Need some ideas? Check out these awesome tutes for making homemade postcards, and then go raid the recycling bin! 12 Homemade Postcards 1. coloring pages. You generally have to back these with a sturdier cardboard, but adult coloring pages, especially, make wonderful postcard graphics. 2. cyanotypes. These sun prints are also really fun for kids to make! 3. embellished vintage postcards. Just because the postcard is already manufactured doesn’t mean that you can’t add your own magic to it!...

For my daughter’s star-themed fifth birthday party, we also wanted to make star-themed party invitations. But there were too many stars on too many invitations to simply hand-draw each one, and with gas at over $4 a gallon here and our party budget already blown on star fruit, I wasn’t about to drive to the big-box craft store across town and splurge on star stickers. In order to keep the handmade look of hand-drawn stars on a multiple of invitations, my kiddos and I crafted hand-drawn, hand-carved rubber stamps....

Want an awesome decoration that’s also a healthy appetizer at your next party? How about a special side dish for a Father’s Day dinner that’s also a work of art? Or how about just a really fun rainy day kid’s craft that’s also lunch? Edible bread sculptures start as play dough and end up as tasty masterpieces. Bread dough is easy enough for a kid to sculpt, but the finished loaf holds detail surprisingly well, making it a satisfying craft for even older artists, who won’t be disappointed with the results....

Hand-dipping candles is no longer a labor-intensive pioneer chore. Using an old crock pot or a DIY stovetop bain-marie, a hand-dipped candle becomes an easy, kid-friendly craft project, one that can stock an entire season of candlelit dinners in a single afternoon. Although I’m using beeswax for these candles, you can use any non-petroleum-based wax–check out Becky’s article on vegan beeswax alternatives for specific tips. Melt your solid wax in a crock pot....

News flash: I get dry skin in the winter. Big shocker, right? Or not. Anyway, store-bought lotions, even the fancy kinds, creep me out–there’s always some sketchy chemical listed on the label. And yet my poor skin…so dry… The solution? Solid lotion bars! Solid lotion contains all the ingredients that are really good for you, like coconut oil and shea butter, but none of the artificial ingredients that make it squeezable through a plastic bottle....

For headache or stress relief, or just a nice, long nap, an eye pillow weighted with natural buckwheat and sewn from soft fabric is just the thing you need to help you really relax. You can fill your eye pillow with your favorite herbs, sew it from silk or organic cotton, store it in the freezer to keep it soothingly chilly, and make a few extras to give as gifts later on....

The ease, efficiency, and eco-friendly nature of a steam mop quickly pales when you realize that whichever one you bought, it did not come with enough re-usable mop pads to meet your needs (funny how that works…). Are you going to constantly launder your steam mop pads, buy a ton more of them…or make your own? I recycled old towels for this project, creating mop pads that are made from natural cotton, are easy to wash and sanitize, sew up quickly, and offer customizable thicknesses, so that I can blast my stone-tiled kitchen floor but not trash the wax on my wood living room floor....

Families who embrace a natural lifestyle often have lots of simple wooden toys–I know that mine sure does! Building blocks, peg people, beads, and even more unusual items, such as my daughters’ collection of little wooden acorns, can furnish an infinite amount of creative play, all without batteries, or plastic, or a video screen of any sort. However, sometimes you just need a little color. A kid can build with her unfinished wooden blocks all day long, but if what she really wants to build is a rainbow, well… Fortunately, unfinished wooden toys (or unfinished wood of ANY type), is quite simple to stain, and it takes color so beautifully that you may never want to paint wood again....

Did your favorite coffee mug lose its handle? Here’s how to fix a broken coffee cup handle quickly and simply. The repair is even dishwasher safe! This is why I can’t have nice things: That mug is a beautiful, hand-thrown coffee mug from my very favorite potter on Etsy. I bought it at the Indie Craft Experience, and it’s the perfect size for my morning cup. It’s my favorite mug, so of course I managed to break the handle off within days of buying it....

I made this pillow sham using a stamp that I carved from a potato. Here how to make a printed pillow cover of your own! My friend Sarah Lodato runs a crafting school here in Atlanta called Atlanta Institute of Stitches and Crafts. She teaches fun crafting workshops out of her studio and all over the city, and at a recent workshop we played around with potato printing. It was actually a block printing workshop, and she had both blocks to carve and potatoes....

If I didn’t talk you out of making a genuine teacup candle last time (you can always make these teacup candle holders instead!), then let me teach you the best way to make one. If made correctly, a teacup candle is beautiful, useful, and endlessly refillable. You’ll love its warm light and gentle scent, and you’ll enjoy your teacup candle far more than you would a boring old store-bought container candle....

If you sew, and especially if you love to upcycle, the upcycled denim skirt is a rite of passage. Here’s how to make one! You will need: well-fitting pair of blue jeans. Maybe they have holes in the knees that you don’t want to patch. Maybe they’re too short, and you don’t want to sew on a cuff or a ruffle. Whatever the reason for converting them into a skirt, they should fit well in the waist....

By this point in our collective steampunk obsession, we’ve definitely used up all of our old watch parts, and everyone’s outgrown swim goggles have been painted black and had silver studs glued on, but there are still plenty of components to be found. Here, I’m modding a steampunk snowman using the wooden gears from a child’s old DIY marble coaster kit and some wire pulled out of an analog clock....

One of my favorite recycling activities is to scrounge around the house looking for cardboard and cardstock to upcycle into holiday decorations. Heavy paper waiting to be recycled is ubiquitous around here, whether it comes from magazine covers, cereal boxes, toy packaging, junk mail, flat rate envelopes, door hangers, or any of the other thousand sources of unwanted paper in our lives. As long as a source of cardstock or cardboard fits my color scheme (and painting counts!...

Ahem. My point, now that I’ve gotten around to it, is that I actually do craft with new wool, but I need to know where that wool has come from so that I can assure myself that the sheep were humanely raised as the happy, frolicsome beasts they’re meant to be (I assume–never having raised sheep myself, they could be fierce and blood-thirsty predators, for all I really know). And one of the awesomest kinds of wool to craft with, especially if you’re not a spinner or a knitter, is wool roving (just don’t use superwash!...

The 2008 Bay Area Maker Faire will put a special emphasis on “Green” living. There will be a huge exhibit featuring Farm Aid’s Homegrown Village, a local farmer’s market, Swap-O-Rama-Rama’s giant used clothing swap, DIY workshops and fashion show, Bazaar Bizarre’s crafts fair, a live Prius plug-in car conversion from Bay Area’s Calcars.org, and much, much more. The Swap-O-Rama-Rama is a huge clothing swap and series of do-it-yourself workshops. Bring a bag of your unwanted clothes to swap with other participants and then learn to make modifications or totally transform your new finds....

When you picture Mount Everest, you probably imagine a pristine, snow-covered peak, a lonely climber making his way to the very top, and maybe a small campfire or campsite where weary hikers take a break from the trail for the night. What you probably don’t picture is tons – literal tons – of litter. Unfortunately, Mount Everest has a bit of a litter problem, despite the Nepalese government trying to keep things under control....

Remember my first music wall art idea? Well, here’s part 2! My roommates and I had a large blank space over our couch that was driving me insane! I didn’t want to buy any artwork from a big box store, so I decided to create my own. You can adapt this with your own favorite quote or lyric too! Here’s how to do it. What You Will Need: An old picture frame....

Every now and then I see the same news articles coming around again: some group is making plarn sleeping mats for the homeless. Plarn is simply yarn made from plastic bags, and it’s been around for a long time (although it keeps being re-discovered by the mainstream media, apparently). Back in 2013, we wrote about New Life for Old Bags, a Chicago group that crochets plarn sleeping mats for the homeless....

Considering that everything except for the tape and paint came from our recycling bin, and that this is EXACTLY the tall, polka-dotted hat that she had wanted, I’m declaring it a Halloween win. To make sure that the hat would fit well, I measured the circumference of my daughter’s head using jewelry wire, which held its shape while I traced it on half of an old cardboard record album cover (I dumpster dive for scratched records and then craft with them!...