Wondering how to make your festive season that bit greener by making recycled Christmas decorations?

There are lots of ways to make them reusing waste paper, scrap fabric, or random other things from around the home and garden – and they’re certainly not all just for kids.

Here are some of our favourites:

• Want to have a starry, starry night? Use twigs from the garden to make window or tree decorations. (Or if your garden is as cold & icy as ours, any other sticks will suffice – perhaps the project to use up your hoarded collection of “disposable” chopstics or lolly pop sticks?)
• If you fancy something a little shinier, make stars from old foil cake or pie tins instead.
• Or if you prefer your stars in a classy matte, how about making these Christmas fairy light shades from old brown/manila envelopes?
• Brown paper shopping bags – particularly ones with a Christmas themed print on them – can be made into decorative Christmas stockings.
• Or if you’d prefer to have fabric stockings to stuff full of treats, how about recycling a pair of old jeans for a modern look?
• Smaller scraps of old clothes or fabric can be upcycled into scrap fabric wreaths – these ones made from scraps of old felted wool clothes are just lovely.
• If you’re more of a paper person, this origami Christmas wreath could be made with coloured waste paper – envelopes from Christmas cards for example.

• Or if buttons are more your thing (mmm, buttons), you could make this fab wreath instead – if you loosely sewed the buttons onto the card, you could snip them off to reuse as buttons as you needed them for actual buttoning purposes!
• If all these are a bit too grown up for you – or you’d like a project to keep the kids busy while you’re assisting Santa, how about using wine corks to make reindeer tree decorations?
• Or if you’ve still got last year’s Christmas cards, they could use them to make a cute bunting banner.
• Finally, a couple of our favourite ideas for revamping existing decorations that are getting old or tired: I love the look of these fabric wrapped Christmas items (I’ve done a similar thing before with a single colour frogged yarn – very pleasant).
• Or, turn plain baubles into fun (angry!) characters with a little paint.

So Christmas is just over a week away and houses up and down the land are being covered in fairy lights, tinsel and breaking-and-entering Santas trying to climb in bedroom windows (is that just a trend on my estate? Is it really just a creative burglar who gets around a lot?).

But what if you prefer decorations that aren’t shop bought? I’m sure all you clever, crafty people have a billion ideas to make pretty Christmas things – and I’m sure a lot of them will reuse or recycle random bits and bobs which would otherwise go in the bin.

I remember making paperchains out of glossy colour magazines as a kid but if we decorate our house these days, I suspect I’d prefer something a little less … paperchain-y.

I like the idea of little festive candle lanterns made from old tin cans, Precarious Tomato’s prescription pill bottle wreath and Alison Bailey Smith’s gorgeous scrap wire baubles. I seem to recall someone making baubles out of old-style lightbulbs too but can’t remember the details… And our friend Deb has made a Christmas tree out of cardboard (the last time we had a tree, a good few years ago now, we had a cardboard one too – but Deb’s looks far more sturdy than ours.)

Have you seen any good upcycling ideas? What have you reused to make recycled Christmas decorations?