Easy Paint-Stamped Stationary with Celery Roses

Easy, eco-friendly, impressive!

Yes, you stamp these with CELERY. The kind you buy at the grocery store and eat.

It’s no surprise that since I drive a Prius love eco-friendly projects, these are one of my favorite things to make. Let’s be real here, what else are you going to do with the butt-end of the celery, besides compost it?

To get these going, you’ll need paint, a brush, celery (duh) and whatever type of notecard you like to use. I buy the “small” celery bunch at the store. My paint isn’t anything special, just what I had on hand today. My notecards are 4 x 5.5 in, a good cream cardstock.

Everything you need for stationary awesomeness.

It’s important that when you cut the celery, you make a good, clean, straight chop. Else, you’ll have trouble with the stamping.

After you’ve brushed a thin, and I repeat a THIN layer of paint onto the celery stamp, press down firmly onto the cardstock to make the stamp. Make as many celery roses as you like on one card–whatever suits your taste. I like to stamp the envelopes too, to make it a matched set.

Press and stamp!

If you want to print words or a message onto the card (like I do with my cakerypapery tag), you need to do this BEFORE you stamp the celery roses–else you’ll have a very hard, messy and frustrating time running the stamped cards through your printer.

The best part? Each card is unique–no two come out alike. And, the whole project only takes one or two minutes per card (plus drying time). Can you tell why this projects is one of my favorites yet?

Not to mention, celery stamping cards would make a great project to do with children (just use washable paint!). I’ve also whipped up a bunch when I need a thoughtful but affordable gift for someone. You can see my inspiration for the cards here at Creature Comforts, where she uses the technique for wrapping paper.

Happy celery rose stamping!

Card + envelope? yes please.

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When you give a girl a party…

She’ll have to craft everything in sight.

Old book pages + gluesticks = victory.

Well…technically I’m throwing myself a party…although it’s really not for me…its more of an excuse to get together with friends and show off try out some DIY project’s I’ve been wanting to do. I keep calling these paper pinwheels, although they’re really not pinwheels, more like flowers.

Pretty easy to make, once I got the hang of it and got over the fact that I need to make MANY MANY book flowers before Saturday. The original idea comes from a Better Homes & Gardens post which can be found here.

First, you’ll need an old book. I grabbed a copy of White Noise that an ex-boyfriend had given me. (Just like the ex, this book needed to go…) While the BHG post recommends using a vintage book with thicker pages, I like the thinness of the paperback pages better–easier for making accordion folds.

Fold, trim, tie, glue!

You need two pages (or one page cut in half) to make the book flowers. After you make the accordian fold, you can trim the edges off to give it a more flower-y look. Then, tie the two halves together (this is where had serious #fails…) and glue the pages into a circle! Luckily, the book I choose had some interesting title pages, which is what gives the light/dark effect above.

After making about eight of these, I got smart accidentally discovered that if you fold one page over the other before tying with string, it cuts down on the glueing. The picture below shows what I mean.

And then I got smart...linking the edges together eliminates glueing.

Also, depending on where you are going to hang your book flowers, you may want to leave extra string on the ties.

As for me, I have 14 of these bad boys finished and many more to go! I’m planning on glueing buttons to the centers to complete the look. Wish me luck!

Ta-da!

One of the best parts of this endeavor was that I already had all the supplies I needed–so the project cost me $0. It’s eco-friendly and a great way to recycle books into something new.