Earth Day - From Tray to Candleholder

I have a couple of recycling projects to show off today for Earth Day.  Hope you enjoy them.

Cupcakes are a hot item, but in our school so are the Chocolate Chip Cookie Pizzas as a classroom treat to celebrate a student's birthday.  I see them come in in multiples and they're not inexpensive.  I think they run about $15 a tray.  They get sliced up just like a regular pizza but in much smaller wedges.  Then the "extras" are distributed to favorite teachers, specials teachers, the principal, nurse, etc.

 

I asked my favorite third grade teacher buddy to save me the tray from a recent birthday pizza and of course he looked at my like I was nuts, especially when I told him that I wasn't going to reuse it as a tray.

You can barely see that the tray is embossed with a pattern, and yes, from this view you can see some of the knife marks that occurred during the cutting.  But you don't see them when you turn the tray over - you only see the embossing.  So what did I do with it?  I cut it very carefully into manageable pieces.  Let me stress the carefully part.  This is metal and it will damage you if you don't respect it.  Once I got it into smaller pieces I took my Flower Folds and Daisies #2 dies and punched two different sizes of the flower folds and a daisy that was slightly larger than the circumference of a battery operated tealight - see where I'm going with this ?

Use a scoring tool and rescore the folds in the smaller of the folded flower so you can bend them up.  Then center your tealight in the middle of the daisy and fold the exposed petals up around the light.  Leave a little wiggle room because you'll need to take the light out to turn it on and off.  To put this all together I just used double-sided tape.

Yeah, he was surprised and impressed when he saw the finished product! 

I'll have another project later today.  Stay tuned!

P.S.  If you don't have access to a leftover Chocolate Chip Cookie Pizza Tray you can usually get trays like these at the dollar store.