Happy Paper Scrap Reuse to You!

In addition to fine art paper mosaics (see blog post at https://www.glorianewton.com/post/skyseasand) and paper mosaic coasters (see https://www.glorianewton.com/post/if-you-can-t-play-with-your-food), I have also started making paper mosaic greeting cards using text and colored scraps from old greeting cards I've saved.

Like my other paper mosaic projects, deciding on a color scheme is the first and one of the most important steps. I usually start by looking through my cardstock scraps for a background color, then at the text scraps I have for the words I want to incorporate, and then try out a few colors by laying out greeting card scraps. In this case, the text background was a yellowish-green which contrasted well with the lavender background, so I chose yellow-orange and blue as a start on the colors for the mosaic. I had already decided the card and mosaic frame would be off-white cardstock. I did two color checks, one before I cut the frame and one after. All systems go!

I laid cut out the text and placed them first, and then surrounded them with blue scraps that fell into the light and green-blue subsets of my blue stash. I wanted them to stand out from the background so dark blues and purplish-blues were not going to work.

I hadn't been completely happy with the choice of yellow-orange, and I had toyed around with pinks, but they were too much like the background to be a good choice. But I did find a pink floral scrap that had nice texture, so I worked in a few of those for variety's sake. I also used a few of the excess scraps from cutting out the text as well. (It's a little hard to see in these photos, but the difference between the yellow-greens and yellow-oranges is more distinct in person).

Here's the finished card. The dimensions are approximately 5 5/8" by 4 3/8".

Because my background piece, leftover from a previous card project, was a little small in this case and didn't overlap very far on the frame, I decided to cover the inside edge with a little bit of washi tape in addition to the double-stick tape I used to adhere it to the frame.

This one is now on its way to a friend in Pennsylvania. Below are pictures of some other cards I've made in the past. This is proving such a useful way to use up the tiniest of scraps that I'm sure there will be many, many more.