Recycled Christmas

Several times in my earlier posts this week I talked about reorganizing my ribbon and I promised pictures of what I did, so today's the day! This is an unusual daytime Friday post. I am normally at work but Tom had some comp time coming so I took the day off to be with him. We spent last night at Baby Creek but came home after lunch because we needed to shuttle Tricia to and from work today. Back to my ribbon. I saw an idea somewhere where someone had taken index cards and used them to wrap their ribbon and store them in boxes. I sometimes get free envelopes from people that I know. One set of envelopes was already glued shut, probably because of humidity but I hated to throw them away. I thought about making corner bookmarks with them but then I thought, why not use the envelopes instead of the index cards for the ribbon. So I folded and stapled two envelopes together and then wrapped ribbon around by color. Earlier this year I had sorted my ribbon into baggies by color and my organization looked something like this:

While the bag system was better than what I previously had I wasn't using my ribbon very often because I had to sort through a bagful or miscellaneous jumbled spools and pieces. And I had two large boxes with numerous bags of ribbon. It took up lots of space in my closet. So after I wrapped the ribbons on the envelopes, it now looks like this:

Pardon my box. I need a new one or at the very least a decorated box. But I went from two boxes to one box with space enough for more ribbon. And what I LOVE about this is that I can see every ribbon I have and choose something very quickly that matches my project or theme. And also know that I am running low on a certain color. Here's a picture of one of the envelopes with the wrapped ribbon:

I stapled the first end to the card and then wrapped the ribbon and secured it with a paper clip or sometimes a straight pin if there was a lot of one kind of ribbon. I could get from 3-5 ribbons on each set of envelopes depending on how wide the ribbons were. Did I tell you how much I LOVE this system?

So what does this have to do with a recycled Christmas? Glad you asked! Since I unwound all those ribbon spools I had a bunch of thoem and I wondered what to do with them. I took one side of the ribbon spool off and printed some Doodle Pantry Winter Wishes pre-colored digital images. I sanded the edges of the spool and colored some of the edges with Copic markers. The outside and inside edge of the spools are covered with ribbon. I don't think I got a really good picture of that. I embedded the image inside the spool, added a hanger ribbon to the back of the spool and then covered the back with Christmas paper scraps. So here they are, my recycled Christmas ornament tags!

I hung these in one of the trees out in our yard. I had a very tough time taking the pictures because every time I thought I'd take it the wind would blow and turn the ornament. It took a lot of tries to get these to hang straight. LOL! I intend to use these as tags on packages and add the "to" and "from" to the back. Two presents in one! Hope you like them. And I have a ton more spools to use for more of these beauties. So don't throw those ribbon spools away. Make something gorgeous with them!
I'm entering the ornaments in the these challenges;

• Outlawz Paper ala Mode challenge: Christmas in July
• Flourishes Timeless Tuesday challenge: Christmas in July
• Party Time Tuesday challenge: Christmas in July

Thanks for stopping by today and checking out all that I have going on. I am off to start creating for the new Doodle Pantry release due out on August 1st. You won't want to miss this one! It's huge and lots of fun! Have a wonderful weekend!

Donna