Recycled Scrapbooking

So for some reason I can't get out of my scrapbooking kick, even though I have tie-dyed bibs and felted wool dinosaurs to make, so today, in between baking vegan cupcakes with the girls and offering unsolicited breastfeeding advice to the next-door neighbor and writing "Z was zapped" on Willow's self-assigned "handwriting sheet" and getting snitty about Matt's cousin's utterly ridiculous decision to exclude children from his wedding celebration, I played with some ideas for including recycled/found elements into scrapbook pages.

These came from a poster of a John Williams Waterhouse painting, one of those things that hung in your dorm ten years ago and you really ought to get rid of but you looooove pre-Raphaelite painting so...

I cut a couple of 12"x12" squares to serve as background papers, but one of them, the close-up of the Belle Dame sans Merci and her intended victim, was so striking that I think I actually will reframe it for the bedroom, a warning for my partner, perhaps... I also cut out some title letters for a page of the weekend trips we like to take to St. Louis, and some random shapes, using my daughters' cookie cutters, for photo mattes or whatever.

These are paint samples from Lowe's--I keep repainting in the house, and while I moon over the paint swatches in the store the girls have taken to collecting them. Sydney, who I'm starting to feel may be color-blind, just likes to hunt and gather, but Willow like to collect pairs to play matching games with later. Later than that, I find them all over the house, and they become...

The top title for the Wonderlab is from those coordinating three-colors-to-a-swatch sample cards, and the other titles are from swatches that demonstrate textured colors.

I also have tons of free fabric swatches that I got online from places like distinctivefabric.com (where I often go to visit this shaggy heart fur fabric, which I long to slipcover the chair in the master bedroom with and make some matching big pillows for the bed, if only I wouldn't have to take out a second mortgage to do so) or fabrics-store.com--I've been to just about every fabrics store on the web in my unsuccessful attempt to score a thick bamboo or hemp terrycloth with which to sew towels. French terry? Bleh. Even though stores ask you not to request free samples JUST for crafting purposes, if you got the samples legitimately, I'm pretty sure that THEN you can use them just for crafting purposes. Same with the tons of swatches of recycled rubber flooring that I've collected in my search for a suitable floor for the basement. Of course, many of these swatches I was able to get courtesy of my IU email adress and my stated (personal) research goal of "soliciting products for environmentally sustainable interior design." That's legitimate, um, right?

Other ideas: bottlecaps turned upside down to serve as tiny photo frames, tiny little stuffies sewn and then stuffed with shredded paper, old CDs covered with paint or paper, cassette tape used as ribbon or tied into bows, Altoid tins redecorated as tiny treasure boxes, illustrations from children's books cut out to embellish a theme. What else?