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Just now, past the excess of Christmas, with its store-bought gifts and overpackaging, is an appropriate time to consider being a little friendlier to our mother Earth. Could we do with less, could we re-use more? We could indeed, and a good start would be to look at some of the accumulation of everyday life as raw material for craft projects and as creative solutions to everyday needs.

CRAFT PAPERS

Many of us have hobbies that send us to craft stores for fancy art papers: we scrapbook; we decoupage; we rubber stamp What if we turned new eyes on those paper shopping bags we often carry our purchases home in, rather than throwing them into the trash or the recycling bin? Often, these bags are made from paper printed in fascinating patterns or with interesting textures. Maybe some of you have already thought of repurposing these bags as wrapping paper, but why not use them in the place of art paper from the craft store? I have seen papers easily the equal of the more expensive stock in the chain craft stores; I have a quaint black-and-white toile print and a lovely black, white and silver design of birch trunks in my "collection," and I am sure I will find just the perfect use for them one of these days.

Many stores change their bags with the seasons, or to suit holidays, providing a usable source of themed paper, maybe for a scrapbook, possibly as cardstock. I found another use for themed shopping bags for my daughter's sixteenth birthday party. I cut the images of several of those oh-so-buff young men off from a rare (in our house, anyway) Abercrombie and Fitch shopping bag, put them on the walls in the party room with temporary adhesive and added speech balloons with appropriate sayings like "Happy Birthday Anna!" Another project using themed bags might be to use a bag from a vacation as part of the memorabilia for a scrapbook page; often a unique shop will have a logo suggestive of its location and even list the town somewhere on the bag. A cutting from such a bag would make a great introduction to a page detailing a visit to a specific town.

COASTERS

Often it seems a shame to send colorful plastic lids from canister-shaped cardboard containers straight to the recycling bin. Since they are waterproof and come in a variety of handy sizes, why not put them into use as coasters? Just as they are, they make perfectly utilitarian coasters to use under glasses or terra cotta plant pots.

To get crafty, it is easy to glue in scraps of material or craft paper (or those

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