You can always reuse or recycle your old Christmas cards or even other greeting cards in order to make a lovely placemats for Christmas that you can decorate on your dining table or around the centerpiece. It is a project that not only you can do it, but also for the whole family to enjoy together during the festive season. You can create beautiful Christmas placemats from recycle Christmas cards and by doing this also you would be able to keep the most memorable greeting cards that you have received from your friends and families, or maybe some of the cards was previously sent by your guests and they would be able to recognize their own cards during the occasions.
What you need to do:
- Thick construction paper
- Glitter
- Scissors
- Stencils
- Ink or paint
- Plain placemat
- Placemat DIY kit
- Glue/glue stick
- Clear contact paper
- Wrapping paper
- Card stock
- Pen for drawing your pattern
- Old Christmas cards
- Circle pattern that is 3″ in diameter
Christmas
Method:
- First of all you need to collect or choose twenty cards design that you like the most. Choose the cards which can complement each other, have matching designs or even more, you can decide on any random designs making it a little bit abstract. Besides that, you can choose color, animals or personal things that represent your family members.
- Next step to take is to choose the beautiful part of your selected card that will show the card’s best design or beautiful picture. Then, you can use a pencil for tracing the circle of that particular pattern.
- Once done tracing, cut out the circles along its line. Apart from that, you can also create your circle template using a cardboard as well as a drinking glass for tracing your circle. You can begin your tracing with four or six inches circles around the main areas or the nice design of your selected greeting cards.
- Always do trial run on a table and arrange your greeting card circles into your preferred layout, for instance with three circles in the top row followed by four circles in the middle, plus another three circles at its bottom row. Ensure that the circles always overlap so that you will have no spaces in between them. Another nice design is a pyramid or Christmas tree like design or a wreath look-a-like design is nice as well.
- Then, you need to glue the cut out circles onto the construction paper with four high and five across, which overlaps its edges slightly thus enabling you to create a Christmas placemats with the size of 10″ by 14″. Whenever you use wrapping paper or card stock, you can swipe a glue stick on the back of each of your cutout circles. This is for the purpose of holding it in a still position until your top contact paper is already in place.
- Once you have removed the backing from your contact paper, you need to place your placemats card carefully side down onto the contact paper. Ensure that the edges are aligned and also smooth it out so that you will not be able to see any bubbles. Then you have to add another sheet of contact paper to its back. Always be a little bit careful when dealing with contact paper because when you have wrongly placed it, it will be stuck there and you will have difficulty to unstick them.
- Another tip for you to remember whenever you use contact paper is that you must always peel away its backing and lay it down on a table with the sticky side on the upper side. If your paper cuts always curl up at the end of its sides, you should use something heavy enough to weigh it down at its corners as you continue to the next steps.
- Other than using contact paper for its backing, you can also use wrapping paper or card stock in a rectangle shape with a size of 20-inch wide by 26-inch long.
- Next, you must make sure that the edges are trimmed leaving at least 1/2 inch to one inch space in the region of your card circles. You can simply keep its corners into square shape or even place your circle template near each corner. Then, you can trace around the upper part of it to round off the corners. By now you already have your very own Christmas placemats.
- Other design that you can use apart from circles are triangles or free-form shapes. As for creating a reversible placemats, you simply just glue two similar shapes together with right sides out in order for you to view the design on either side of your placemats.
Additional Reading:
Chrismas Crafts and Entertaining: Fun Projects & Gifts plus Great Recipes
