DIY December, Day 5 of Christmas Craft making

5th December

A couple of days ago I mused over ways to reduce wastage at Christmas and today I thought of a way to help in a small way. When creating any sort craft there's always going to be left over craft bits. Pieces of string, cuts of paper, and perhaps stickers that were more than what was needed for the project. Today I took a look through my craft boxes to look for things that more than likely I would have thrown out and instead will make them into Christmas Cards.

 Handmade Christmas Card

• I looked through the scrap bits of paper to find a couple that I could use for the card. Once trimming the green polkadot the width was a little shorter than I'd like it to be, so I lined the pieces up leaving a border on the right hand side.

• To hide the gap in the middle of the scraps of paper and the gap in the side I added some gold patterned craft tape to the middle and side.
• I ran a strip of double sided tape along the middle of the card to attach a bit of left over gold tinsel from my Day 1 of DIY December.
• I also had a Merry Christmas sticker that had lost its stickiness and had a blue border around it. i trimmed the border and added double sided tape to the bottom of the sticker so it would stick again.

To finish it off I added some Christmas themed bird stickers to the red area. The card was really quick to make and was a mix of scrap and already owned craft items.

DIY December, Day 3 of Christmas Craft making

3rd December 2016

Do you do a "spring clean"? I do general cleans (obviously) throughout the year, but I do try to do a thorough clean out of my house at least once a year... 

Well, I try. I haven't actually done one in a very long time so recently I've been going through everything in my house and getting rid of a ridiculous amount of things that I will just never use again or don't want anymore. How do we acquire so much stuff? It's crazy. Today I cleared out the much neglected garage which finally marked the completion of my "spring clean" even though it's just turned into summer.

What does this have to do with Christmas, you ask? Often Christmas can be a holiday over overabundance, expense, and eventually waste (food in particular) so something that has been on my mind whilst I've been cleaning is the adage "reduce, reuse, recycle," elements of "less is more," and cost cutting, and I wondered how I could keep this in mind for Christmas this year. It doesn't always have to be with the environment directly in mind, as an aside I find that if I have less clutter it's easy to clean and I will be less likely to be a scatterbrained mess-maker, which I am notorious for.

Sometimes after Christmas all you want to do is throw all the decorations in a box and forget about it until next year, and the idea of Christmas shopping after Christmas sounds crazy, but a cost cutting tip for Christmas-specific shopping like decorations is doing it AFTER Christmas for the next year. Go through your decorations and make a list of things that you should really replace, those half broken baubles, old tacky decorations, or maybe your tree is looking really bare. Then, see if you can find them reduced in store. Here when Christmas is over they reduce the cost of Christmas stock by so much that it's worth at least looking. I got my Christmas lights, baubles, and (plastic) tree all very cheap in late December or early January. It's not the most out-there tip, and if you can't find it in the remnant stock then you might have to buy full price next Christmas anyway but it's worth a try!

As the December theme in my blog would suggest, you don't always have to buy straight from the store... DIY it! You could re-purpose some of your own items into Christmas decorations or jazz some of the old ones up again.

As the theme of today is basically reusing and cost-cutting, the things you have available to you to reuse in your house might be different to mine therefore you might have to go out and purchase some things I already had so instead I want this as more of an DIY inspiration than an instructional DIY post, and encourage you to make one DIY Christmas decoration out of something in your house that you've been thinking of throwing out, or redecorate an old bauble. Tweet a picture of it to me if you like @SeaCityCrafts with the hashtag #DIYDecemberDecoration.

My example for my own decoration is a mini Christmas tree I made to Christmas-up my computer desk. Do you Christmas up your desk? Going back to the de-clutter talk from before, I wouldn't have something too big on my desk as I need all the space I can get.