New from Old

Our theme this month over at St Luke's is an appropriate one for the start of a New Year - is to give a new lease of life to something old and tired and destined for the bin…  Don’t throw it away, turn it into something magical and give it a new start for 2012 by putting it on a card!

So, my card, started as a Christmas cracker, and some tissue from around a gift.  Here's the cracker before we pulled it....

 ....and here's what I turned it into:

I started with a 7 x 5 white base card and added a strip of black glitter card (from my snippets drawer to maintain the spirit of recycling and not using anything new except for the card itself).  I then cut to points off the top of the paper crown from inside the cracker (thankfully they were nice silver ones!)  I fixed this to the card with some homemade tissue tape.  I stamped a row of black circles onto tissue recycled from a gift using a papertrey ink stamp and repeating it in a long line.  I stuck a strip of d/s tape to the back, and then trimmed the excess tissue from either side of the tape with scissors to make my own tissue tape - a bit fiddly but a much cheaper option that the stuff you buy!

I then made my flower - entirely from the cracker.  I cut 4 die cuts from the centre of the cracker tube which I had carefully opened and flattened.  I used two showing the outside of the cracker, and two I used the inside kraft colour and inked it with black DI.  I cut the ribbons into 8 pointed strips and stuck them under the centre to create another layer to the flower and then used 3 of the baubles which were wired to secure the layers together.  I added a couple of die cut leaves which were cut from the remaining bit of the paper crown.   I thought the colours would work for a silver anniversary so I added a simple papertrey ink sentiment and 3 clear gems to finish.

I'm definitely inspired to find more things to use that I would normally throw away as I'm really pleased with the results - I think the flower looks quite expensive when it was actually essentially free!  I hope you'll be suitable inspired as well and will join us for this challenge - you have until the end of January and can win this lovely kit kindly donated by The Ribbon Girl.

Do play along  http://stlukescharitycardschallenge.blogspot.com/