Lime Grocery Tags and Accessories

During my crafting on the Lime Grocery journal, I challenged myself to find ways of using every part of a piece of packaging, and created many tags, along with a few accessories.

I used packaging from Trader Joe's lime sicles, Ball Lids, Culinary Circle pizza, and Whole Foods paper bags. It seemed like a good idea to make collection sheets of these accessories in case I ever wanted to print extra for one of my books.

I offer these print out sheets as fun things for personal use only (right click and 'save as' to use). I don't own the designs of the packaging used to create these tags, cards, tabs, and other accessories, I simply put work into making the accessories themselves.

Lime skinny note cards and tag decor paper strips (left). Ball and Lime cards (right)

Lime book tabs (left). Lime tags (right). Those are my favorite accessories.

Culinary pizza tags and Whole Foods large paper bag tags.

Paper bag tags with a bit of collage.

Alongside the tags, I also made flags out of bags and stamped them with various designs and colors. I then created print pages of these. To use them they simply have to be cut out, folded down the middle, and glued together over a piece of twine (example shown above).

Lime Grocery Book

Here's a fun journal made from all things recycled. The Lime Grocery Journal, named after its color and the fact its pages are made from paper grocery bags, was a fun experiment that led me to discover many different ways of using up scraps from the junk pile.

All materials used are from the recycling bin. The cover is scrap cardboard from some product packaging (a linkyo diffuser), paper bags from Whole Foods and Trader Joes, Popsicle boxes, Ball lid boxes, a bit of elastic thread, and some final touches using stamp inks and Liquitex varnish.

Enjoy a full video tour.

I added a little stamp to the back using stays on ink, and went over the letters with white jell pen. I thought it added a bit of cute interest to the book's back side (stamp is a very old sample stamp from a Stampin Up party).

I chose to do an exposed stitch on the spine, matching my thread choices with the color scheme. This is essentially hand made bakers twine, made by half successfully twisting green and white cording together. It could have been better, tighter, but I didn't have a little hand crank machine for making mini rope at the time.

The closure is made from white elastic thread which has been fed through two homemade cardboard buttons, and then knotted on the outside. The outer cardboard button kind of just hangs freely, and only has a single hole which both strands of elastic were fed through.

On the inside I used a lime green button with two holes. This one was made from part of a Lime fruit Floe's (Popsicle) box.

Like on the outside, I used sides of a Whole Food's bag to decorate the inner cover of the book. This has been sealed with Liquitex satin varnish. I really enjoy the look of the lettering in the egg shape.

From here on down you can peek at all the fun pages made entirely from paper bags with added items like tags made from small sections of packaging and paper bags. I found ways to make side tucks, corner tucks, and top loading pocket pages all throughout the book, using art aspects of the bags for interest.

The book contains three signatures in total and measures around 5.5x 5.5 in.

Find out about the process of making this book and its accessories on the post- Waste Nothing challenge- Lime Grocery Journal Process

I found fun ways to make tags from packaging like the Lime sicles box (shown right). There are three large tags in the book, two of them pull tab types and one of them a booklet like thing. Other tags were made from frozen pizza box cardboard and the tabs of a Lime sicle box.

I made lime tags, trading cards, and even Ball lid slip cards for adding notes to. I'm not quite sure what you can do with little tags and such, but it might be fun to use the book as a simple 'grocery list through the year' kind of book, with added notes on food.

Among all the fun brown paper bag tags made from scraps, I also made some print outs from a few scrap collage pieces I did, just for fun. There was also a small experiment of making little brown paper envelope bags for holding goodies that go into the book.

My adventures through crafting led to me finding ways to make little garland flags from scraps, book tabs, shakers, even the small strips leftover seemed like they could be used for decorating or adding to extra tags and writing spots. 

Also in the print outs collection I made some ATC cards from some Lime sicle box scraps and stamping, and tiny faux postal stamps created as mini collages. These just had to be scanned and printed.