Corralling greeting cards

I'm so excited about how I organized my greeting cards that I'm starting with an after photo! I used to save every single greeting card anyone ever gave me. My collection of cards from the past five or six years took up two photo boxes and outgrew them after Caleb was born, so there were just piles of cards on top of the boxes. I had re-read them a total of zero times, so I decided it was time for most of them to go.

I went through them all and made several piles

• Keep for sentimental reasons
  
• Keep to use parts of the design for scrapbooking
• Keep for design inspiration
• Keep because I might frame and use as art
• Trash

I was good and got rid of a lot! I think I kept 1/5 or less. Most of the sentimental ones will stay in one of the photo boxes... more what will happen to the rest in a minute. The ones I might use for scrapbooking will go with my scrapbooking supplies. The design idea ones will go with the rest of my design samples. And the ones I might frame will go with the art file I plan on creating. Not sure how it will look yet, but I need a way to store flat things that aren't currently framed and on my walls. I want to keep all of my wedding cards and baby shower/new baby cards and thought it would be helpful to group them together. So, I made them in to books! Now they are all bound together into cute little keepsakes.


I was originally going to punch holes in the corner and add a binder ring, but once I stacked the cards up I realized there were way too many! So, I just tied a ribbon around them and added tags to label them. Then they went back in a photo box, all pretty and organized.


I am also going to do this with the Christmas cards we get, starting with this year. I hadn't put this year's cards away yet, so they went straight from my card display to into a book. I did use a hole punch and binder ring for these. I also included an envelope in the back for letters and photos we received. Then I tied them up with some pretty ribbon I had lying around and a tag I cut out of cardstock. They got packed away with Christmas decorations. This way, every year as we are decorating fro Christmas we can look through all the cards we received in years past.

Now it will be so much easier to enjoy special cards and memories without digging through giant stacks.

If you are wondering how I display my Christmas cards, I use the Umbra photofalls desktop. I decided I didn't like using it for photos because it gets so dusty when left out year round and the clips dent photos. But it works perfect when I get it out once a year to hang cards on it!

Here's the project breakdown.
Supplies needed: cards, ribbon, cardstock, binder rings, pen or marker, and hole punch
Total cost: $0 for me since I already had everything (approx. $6 if you need to buy supplies)
Time spent: approx. 3.5 hours (2 hours going through cards and 1.5 hours making the books)

Are you a saver or do you throw cards away? Do you have any creative uses for old cards?