The is the fourth in a series of projects (see Recycled Christmas Cards into pyramidal Christmas Trees here) for recycling your old Christmas cards into artistic homemade Christmas decorations for around the home. Today we’re going to make 2 old Christmas cards into a coaster or ornament:

• Place a Christmas card on a cutting mat and use an exacto knife to cut rows of strips across the card. Be sure to leave them all attached to one end of the card.
• Repeat this for the second card.
• Weave the two cards together, creating a checkerboard pattern.
• Trim off the areas that held the card together. What you have should look like this:

• At this point you can place the woven cards on a piece of wax paper and brush a collage glue, like Mod Podge, over the surface to hold it together and seal it, or . . .
• Laminate the woven cards and trim. I used a Scotch thermal laminator on mine, and this it the result:

At this point, you have a nice Christmas coaster for your cup of Hot Chocolate. If you’d like to continue on and make an ornament for your Christmas tree, then:

• Use an oval punch to make a whole in the top of the woven coaster.
• Use some curling ribbon to make a hanger for your ornament.

Here it is on our tree:

What I would have done differently for the ornament version, now that I have the experience of hindsight:

• Before glueing or laminating, place masking tape over the back of the woven cards to temporarily hold in place.
• Cut out the woven cards into a circle, bell or other Christmas symbol shape (as I find the square to look a little borish).
• Remove the tape and use Mod Podge to seal the project together.
• Then oval punch and hang with curling ribbon.

Maybe I’ll try it that way for a later post.

Don’t have a lot of Christmas Cards? Well, Ive found that to get them you have to send them. Here are some really cool pop-up Christmas cards I found from Robert Sabuda . . . of course you can always cheat and order a bunch of different Christmas Cards to use in projects like this. Often you can get them on clearance after Christmas.

Merry Christmas!