Jingle Belles - Peace on Earth Day

 It's time to recycle.  It's time to reuse.  The Jingle Belles run this particular challenge every year and I have to say that it's one of my favorite ones.  Probably because there's a little bit of pack rat in me.  Shiny or not, I find there are things that are just too interesting to throw away.  They deserve to be reborn into something new.  My card below is made with 11 elements.  Eight of them are recycled. So, that's roughly 75% recycled.  And, as I've always mentioned when trying to photograph metallics, it's much prettier IRL.  (Even HWNSNBP was impressed.) Oh, and it's probably the largest card I've made in a long time.  A little bigger than your standard 5 x 7.

So here's what I used:

The left is the seal from a jar of Nutella - the dear die cut.  The right is the base for a small bakery tart  - the base for the two larger elements.

This ribbon/string is from a package of glow sticks provided to be able to hang them around the neck.  

These white circles are the foam inserts from the lids of some fruit in a jar - the backing on the deer die.  

And getting ready for a new treatment are some empty tea bags.  

I quickly pressed them and then took some metallic watercolors and started painting them with all the different shades of gold (3) and a little of the pearl white.

I added a round die cut to one gold foil disk and wrapped the string around the second one.  You can see the metallic watercolor a little better close up. 

There's an artist that I follow - both her blog and on Instagram - Kim Henkel, Letting in the Light Blog and KimHenkelCreations on Instagram - who sparked my interest several years ago about using the paper from used tea bags. Here is a post from her blog about tea bags (click here).  I started saving used tea bags when I was home recuperating from my back surgery back in 2014 - so that stack of bags that I have has been hanging around for a pretty long while.  (I also saved the used tea to put into the compost.)  So you see there was an intended purpose for saving those things even if it took 6 years to come to fruition.  I like the way the metallics look on the paper so I'm going to try some different colors.  

I did say that this was my favorite challenge and I have one more idea to try to put into place, so I'm going to head off to the stamp cave and try to get some creative time in today away from the computer.  I'll be back later to visit all the creations in this recycling challenge.  But if you have the time to go now, here is the link.  Enjoy!