A Bit Of New Year Recycling

My first set of ATCs this year are made of recycled bits and pieces that would otherwise have ended up in the dustbin, Re-cycle being the theme for The Stamp Man ATC swap this month. 

The background is the outer part of some christmas crackers and the flowers are made from the tissue paper party hats that were inside them.I cut as many flower shapes as possible from two paper hats with the two smallest Tim Holtz tattered Florals dies and layered them up alternating the colours and fixed them with a brad in the centre. I then screwed them up and sprayed them with a gold memory mist making them quite wet and then pulled  the petals out again gently with a pokey tool and sprayed them a bit more and left them to dry. Meanwhile I peeled the top layer from a paper table napkin with the candle design on and glued it to a piece of thin card with Modge Podge. When it was dry I cut out the two candles that I wanted and glued them in place. I then cut some leaves from green card left over from my christmas card making, with a Sissix die. This die is quite a bunch, or branch of leaves, so I cut them into smaller sprigs so that I could arrange them around the flowers. I also used some plastic netting that had held fruit from the supermarket to tie into a knot to place behind the flowers. One piece of this was black so I ran a gold Krylon pen over it and was quite surprised how well it worked. It doesn't show very well in the photo but I also added some yellow Stickles glue to all the netting bits and on the candle flames as well. I used a Krylon pen to edge the red card and a red permanent marker for the gold ones.