Christmas Present Adventures, Part 3

Now that my husband and I are finished celebrating our 4 days of Christmas celebrations, I can finally post about what I made for presents! I gave away gift baskets filled with upcycled handmade goodies, and today I am going to cover the paper gifts!

As I hinted in an earlier post, I covered a LOT of pencils in security envelope linings. I am seriously in love with the patterns that are used, and I have to say I really like how they look wrapped around pencils!

Now, to go with the pencils I also made magnetic paper pads. Since my goal was to make everything out of recycled materials as much as possible, these paper pads were no exception!

The idea actually came about when there was a mistake made with one of my photocopy orders at school. I was left with a whole stack of colored paper, printed on one side. So I simply photocopied lines on the other side and cut them up! I used leftover invitations from my wedding for the backing, and used some magnetic strips that I had stashed away.

I bound the pages together using clear Silicone, and it worked great! The pages are held together well, but also tear away really easily. The overall effect was very cute, and I was very pleased with how they turned out.

And then finally, I gave out lots of paper star ornaments!

My house has been filled with these stars for months now, I had so much fun folding them! And they looked just darling hanging in a tree.

Tomorrow I will share the food related pieces that I made! I hope that everyone had a wonderful time with the Holidays, and are looking forward to a Happy New Year!

Adventures in Earring Reconstruction!

Wow, I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last updated! I promise that I have been very busy with little craft projects, but I'm keeping them a secret until after Christmas :) However, there was one project that I was inspired to make last night and I just had to share with the rest of you!

I call this post 'earring reconstruction' but really I should name it earring DEstruction! My inspiration came about last night as I was going through my overly crowded jewelry box. I have never really sorted through my jewelry box, and I have so many earrings that I never wear anymore. As I was gathering up these earrings, I started to think about how I could tear them apart to make new earrings. Then, for some reason, I was reminded about these paper beads that I played with this past summer. So I decided to combine the two! I was so excited to try this that I put off my big stack of grading and just dived right in!

I created these paper beads out of various colors of paper, and then created the individual earrings out of the beads and the bits and pieces from the earrings I tore apart. I looove how these turned out, so much better than I originally imagined! I will definitely be giving these out as Christmas presents, so if you get one--act surprised!

Paper Jewelry Adventures

These are some paper beads that I've been making, and turning into necklaces!

I really like how they turned out, and I love how the different color combinations look! I've also made beads out of magazine pages, which have a cool look as well!