#27 Inspired by "green"

Well this was a very fun week for me. I challenged myself to try and see everything that came across my hands with new eyes in the hopes of bringing you some really fresh inspiration. As a result, I made 4 layouts I love.

I found inspiration on a tag that came in the mail...

I found inspiration in everyday objects...

I was happy with what I was able to accomplish with things that were not intended for scrapbook pages. And then I saw what Lisa accomplished and my inspiration was renewed. I decided to rumage through my stash, my wastebasket and my house for any other items I could use. And I am glad I did!

Look at all the fun items I found -

One thing I really dislike is the amount of junk mail that I receive every day. On any given week my household gets up to 15 catalogs (most of them in duplicate for each member of my family). The wastefulness really annoys me. 

The one good thing is that these companies spend thousand of dollars on hiring marketing companies to design their catalogs - and as such they are usually up to the trends. Look at that fossil catalog and all that wood grain paper. I just paid some serious money to purchase some of that same pattern.

 I used those scraps to make flowers...

 to create stamped embellishments.

or just punched shaped out of the backgrounds to use as patterned paper.

I was able to create an additional 2 pages (with some items leftover for more).

So there you have it. A week inspired by reusing what others might classify as garbage and finding ways to make it match our style. We hope we were able to inspire you to see things a new way. If you played along, we would love to see what you recycled, reused or re-purposed - just add it to our Flick'r gallery with the tag WM#27. 

Lisa's challenge should be up in a few hours. Woot!

xo,

Pamage

#27 - inspired by going green

This week Pam challenged us to go green and I did wonder if I'd get extra brownie points if I actually used the colour green, but what a surprise, I didn't use a single item of green I think :-) But the idea was there.

So, the real idea was to recycle or upcycle items (would love someone to explain the difference!), repurpose or reuse.

Now I may not be a natural at this but I do try and keep my eyes open for products that can be used for my scrapping and even recycle products from time to time.

This layout uses regular cooking doilies (my current fave) and string from a set of exchange presents:

And my favourite layout of this LOAD uses a small strip of Prima packaging behind the film strip. Again the doilies and of course, my non-scrapbooking specific twine that I just pick up in my local haberdashery department - I think it's designed for crochet.

So I had a few ideas about what I could do for this challenge and ended up using some old pyjama trousers that I'd had to throw away but couldn't resist keeping some of the fabric because of the gorgeous layered hearts printed on it. I added some stiffener to the back of the fabric and cut out the hearts, deciding to sew them onto my layout as a banner. The obligatory twine and doily and this came together so nicely. Really another one of my faves of the month :-) Look at that scrumptious little bottom! (My sister will most likely kill me for publishing this one!)

And then today, I decided to really challenge myself to create something using as little real scrapbooking product as possible. Grabbing a sheet of cardstock I then rummaged through my supplies and came up with the pile below. I have Prima, K&Co and BasicGrey packaging, kitchen string, cake doilies, another of the cut out fabric hearts, a floristry pin that came one of my floral arrangements, some flags made for my by my sister using regular cocktail sticks and tiny scraps of paper and some pink leaf skeletons that came as a garland round another floral arrangement. I did some fussy cutting on the BG packaging and trimmed the rest so that it would be ready to use.

Then I made up my base, layering as much as I could, leaving out one or two items and adding in another few non scrapbooking items - a parcel label, some coloured ribbon type twine from a present and a bit of gathered t-shirt fabric from, yes you guessed it, a t-shirt that I was going to throw out! Once I reached this stage, I then went off to find a photo and a story to tell!

And here's the final result. The only other product I added in was my title alpha but even here I repurposed a "j" into an "i"!

How far will go you go in your repurposing, recycling or reusing? We can't wait to see. Don't forget to link up over in our Flickr gallery with the tag WM#27.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Pam creates for us and tune in tomorrow for the next challenge.

Wishing you a great week! Oh, and happy Leap Year Day on Wednesday! (ok so I just made that up!)