Recycle, Re-purpose, Re-invent!

The title of this post is also the name of a CS Designs blog, sister to their Art with No Boundaries blog. The brand new Recycle, Re-purpose and Re-invent site  challenges us to dig into our stashes and recycling bins to come up with fresh ideas for our art. Check the right side of this blog for a link.
To answer RRR's first challenge, Anything Goes, I'm using cards I made for a CST (Canadian Stamp Talk), card mingle. Last year, CST challenged us to use tissue boxes as material for our mingle cards. I hopped on board, because I've got a drawerful of flattened tissue boxes I've been meaning to use, but needed a push to get me going.
I saved the box used on these cards because the colors, flowers and design elements appealed to me and are similar to  some of Stampin' Up's colors and one of their stamps.
SU's Build-a-Bird punch was used on the first two cards, along with stamps from the SU set, Warm Words. The background is not printed cardstock, but part of the tissue box. SU Baroque Motifs was used on the third card, beneath the tissue box strips. The card base and other cardstock used on the cards are SU.
For the Bonus Round of RRR's April challenge, one must answer the two-part question, "What’s the strangest thing you have been hoarding for the
purpose of using it in your art and how do you plan to use it?
I had a hard time with this, because one artist's weird is another's normal, no? I finally decided on a piece of the birch bark I've been saving for years. I intend to use it on a card.
The bark comes from birch trees used for the wood-burning stove at the Chabot family cabin, which is on a lake three to four hours driving distance from Québec City, plus a hike up a hill. Since my deceased husband and I spent part of our honeymoon at this cabin, the bark has a particular meaning for me.