Earth Card Making - Shopping Bag Flowers

We are having an Earth Day Card Making fundraiser today at work. Our committee decided with it being just around the corner why not see what crafts we could make with the theme reuse/recycle/reduce.  I found shopping bag flowers in my search and applied my twist to it. Check out this post Shopping Bag Flowers  for how tos.

For this card, I cut several flowers in coordinating colors with Sizzix Large Daisie die.  I created the leaf with a Sizzix Flower Layers #2 using largest flower then cutting petals into 4 leaves. I went searching for a background for my flower.  Into my Cricut cartridges I found this one with the perfect ratio for an A2 card in the "Just Because Cards" cartridge.  I cut it from distress black designer paper.  I color printed my greetings then cut them with my Creative Memories oval cutter and it fits perfectly in the space on the background.  I punched a 1" circle of vellum for the centre of the flower and held the flowers in place with a flower pewter brad.  Super happy with this idea.

How To: Shopping Bag Flowers

With Earth Day just around the corner on April 22nd I was working on a recycle/reuse/reduce idea for work. More on that in the next post.
I found inspiration in an internet search.  I've applied my tools to the project and here's what I came up with.
We all have plastic shopping bags that get stuffed in a box, drawer, fabric tube, etc. for when we next need one.  How about making flowers for card making with them?  I went through my stack of bags and found purple, yellow, pink, navy blue and clear.  After checking with co-workers we came up with light yellow, bright blue, green, and more.  Some plastic is thicker and opaque and some is thin and translucent which works for creating depth.  I cut several layers of plastic to size for the flower die I had selected. Any flower die will do that is a good size. I found it best to sandwich the plastic between 2 layers of scrap paper.  After running it through the machine you have plastic flowers in various colors.  Think about how you can use something in a new way!
Purple - Purdy's chocolates                    Yellow - McBain, Home Hardware
Clear - Ikea                                             Pink - Scrapbook Store
White and Pink - HMV                          Blue - The Children's Place
Navy - Sears                                           White and Red - Safeway