LOTS of them. With the size of the card in mind, I decided to cover the “plain” cards with embossed foil. I embossed large sheets of various colors.

I wrapped the inserts with foil

I added a cover paper, then added the printed quotation.

I added the cover paper – which were trimmed down ends from yet another project. The quotation was scanned into my computer then printed on scraps of Arches Text Wove – that was an experiment – but went through my printer just fine! The quotation was layered on pieces of old commercial greeting cards – yes, I save those, too – and other pieces of left over decorative papers.

I cut and gathered all the parts to be assembled

Since I was working with leftovers I had quite a variety of color to work with. I ended up with a few color schemes so I gathered all the parts into piles and started my assembly line. Final touches were ribbon and a personal greeting (printed on more left over insert cards) added to each one. The result was a card/ornament.

Various resulting color-schemes

Waiting for next year

It felt great to be able to create the entire project using “stuff” found in my studio. Unfortunately, though, the whole project resulted in more scraps, which, of course, I have saved.