STOP! Don't throw out those Christmas cards!

I know that most of you are such organised little vegemites that you have already taken down your Christmas cards and are getting ready to put them in the recycle bin if you have that facility where you live. Before you do that though, take a good look at them and pick out some that you can use to make new Christmas cards, gift tags or decorations for Christmas 2016.

For inspiration I did a search on Pinterest for recycling Christmas cards and this page came up with so many good ideas. One such idea was to make little gift boxes out of suitable cards and there was a link to Pillow Box Template on Crafty Journal. When I saw that page I remembered I had a template from back in the day when I used to do a lot of craft work so dug through my craft supplies and found it as well as ....

would you believe it....the box from a McDonald's Apple Pie which must be about twenty years old. 

 Obviously I kept it to use as a template and, as it happened, it was just the right size to make a nice gift box out of a colourful card in which I could fit a cake of soap made in my mould from Aussie Soap Supplies which I bought when I first started making soap and before I realised I could buy silicon moulds from the $2 shops. If you would like to buy some nice moulds just click on the link and check out what are available. The one in the photo isn't available anymore from what I gather but there are some other nice ones there.

You can also use parts of a card for gift cards. Just use a hole puncher to make a hole to thread ribbon through and attach it to your gift. This would be a fun thing for Aussie children to do while still on school holidays and then they can be packed away till Christmas...the gift tags not the children ;-) There are some more ideas on My Untangled Life.

Another idea is to cut out part of the cards to make new ones which could be another job for the children. You can buy scissors with decorative edges fairly cheaply these days which would come in handy for this job. 

I am sure most people remember the old Christmas card gift baskets. They have been around forever and I found a really good tutorial on DIY Gift World...How to Make Recycled Gift Baskets. If you don't have the space to store these then you could cut out the templates and sew around them with blanket stitch as is done in the video and then store them flat until later in the year when you can then join all the templates together. Check out this Pinterest page if you like these baskets as there are more tutorials there and lots of photos including some of vintage baskets...vintage being what was around when I was young. Sigh! Some baskets have even been made from old books.

So there are a few ideas on how to recycle your Christmas cards. I hope there is something there to inspire you. 

Have a great weekend everyone. If you live in SE Queensland enjoy the rain.