Don't Trash Your Wrapping Tissue Paper

We've all seen it: the tissue paper carnage that results from Christmas mornings, birthdays, baby showers and wedding showers. Giant clouds of tissue paper get stuffed into big garbage bags to be put on the curb, bound for the landfill.

Tissue paper is one of those grey area products when it comes to recycling. Some municipalities won't recycle tissue paper because it often contains additives - like wax, glitter or foil - that are problematic in the recycling process. We can, of course, reuse tissue paper in our own gift wrapping and packaging, but in doing so, we can't be certain that it won't get thrown away.

Lucky for us, we don't need to throw away tissue paper or recycle it because there are so many marvelous household and creative uses for the stuff. I'll focus on some creative uses in this post.

Tissue paper is marvelous stuff to use in art because you can manipulate it and layer it in so many ways to create really cool effects. I'll show you some examples from my own work. I created these art cards using tissue paper:

I made the white flower on this card by layering pieces of white tissue paper for the petals, and bunching together small shreds of tissue paper for the centre.

I made the flowers on this card with scraps of blue and yellow tissue paper.

Here, I played around with some tissue paper to create texture for a painted background. I painted some gloss medium onto a piece of paper, then laid tissue paper loosely on top, and pressed down lightly to adhere it. Then, I painted over the surface with more gloss medium to set all the interesting textures created by the tissue paper.

You can also use tissue paper to make something called "crystalline paper". All you need is some gloss medium and some freezer paper to use as a work surface. To learn how to make it, check out this easy tutorial about how to make crystalline paper, or watch this video about how to make crystalline paper. Look how super fun it is:

I used red tissue paper that contains little pieces of coloured foil to make the crystalline paper in this bookmark. If you look closely, you can see the book's words through the paper.

Here's some crystalline paper that I made with green tissue paper and circles of white and teal tissue paper. I took the picture of the paper hanging in a window to show the beautiful translucency of the paper.

This just scratches the surface of all the marvelous creative things you can do with tissue paper. And the great thing is, it's no problem to store because you can smush it into whatever space you have available!