Love paper, but loathe waste? Adore crafts, but revile pollution? Somewhere between Zero Waste and Pestilence let’s wiggle a little in the direction of being kind to our home on this weird and wonderful planet. Here are a few ideas for ways to do more of what you love while reducing waste and celebrating the materials you use.
Create a lattice from paper offcuts
When you’re working with paper products, there are often strips of paper – offcuts from projects where the sections you needed left a little unused at the end of the process. Collect those, store them until you’ve collected enough – sometimes this will mean doing a few “official” projects and saving the scraps. Then arrange those in a lattice. Try different colour combinations, paper sizes, and patterns. Use a good quality glue stick, liquid glue, or even tiny bits of double-sided tape to secure the outer edges and weave the paper strips to create a beautiful, colourful, and textured article.
You can weave them tightly, side by side, which is what I’ve been doing, but you could also leave gaps between the strips and then mount the lattice onto beautiful backing. Either way, these little scrap creations add texture and depth to greeting cards, school projects, posters, holiday decorations, and scrap booking projects.
Your hole puncher has a dot matrix in its belly
Whether you’re in the office or happily crafting at home or at school, I bet you’ve emptied an hole puncher into the trash, recycling, or compost recently. But it’s paper and those little circles can have a second life as art. Instead of macaroni art or glitter or sequins, try these tiny fluttering paper circles. They are usually forgotten and unappreciated, but you can be their champion!
I have a confession: I recently did collect hole punched circles while creating my Bluebery Fig resources. It’s important to me to reduce waste and this seemed like a fun challenge. Perhaps where my good intentions started to slide into derangement was sorting the tiny mountain of minute circles by colour. I am now storing them in a pill box with many compartment. I’ll post updates when I get around to using them!
Make functional items beautiful
If you have irregular or randomly sized scraps of paper, use them to decorate parts of projects you would otherwise leave unadorned. When I was creating my Berry Fig teaching calendar, I used many of the offcuts that came from creating the face to decorate the back of the calendar. The back has no function and won’t be seen nearly as much, but there’s something magical in creating and using an object where every part of it is beautiful. Especially for learning resources, decorating all parts can show learners our earnest devotion to education and a respect for the objects that teach us about the world.
You can also use irregular offcuts to decorate the backs of greeting cards, the inside covers of hand-made bound projects, and to create beautiful borders for school projects, recipes, or house rules. This shows true appreciation for the paper, reduced waste in landfills, builds awareness of how much material we might otherwise discard from a project, and also reminds us that recipes and non-functional parts of learning resources are still worth celebrating.
Make origami creatures using completed colouring pages
Colouring pages can be vivid and beautiful, but we tend not to display them as art. Once they’re completed, they are stuck to the fridge door with magnets, perhaps proudly shared on social media, and then forgotten or recycled. You can give these pages a longer, richer life by using them to do some simple origami. Especially if you’re an origami novice, this could be a great way to practice. Your intricate adult colouring page mandala or your child’s or student’s purple tiger will peek out between the folds of a little paper crafted frog or swan. This also means that instead of using a new page for origami, a page already in use is saved and allows fancy origami paper to be saved for a rainy day.