Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

The 3 R's....a song by one of my favorite artists, Jack Johnson; it's also a mantra that our family tries very hard to live by. We definitely don't have it down pat but we try.

I have been trying extra hard over the past year to use The 3 R's in my crafting. I've been Reducing by not buying so much paper, embellishments and new gadgets and supplies that hit the market. It's tough to resist all the pretty papers and whatnot, but it has forced me to use what I have. It's also made me discover some of the items I purchased, put them in their proper storage container and forgotten about.

Reusing...sort of hard, but my version is using my scraps of paper. I save pieces of cardstock or patterned papers that I cut off and don't use on a scrapbook pages or cards. Those pieces go into hanging files, sorted by color family and they are my first go-to place when I'm ready to make a card or scrapbook page. I do cut into some fresh pieces of paper, but it's only for card or page bases or it has to be a piece of paper that I currently have in my stash.

Recycling...this one is easy. If my paper scraps are too small to use on a card, page or for die cutting, they get tossed into the paper recycling bin. I've also been known to take ribbons off of items before they go into the garbage, recycling or donate piles and toss them into my ribbon stash.

Last year I made a crafty resolution to only use what I had on hand, to cut my stack of scrap papers in half and only buy new papers when I really needed them. For the most part I stuck to that resolution. I am also making the same crafty resolution for 2009.

To start my year off right, as far as my resolution goes, I'm going to recycle all those holiday cards we received over the past few weeks. Rather than tossing them into the recycle bin I decided to make gift tags for next Christmas. Last night I cut the cards up to make the first half of the tag. Now I'll be going through my cardstock scraps to cut a back for them and all I'll have left to do is add some ribbon.

Now, what to do with all those picture cards and photos we receive from everybody? I can't bear to throw them out, so I think I'm going to do some cropping and make a layout for our scrapbook with all the kids pictures. I need to start doing this after each Christmas season so we'll be able to look back on each year and see how everybody has grown.

I've told you my 2009 crafty resolution; do you have one you'd like to share?