Not a lot! And who wants to buy a fancy, expensive bird feeder? Not me! To make it feeding the birds more fun, don’t fret yourself dropping the big bucks on pricey specialty bird feeders, not when there are so many great DIY bird feeders to build. From silverware to coconuts, cracked teacups to fallen tree limbs, you’ll find that a lot of natural or recycled pieces that you already have can be utilized to make sturdy, attractive, useful bird feeders....

Add color and fun to your keys with DIY crafts like this step by step tutorial on how to recycle gift cards into unique keychains! Do you remember our post on 33 ways to recycle gift cards, credit cards, and other plastic cards? The post inspired me to recycle my own gift cards that I received as Christmas gifts. My car keys were looking super boring and bare, so I decided to turn my gift cards (and a few rewards cards) into cool keychains!...

Who says you can’t be comfy and look cute at the same time? These cozy, skinny sweatpants are my kinds of DIY fashion tutorial! I wrote about the skinny sweatpants tutorial from Cotton and Curls over at our sister site, Feelgood Style, and I thought I’d be remiss if I didn’t share it with you guys, too! It’s kind of the perfect project for a lazy Sunday, isn’t it? Alter a frumpy pair of sweatpants, then lounge for the rest of the day in DIY fashion style!...

You’ve now cut your old jeans to make a sexy upcycled mini skirt, craft supply organizer or I-pod case– what do you do with all those…well, leg scraps laying around? In a few simple and experimental steps you can create this super eco craft hat has double the Earth-loving power: an upcycled denim BYOB (bring your own bag) tote! Not only is a DIY market bag a great way to reuse your old jeans but this crafty shopper will help stop the plastic bag litter that is poisoning ground water and soil....

Without getting too mathy, because I know that scares some of y’all, polyominoes are shapes that you can draw on a piece of graph paper using the same number of squares. You know dominoes, right? Those are polyominoes made of two units. Tetrominoes are made of four units. When you play Tetris, you’re playing with tetrominoes! Pentominoes, pieces made from five units, are my personal favorite. There are infinite really interesting math problems–many of which have never been completely solved!...

As news about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues to darken, citizen clean up efforts are on the move. Founded in 1998, Matter of Trust has been collecting and making hair mats and booms to help in oil spill clean up. Their method is simple genius; donated hair is collected, stuffed into hose and used to soak up spills. Why hair? Hair easily collects oil and is really good at it....

Little kids who can’t yet play a full-on game can have fun simply matching the tiles. Slightly older kids can play a simplified game with just six or nine tiles. More tiles support more sophisticated game play or multiple players. But playing alone is fun, too! Your favorite kid may even already own a few iterations of Memory. This stitched scrap fabric and felt version, however, is special. Using fabric prints requires a kid to develop a different type of pattern recognition than matching identical images does, because two cut pieces of print fabric will rarely be identical....

Fitzgerald prints on all natural fabrics, like hemp/organic cotton blends and uses water-based, eco-friendly inks on all of her hand-printed fabrics. The Melbourne, Australia designer says being kind to the planet is important to her and to her business because: I love that she not only uses Earth friendly processes but creates products that help folks reduce their waste, too! These mod printed tea towels are a great example:...

(Yes, I ate at McDonalds! I get one milkshake there about every four years! Yes, I know it’s wrong! I was having a really bad day! I’m sorry!) UniqEco is just one of the companies making crafts out of recycled flip flops, but I heart them the most. The company was started in response to an ecological nightmare – discarded flip flops washing up on Kenyan beaches in vast numbers....

I LOVE fan-made arts and crafts, as you well know if you’ve read this blog for more than, like, a second. Was it the Tolkien book cover skirt that I made my kid that tipped you off? Or the time that I wallpapered my hallway in comic books? Or the way that I will not stop telling you, often mid-tutorial, that even J.K. Rowling, herself, said that Harry and Hermione were meant to be together?...

We love recycled felt around here, but what is a gal to do with those leftover scraps after the big project is done? If you have felt scraps in a range of sizes, you can whip up this simple, sweet peacock fascinator! Peacock feathers are mega hip right now, but for vegan crafters, the real deal is off limits. Luckily, with some eco-fi felt and a little bit of crafty know-how, you can whip up a cruelty-free fascinator that’s just as lovely....

Man, I love crafting with recycled felt! It’s colorful, versatile, and best of all every piece of recycled felt helps keep plastic bottles out of the landfill. How could you not love the stuff, right? One of my very best friends is having a baby in May, and last weekend we threw her a baby shower. Of course, we wanted to make things extra fancy with festive decorations, so a couple of us party planners got together for a crafternoon, where we schemed up the party layout and made some decorations....

When you’re sewing a T-shirt, adding a hood is one of the easier modifications to the pattern that you can make. It’s a modification that also looks a lot harder to do than it is, so get ready to impress all of your friends with your mad sewing skills! To make a hooded T-shirt, you will need: a good T-shirt pattern. I’m using the Oliver + S School Bus T-shirt pattern, which you can read my review of here....

I mean, it WAS the 1970s, the heyday of string art. But whereas the 1970s craze was all about making a string art owl from a kit (which we had), or a string art sailing ship, also from a kit (which we had), you can now do quite a bit better. A lot of the imagination that you can bring to string art now comes from how simple technology is to use....

Cardboard record album covers are perfect for this project–they’re a little sturdier than your regular dime a dozen cardstock folders (which is a good thing!), but still light and easy to carry, and their prominent graphics both recall the look of your favorite themed folders and are unique to your own old-school interests. Seriously, where else on the planet am I going to find a Simon and Garfunkel folder for myself?...

We recently shared an article on extreme seed bombs that you fire out of a shotgun. A couple of folks have asked about how to make seed bombs with a little bit less firepower, and it reminded me about the article below that I wrote back in 2008 for Ecolocalizer. It’s a simple seed bomb recipe, no shotgun shells required. How to Make Seed Bombs selected from Ecolocalizer File this under genius!...

Kids love personalized stuff. You know this for a fact if you’ve ever gone into a gift shop with a kid and watched her break her heart fruitlessly searching for a key chain with her name on it. You ESPECIALLY know this for a fact if you have more than one kid and you like to give them matching stuff; they will fight to the death over which completely identical beach towel, or pillow pet, or sandwich is whose....

I sew a lot of little drawstring bags, dozens at a time for my etsy shop, one or two every time a new mismatched set of chess pieces or Bella Sera trading cards presents itself as a storage problem, a couple every weekend, it seems, to package the gifts for the endless parade of children’s birthday parties that my daughters attend. When I sew a lot of something, and often, I’m always trying to refine my methods....

All birds are welcome in my garden. I feed them. I give them water. I let them taunt my cats who eyeball them through the bay window. The only issue I have with my feathered friends is that they refuse to share the strawberries I grow in my garden. Year after year, I watch my beautiful red fruits get gobbled up – leaving me jealous and a little peeved. This year, I’ve got a plan....

Let them at it! There are tons of easy, fun sewing projects that kids can do almost completely independently, projects that will result in cute, useful, genuinely satisfying results. And while your kids are happily sewing, they’re teaching themselves some very useful life skills, not the least of which is how to privilege the DIY mindset over mindless consumerism. And if they keep it up, in a few more years they’ll be able to sew ANYTHING!...