This blog post sharing how we made a scrapbook with recycled materials is an old one on the site, but we still love looking back at our kid-made scrapbook! The best thing about a scrapbook using recycled materials is that you can use what you have on hand…even incorporating recycled art or other items. This is a kids craft that you’ll love to hold onto forever! Let’s get started with a recycling bin project that kids will love.
Scrapbook Using Recycled Materials
We love using recycled materials in crafts and activities. There’s nothing like grabbing craft supplies from the recycle bin and creating, learning, and playing! We made our own phone picture scrapbook together with the kids using recycled materials and now have a great keepsake of a season of fun with cousins!
The best news is that these are pictures from my phone that I never would have printed off let alone scrap booked into a memory keeper.
There are so many items in your recycle bin (or heading for the trash) that can be used as embellishments in a recycled scrapbook design. Look around the house and see what you can come up with!
Here are some ideas for decorating a scrapbook with recycled items:
- Scrap paper
- Kids art
- Old papers from school
- Old school folders
- Fabric from clothing that no longer fits
- Strips of colored paper- try junk mail!
- Paper bags
- Old magazines
- Envelopes that come in the mail
- Refrigerator magnets
- Stickers
- Old jewelry
- Decorative paper from greeting cards
- Various types of paper texture: cardboard, egg cartons, fabrics, etc.
These items can be used as a photo mat for holding photos on the scrapbook page, or you can use the items as accents on the page. The sky is the limit!
Add a few scrapbooking tools to work with the materials and you are good to go:
- Scissors
- Glue
- Brads
- Pens
- Markers
- Staples
- Hole punches to punch holes in paper and use the paper holes as accents
These lists should give you some inspiration to get started!
How to make scrapbook using recycled materials
If you are like me, you always have your phone in your back pocket. A mom has got to capture those cutie pie moments and lugging a big camera around just isn’t an option sometimes. I love having a phone camera always on me a the slightest indication of a gummy baby smile.
With such access to capturing images, most of us have hundreds or thousands of pictures stored on our phones. Those images usually never get printed! All of those real-life, caught in the moment pictures that tell the story of our lives just get stored away and never to be printed or scrap booked.
When they arrived in the mail, my kids loved looking at the “story” of our winter. And, these pictures were clear and bright! We decided to make a scrapbook with our high quality pictures using recycled materials.
Here are the directions to make a scrapbook from recycled items:
- Cut out 2 pieces of cardboard to create a front cover and back cover. Cut the cardboard to the size of the book you want to create. We used a cardboard box to create a front and back cover for our scrapbook. A thin cardboard like a cracker box or cereal box will work best.
- Cut paper the same size as the cardboard. This will be pages in your recycled scrapbook. Thicker paper like cardstock or an old folder works best for the pages.
- Cut paper, fabric, or cardboard larger than the size of the images. This will be photo mat for each image.
- Use double sided tape to attach images to the photo mats.
- Add accents or embellishments onto each page: pieces of fabric, old stickers, layering various textured paper, adding strips of cardboard, etc.
- Use a hole punch to punch holes in each photo page and in the front cover and back cover.
- Thread the book together using a strip of recycled fabric, a piece of string, or twine. Tie each hole with the material.
- Use recycled paper, ribbon, or scraps from magazines to decorate the front cover. We used scraps of paper to make a top border and falling dots on our scrapbook. You can add decorations to the back side of images as well, even adding written descriptions for each picture in the scrapbook.
