Celebrate Green Blog

By Lynn

Celebrate green this Valentine’s Day by taking a few minutes to make your love(s) a handmade card and/or gift. Here are two that I whipped up in less than an hour.

You may not want to make this exact Valentine, but I hope it will fire your imagination.

I buy glasses at the drugstore, then either lose them, scratch them or the ear pieces fall off. (And admittedly, more than a few have gotten run over by the car because they fell out of what I was carrying when I exited the car, and didn’t notice I’d dropped them.)

I’m planning on incorporating the ones I have, (or the pieces) into some sort of fun sculpture one day, but in the meantime, as I was thinking about an idea for a Valentine’s Day card, this one came to me. I made a paper “glasses case” using scraps I had left over from other projects. Then I glued paper cut outs over the glass, glued a charm with the word “LOVE” (you can’t really see that in this picture), over the nosepiece, added a hang tag with a message and there you have it. The glasses can be kept on a bedside table as a constant reminder of your love or incorporated into another project later on. And the case can be used to hold photos or notepaper. A no cost, no waste card and gift combo.

If you don’t have a stash of glasses, what objects do you have a few too many of that you could cleverly incorporate into your card or gift?

I’ve recently gotten into making charms from all sorts of odd bits and pieces. We show several in Celebrate Green!, but this one would be especially timely (pun intended) for Valentine’s Day.

These charms are so easy to make, yet can be packed with meaning.

If your beloved has an old watch, remove the face. Glue it into a bottle cap. Punch a hole in the cap near the top. Fashion a loop from a piece of wire. That’s it. Add a ball chain necklace-or not. Done! Finished! Gift-ready.

Any object in which you can punch a hole can be turned into a charm. Artists are using this technique to create amazing and wonderful jewelry from objects that would normally be tossed. One of our favorites is Susan Lenert Kazmer.
And here’s a quick and easy way to “package the charm.”

Remove the label from an empty soup can. Wash it. Paint. Let dry. Glue paper or ribbon all the way around. Punch a hole on each side near the top and insert a piece of wire through the two holes forming a handle. (I strung on some buttons and charms after feeding one side through. You can do that if you like, but not necessary.)

Once this is done, mash down on the top of the can so that the opening is no longer round, but more oval (although you don’t have to do this either if you prefer a perfectly round can).

Glue on decorative accents and /or words cut from newspapers or magazines. I happened to have some magnetic tiles from an old Magnetic Poetry set that I used here. A small section from a letter from a note your beloved wrote to you would make a meaningful contribution.

One more step.

Do you own a cross-cut shredder? In my opinion, they are a great green investment. Why? I use shredded paper every day in our composter, especially during the winter when all the “brown matter” is too wet to be useful. I also use it to cushion items to be mailed. But I digress.

One of the best uses is as a substitute to that grass or shredded paper you buy to fill up the spaces in gift boxes and bags.

If you have an unwrapped gift that could be discolored by the paper, shred magazine covers or other shiny papers that are less likely to transfer ink than newspaper. But for the purposes of this particular gift, you can fill the can with newsprint and lay the necklace on top with no problem.

So what do you think of our easy, no-cost, green Valentine’s card and gift ideas? Let us know by commenting below.