Scraps

There’s been Earth Day and Earth hour in last month or so.  I have to admit, I didn’t really do anything for it this year.  I became distracted, and just completely forgot about it until I crawled into bed and my hubby reminded me.  Not much of a excuse.  I think we should be good stewards and caretakers of our planet, but I’m not very good at it.  I’ll be scrapping away and look at my garbage bin and realize that maybe I could use that scrap of paper.  But what do you do with all those scraps of paper?  Save them until they just keep sitting there not getting used?

The mom’s group I go to had a great idea that I expanded on.  Once of their St. Patrick’s day crafts was to cut out the letter “R” for “rainbow”, and have your child glue different coloured paper on to it, so they can not only learn about the letter “R” but their colours too.  Well we did the “R”, and I pulled out all those scraps, and let my son go wild with all the scraps and punches I have.

He loved it.  That day and the next day after he kept asking me if he could do a craft.  Why not?  So we kept going with different letters, and before I knew it we had spelled his name.  My husband loved it too, and made the suggestion of putting up the letters on his wall in his room.  Now instead of just a boring blue room, he now has some decoration on his walls, and the best part, is that he made them himself.

What worked great with this craft was using the Crayola sparkle glue.  You can colour with them, and use them as glue.  So we squeezed out squiggly lines all over the letter and use the glue to adhere the different punches and the coloured paper too.  So I guess this was our contribution to earth day.  Using up those scraps!

Some other great ways to use up scraps is on collage pages.  When you want to try and fill up a page with photos, I would grab my scraps and mat each photo on a different colour of scrap paper, giving the page more colour and another chance to use up the scrap paper.

The creative memories virtual crop, gave the idea of creating a border with your scraps.  I liked that idea too, and here is how my page turned out using that idea.

Scrap paper is also great for cards.  The paper will usually fit onto the card your making, and you should be able to create a wide variety of cards, or one really unique card with all your scraps.  Since I ran out of photos to scrapbook, perhaps a scrap card will be my next project.  How do you use your scraps?