10 Ways to Upcycle Scrapbooking

Greener lifestyles are trending in all areas, and the scrapbooking world is no different. Aside from the eco-friendly and budget-friendly benefits, upcycling materials to use in scrapbooking adds an extra amount of personalization and detail to your precious memories.

1.  Instead of shelling out good money for pricey scrapbook covers, try upcycling an old hardback book cover into a classy scrapbook cover by removing the pages and adding a 3 ring binder insert. 
Upcycled Scrapbook Cover Tutorial

2.  Make your own titles and chipboard embellishments using a die cutting machine and old cereal boxes, mailers, and thick stock junk mail pieces.

3.  Go vintage at the local thrift store.  Pick out fabrics, buttons, and jewelry pieces that coordinate and inspire.  Bring them home and see what you can come up with.  The best part about upcycling is that you can use anything that you can find a use for.

4.  Save on distressing inks by using tea bags or coffee grounds for a darker, aged look or household bleach for a faded look.

5.  Transform your old, dated, or broken jewelry into accents on your scrapbook pages.  Check out these ideas for beading scrapbook pages here.

6.  Make a shaker by sewing two transparencies together and filling them with something small like seed beads.  This adds a cute element when done over a photograph.

7.  Take a note of inspiration from stylish packaging.  This one is totally for me.  I am such a sucker when it comes to cute and trendy packaging that I am constantly trying to talk myself out of buying produce X because I don't really need it, I just like the way that it looks in all of its colorful packaging.  Whether you use any of the packaging in your actual design or not, you will still be upcycling an idea!

8.  Repurpose old greeting cards, in whole or in part, to make artwork for your pages, frames for your photos, and preserve sentimental notes from inside the cards where they will be seen and remembered.

9.  Flatten the aluminum from rinsed cola cans and punch or cut it into shapes for nifty, one-of-a-kind embellishments.  These can be easily attached with jewelry fittings.

10.  Skip on the pricey scrapbook paper and get what you are really going for: Use old sheet music instead of scrapbook paper printed to look like sheet music or strips of left over tissue paper or wrapping paper to add some color to white cardstock.

Upcycled Paper Crafts: Eco-friendly Scrapbooking

Many of us are finding all of kinds of useful ways to extend our eco-freindly habits into our paper crafts. While it may not be possible (at least yet) to use green seal certified products for scrapbooking, as many glues and dyes are naturally harmful to the environment, there are a number of other things that we can all do to save both money and the environment.

You may have heard of the hot trend of upcycling buzzing around in the crafting community.  Upcycling is the practice of taking an item that is ugly, dated, or otherwise no longer useful, and repurposing it with a creative touch.  

The possibilities of creating artful creations with repurposed materials is limited only by your own imagination.  There are literally dozens of blogs and websites that showcase the creative skills of many talented upcyclers, providing the rest of us with envy and inspiration.

Above, is a picture of a small calendar that I created from old regridgerator magnets and repurposed paperboard coasters.  I have had a stash of assorted disposable coasters from various restaraunts and bars (I seem to pick them up everywhere) and one day last week, I finally decided to do something with them.  I had some left over miniature calendars that I had created for another project and decided that I needed a way to display one of these calendars at my desk.

While the coaster could be decorated in may different ways, or you could simply use the design that is already on the coaster, I chose to recover mine in a lightweight white cardstock to give me a blank canvas on which to create my design. I simply adhered the paper to the coaster with my glue runner and then carefully trimmed the excess from around the edges with an Xacto knife, and voila I had a plain white backboard to begin designing.

I made a note of how much space would show around the calendar pad and then carefully selected a stamp.  I used a Momento Black Inkpad to stamp my image design on the coaster and then colored each flower with my copic markers.  I attached the calendar pad with a piece of double stick tape and embellished my flowers with color coordinating rhinestones.  Finally, I harvested magnets off of some old refridgerator magnets that I had lying around and glued them to the back of the coaster so that it would hang on the side of my file cabinet.