Recycling Arts And Crafts

There are a lot of ways to combine arts and crafts with recycling that can occupy your time and still afford you the recreation and chance to come up with some gifts for special occasions.

The more prominent of these recycling projects is to decoupage.  This is a unique craft to undertake and the materials needed to do this project are simple and easy to acquire.  You will only need several old and colorful magazines, a pair of scissors, white glue, and an object to decorate.  You can choose any specific object to decorate, like vases, lamps, small furniture, and even headboards.

As soon as you have gathered the materials needed, you can commence with your decoupage project by flipping the pages of your old magazines.  Look for attractive and colorful pages in your magazine to cut into pieces for decoration.  Remember that this craft can be done according to your whim, and there is no wrong procedure when doing this project.

Some people may prefer to cut out images of persons, while others would prefer commercial and advertisement presentations.  The concept of decoupage is to cover an object to decorate with layers of cut outs of the magazines in a random and colorful collage presentation.

After you have collected loads of cut-outs of different images and shapes, then you can start decorating your chosen object layer by layer, and this is the part where your ideas and creativity can become limitless.  You can choose to layer the initial stages of your decoration with colorful shades of magazine cut-outs, and then top them off with real images and cut-outs of flowers, birds, or any specific images to finalize your decoupage project.

After gathering your cut-outs of colored pages and images, you can apply a base coat of white glue over the object to be decorated and post the cut-outs layer by layer, while coating each layer with the white glue.  When the glue coating has dried and your decoupage is in place, you can finalize your craft by applying a coat of clear glossy paint to add sheen and at the same time hold a protective coating to your project.

Another reusable item is the humble, old shoe box.  It can be made into gift boxes’ which you can give to your children’s classmates and even teachers.  You can do a decoupage with this and put in the layers of magazine cut-outs to your desired density and decoration.  The gift boxes can be a decorative container that can hold different mementos and memorabilia of a person, like concert tickets, movie or ballgame tickets, birthday and other greeting cards, and similar stuff which a person wants to keep as remembrance of a special event or occasion.

These gift boxes can be opened by its owner from time to time, especially during lonely moments, and can reminisce happy and fond memories in his life from the different memorabilia that are contained in the said gift boxes.  These gift boxes can be so practical and beautiful that it can impress people from practically all walks of life and be proud to own a gift box or two.  What is gratifying about these gift boxes is that you are able to create these wonderful crafts at very minimal costs owing to using mostly recyclable materials.