Upcycling Old Greeting Cards

Twice a month I meet with a group of church ladies to work on a fun missions project. Members of the church are asked to donate their used greeting cards, and we turn them into new cards, bookmarks and gift tags. They are then available to take home with a donation to the missions fund. It's a great way to use some creativity and help spread the Word of God around the world.

We create cards in a couple of different ways. The first way is to cut an 8.5x11-inch piece of card stock in half. It doesn't matter if it's not perfect, like the corner here, because the heavy card you're placing on top will smooth it out.

Some cards can easily be cut down to fit on these 5.5x8.5-inch blank cards.

Then the old insides become the new insides.

Another way is to cut the card stock into five pieces, which gives you a 4.5x6.25 inch card, a 2x6.25-inch bookmark, two 2.25-inch square gift tags and a 2x2.25-inch gift tag.

Here they are folded up.

This arrangement helps us use images both large and small without wasting any of the beautiful pictures. Also, having a larger blank card stock card allows us to have a larger canvas for bigger cards. Thinking up different ways to recycle a used greeting card also reboots our creativity, since it's completely different from many of the other crafts we do.