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.