How to upcycle your greeting cards?

Your special occasion has passed and the time has come to take your greeting cards down, What do you do with them?

While recycling and composting immediately come to mind, why not upcycle your greeting cards! Here are some non glue eco-friendly play ideas as we want the upcycled item to still be compostable and recycled. The following 4 activities were made from just 2 greeting cards!

1. Create gift tags. With a pair of scissors and a hole punch you can create your own gift tags for birthdays or for gift giving.

 

This is something we have started doing with our personalised giraffe birthday card.

We wanted to create a fun birthday card that had a circular window, so that we could display the giraffe on the inside of the card to give more meaning to the phrase ‘from me to you’. The problem was we had a circular piece of card stock left, so we turned it into a gift tag that comes with card. A zero waste solution! Hand drawn greeting cards are particularly great to create unique luxury gift tags.

2. Frame them

All of our personalised name cards are designed so that they can be framed and hung in your child’s bedroom.

 

The same is true of our hand drawn greeting cards. I design the cards with this kind of upcycling in mind.

3. Create stories

Children have great imaginations and they love making up stories. Cutting out the characters and other objects and keeping them in a tin is a great way to have endless story fun. Children over 3 years can usually cut out the characters with safety scissors and parental supervision.

How it works?

a. Get your children to cover their eyes and pick 6 greeting card cut outs and lay them in front of the children. An alternative to this is getting them to close their eyes and you hiding the 6 greeting card cut outs for children to find.

b. The children open their eyes and look at the cutouts/ bring all the cutouts they have found and look at the pictures.

c. You then ask them to make the silliest story they can. This could be individually or collectively. You also have to take part.

The sitting version of this is great for planes, trains and restaurants. Slip a selection of cutouts in your bag and away you go!

4. Create puppets for character play

Take some of your cut outs and stick a lollipop stick or craft stick to the back of one of the cutouts. Remember to use eco masking tape rather than glue, so that everything can be recycled or reused.

Then, create a puppet show from behind your sofa or table.

 

 We love stories! We hope you have fun!