Earth day recycled cards

As my mojo has been AWOL for a while, I thought I would try something a bit different to get my brain back into crafting gear. This weeks challenge over at Shopping Our Stash is "Happy Earth Day" and that means up-cycle or recycle something. The idea is that craft hoarders tend to collect a lot of stuff you mean to use later, but it all just ends up in the ever growing stash. And I have to admit to this, I tend to collect lots of things I think I could use for crafting, but most of the time they end up forgotten in the stash. I also have loads of random mismatched cardstock that I never seem to get around to using. When I started crafting I got a huge box of mixed craft stuff from a friend and I have used a lot of it, but there are bits and bobs that have stayed lying around, particularly some really nice cardstock that sadly has some imperfections here and there, so I haven't quite figured out what to do with it. And this challenge came in perfect.

The cards are made from a drawing from a box of chocolates. I just cut the drawing into two panels and applied a lot of Stickles to bling it up a bit. I matted the drawing onto some of my left over cardstock, cleverly avoiding the imperfections. The letters are die cut from the same purple sparkly cardstock using the Tim Holtz inside out alphabet die. I felt I got away a little too easy with basically just gluing stuff on for these cards, so I also added some die cuts to the inside of the cards. 

I think the cards turned out quite nice although they are quite simple. They would work as an invitation, birthday card or as a "just because" card. And it feels nice to have actually used something from my stash instead of just expanding it all the time.

Cardstock: Leonardo Stationery 350 g Smooth White cardstock, leftover purple cards from my stash, Drawing from Hotel Chocolate box
Other: Ranger Ice Stickles in Coffee Ice and Ranger Tim Holtz Distress stickles in Dusty Concord, Spun Sugar, Mustard Seed and Spiced Marmelade, Tim Holtz Alterations inside out alphabet die, Tim Holtz alterations Vintage Lace die, Nellie's multiframe's MFD020 die