DIY: Up-Cycle Your Old Greeting Cards

For a lot of the birthday, christmas, valentine and other greeting cards I have received over time I tend to hoard and box away for sentimental reasons. I never refer to them; only re-reading them once a decade when I happen to stumble across them during another house move. I feel that if I threw them away, I would be discarding the well wishes that were written with care by those who I love. 

A couple months ago I was perusing the interweb as I do, and came across an incredibly sweet and creative article post on Good Housekeeping about different 'things' to frame to create your own wall art. After our engagement, wedding, pregnancy announcment and birth, we had accumulated an extensive collection of cards. Rmemebering the post, I decided to put them to good use. 

I thought I would share a brief How-To to obtain a very unique piece of art in your house and show you what I ended up doing in my own home. For the purpose of the tutorial, I made it small-scaled but depending on how many cards you have, it can be as small or as large as you like. 

The first step is to choose a shape to cut out. This can be anything; a butterfly, star, heart, geometric shapes, flower, animal, etc. I chose a heart. I used a post-it note and drew an outline of the shape/template on it so that I could simply stick on top of the card I was using. For a heart, I folded the post-it over so that I was symmetrical. 

Here, I simply cut out the hearts without having to draw ontop of the cards. This ensures the template stays in place. Do this for as many as you need. If the 'stickiness' wears off, copy the shape onto a fresh post-it. 

Choose a frame size that can accommodate the number of shapes you have. As mentioned, for this tutorial I had only two so I used a small frame. For a backing colour I simply applied a pink sheet of paper. The glue is to stick them to the paper so they don't move while you are adjusting everything (a lot more helpfull with a larger frame)

The End Result

It's not very hard or high tech to create and if anything it's a lovely rainy day craft idea. If you have any simple craft ideas of your own that you think I would enjoy please let me know or leave a link! Being on maternity leave gives me a little more time to tinker. 

This is what I had created a few months ago out of our wedding cards:

I also included our wedding invitations in two of the hearts and a picture of Eddie and myself.