Free and Cheap Ways To Repurpose Old Greeting Cards

From birthdays to anniversaries and everything in between, many of us collect a lot of greeting cards throughout the year. It seems wasteful to throw them away, but keeping cards can cause clutter.

What To Do With Old Greeting Cards

Fortunately, I have some clever ideas on how you can recycle or repurpose old greeting cards.

Donate

Did you know that you can donate old greeting cards? Here are a few places that accept them.

St. Jude’s Ranch for Children

St. Jude’s Ranch is a charity that helps abused and at-risk children, teens, young adults and families. The organization accepts greeting card donations and uses them to create new cards that they sell to benefit the charity. They use only the fronts of the greeting cards, and they don’t accept Hallmark, American Greetings or Disney cards due to copyright laws.

Here is the mailing address:

St. Jude’s Ranch for Children
Recycled Card Program
100 St. Jude’s Street
Boulder City, NV 89005

You can visit the website for more information.

Local Community Organizations or Libraries

Places in your local community may accept card donations. Daycare centers and schools often use them for arts and crafts activities and other purposes. You can also check with your local library.

Nursing homes, senior centers, homes for the disabled, art schools and centers and other places may also accept donations to use for crafting and other projects.

Repurpose

If you would like to save greeting cards instead of donating them, here are a few clever ways to repurpose them.

Scan to Your Computer

If there are cards that you want to save but want to avoid clutter, scan them to your computer. Create a folder to save the scans. Then you can always look back at them without keeping the physical cards.

Make Gift Tags

You can use many different parts of a card to make gift tags for packages. Often the cards have lovely pictures and artwork. Cut out portions of the cards to attach to gifts. You can get creative with different shapes and by attaching ribbons, strings and other decorative items to the tags.

Use as Note Paper

Use blank areas of the card for notepaper. Cut out what you can use and put them in your office or kitchen for lists, notes and other things.

Send a Note

Cut out the front of the card, fold it over and use it to send a note to a friend or loved one. Or write a note to your child and tuck it in their backpack or lunchbox as a nice surprise.

Use as Seating Assignment Place Cards

Use the front of the card to create seating assignment name cards for dinner parties, birthday parties, holiday parties, weddings or other special occasions.

Create Garland for a Party

Cut the picture on the front of the card into different shapes such as triangles, squares, stars, hearts, or whatever you like. Then glue them to a pretty ribbon to hang at a party.

Frame or Display Them

Some of the artwork on greeting cards is beautiful. You can frame these to display in your home or office or to give as a gift.

Make a New Card

Use a piece of construction paper and cut it down to the size of the greeting card and glue it to the inside of the card. Write your own personal message and send it to someone else. You can even cut out shapes and parts of other greeting cards and glue those to the inside of the card to decorate them. Or you can buy blank cards and cut out shapes, words, letters and other pieces from the used card to decorate the inside and outside of the blank cards.

Create Gift Card Holders

Use the front of the card to make a holder for gift cards.

Shred Them

You can use the shreds as padding for packages or to stuff into gift bags.

Save in a Scrapbook

If there are cards you want to save because they are from someone special or have some sentimental value, create a scrapbook to save them in.

Turn Cards Into Bookmarks

Pretty greeting cards make great bookmarks. Cut them into different shapes, attach a ribbon and create a pretty bookmark. These make nice gifts for book lovers.

Try a Craft

Get creative there are all kinds of craft projects that can use old greeting cards. Some ideas are small gift boxes, placemats, coasters, ornaments, wall hangings, wreaths, holiday centerpieces, collages and more. Check out Pinterest: Users there share tons of creative ideas.

How do you repurpose greeting cards? Let us know in our free Clark.com Community!