Do you keep your Christmas cards after the festive season is over? I’m a big sentimental sap so I find it really hard to just chuck them in the recycling when they’ve been sent with so much love and care from my friends and family! But I also like to keep them because I’m all about recycling, reusing and trying to create as little waste as possible. Why throw away a perfectly good piece of festive artwork when I could transform it into something else?

If you’ve still got last year’s cards hanging around, here are some ideas for how you could give them a new lease of life this year!

1. Turn them into gift tags

This is something I really enjoy doing – I pop a Christmas move on, sit down on my living room rug with a stack of old cards and a pair of scissors, and sift through looking for lovely details on cards that I could cut out and turn into a gift tag for this year’s presents. You can get quite a few tags out of one card sometimes – you can cut out shapes and images, and then also cut around the words on the card to make a gift tag that says ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Season’s Greetings’. Then just use a hole punch to make a hole (or put blue tack underneath the label and stab a hole with a sharp pencil!), pop a bit of string or ribbon through, and you’ve got a set of gorgeous recycled gift tags. I like to pair them with recycled brown paper and brown paper tape – keeps it all eco-friendly, and the neutral background makes your gift tags stand out!

I took inspiration from this idea last year and turned several of my card designs into gift tags that you can order ready made for you!

2. Frame them and decorate your home with them

Beautiful cards are a great way to add a little festive artwork to your home at this time of year. Just pick one or two of last year’s favourites and pop them in frames – to keep up the recycling theme and to keep the cost down, I love hunting through charity shops for picture frames. I like a bit of an eclectic, mismatched look in my home and I’ve made some great discoveries in my local charity shops! This is also a great way to keep hold of and protect any cards that are really precious or have sentimental value, maybe because of the message that’s been written inside, rather than cutting them up to make something new.

3. Turn them into a garland

Instead of gift tags, you can also cut out your favourite details from cards, punch holes in them and string them up as a festive garland! Try drying orange slices in the oven and alternate stringing card cutouts and orange slices onto a length of twine. These look so pretty over fireplaces or windows, maybe with some fairy lights!

4. Turn them into bookmarks

There’s no time like Christmas for curling up by the fire with a mug of hot chocolate and reading a good book. Slice up Christmas cards into strips and add colourful ribbon to create festive bookmarks for all your wintery reads. These also make a nice eco-friendly stocking fillers!

If you like the idea of Christmas bookmarks but don’t have cards to make them, I do have a set of Christmas bookmarks ready made for you – like all my products, they’re made from recycled brewer’s grain, so while you may not be repurposing old cards, they’re still using up a waste product!

Are you going to try any of these out? Or have you got any other ideas for how to repurpose Christmas cards? Let me know!