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The awesome folks at Hemptique sent me some of their sustainable hemp products to craft with, and they’re generously offering up a prize pack to one Crafting a Green World reader! David from Hemptique and I had a great conversation about sustainable crafting and which products you guys would be most excited about. What we settled on was a rainbow selection of their beautiful cording, including some metallic cording! Who says that eco-crafting is all about earth tones?...

One book page or other recycled paper A permanent marker Scissors School glue. If you can, use eco-glue! A small paintbrush A damp cloth How To Do It: Clean your jar. On your book page, draw a dog bone with your permanent marker. Inside the dog bone, write “treats.” You could also write your dog’s name. Using the same method that I used with my DIY coffee canisters, I mixed glue and a little bit of water....

Want to bring more nature into your art? Crayon, colored pencil, and marker holders are easy to make from reclaimed fallen branches. They organize your art supplies, make them visible while you work, and, if you’re creating with kids, display a manageable (and easy to clean up!) number of utensils that the kiddos can access independently. Here’s how to make one for yourself: Saw up a fallen tree branch. Look for a wide branch to display a number of utensils, or a narrow one to hold just one or two special graphite pencils....

Need a crafty green way to upcycle an old wool sweater? Here’s how to make a wool sweater Mason jar cozy, to help keep your hot drinks hot and your cold drinks cold and leave your precious hand the perfect hand temperature while you drink. Felt a wool sweater. Here’s how to felt a wool sweater in washing machine. To this original tutorial, I’d add that some wool sweaters can give off a LOT of fibers as they felt, so these days I do a quick clean-out of my washing machine outlet screen-thingy after I felt a load of wool sweaters....

I found an amazing ceiling medallion for 50 cents at the thrift store at the beginning of the week and I knew I could turn it into something cool. Then, my uncle gave me some extra cork board he had from a project of his own and my grandma gave me tons of beads. I wanted to make an inspiration board of some sort for this week’s project, so I put all of the items together!...

Natural materials make fabulous art supplies. Even when it’s raining outside, you can make good use of the weather by creating a watercolor painting project in which the rain is the most important ingredient. Here’s how: For this project, you need watercolor pencils (we use Prismacolor) and watercolor paper, or any other paper with a rough texture. Watercolor pencils are a professional-quality supply (with a professional-quality price tag), but you can purchase them in small sets, and for adults or kiddos who love making art, they’re lots of fun....

Don’t let a busted pocket mean the end for your favorite garment. You can repair instead of replacing with one simple stitch! It happens to all of us sometimes, right? We load down our pockets each day, and after a while, the poor things just can’t take it anymore! Don’t fret, though! That pesky pocket doesn’t have to mean the death of your favorite skirt, pants, or hoodie. Armed with a simple whip stitch, you can re-attach your pocket lickety split....

Are they really THAT easy to make? (They are.) Do they really make your house smell like honey? (They do!) Will you really become addicted to making them? (Yes, you most assuredly will.) Not only is making rolled beeswax candles one of my favorite craft projects, but it’s also one of my six-year-old daughter’s favorite craft projects, as well. So read on, because we’re both going to show you exactly how to make rolled beeswax candles for yourself, and trust me, if the six-year-old can do it, then so can you....

Even if you regularly sew lovely dresses, it can be easy to forget that you must also often sew the correct foundation garments for those dresses. A child’s poofy skirt, for instance, for all its flounces and ruffles, simply will not poof properly unless she is also wearing a full petticoat underneath it. Fortunately, just as you can refashion formal dresses into a new garment, you can also often find the material for the perfect petticoat hiding under one of those same Prom dresses that you’re already planning to rip up and re-sew....

My kids just harvested the pumpkin plants that they’ve been nurturing all spring and summer. It was quite an exciting achievement for them, and even more so because they’ve actually been following this process for almost a full year now. Almost a full year ago, they first picked out some organically-grown, heirloom pumpkins, and these newly harvested pumpkins came directly out of the body of those. It was a fascinating process, a pretty easy way to grow pumpkins, and a great way for a kid to follow the life cycle of a plant throughout its entire lifespan....

By Jennifer Tuohy In our Southern summer garden, we are blessed by an abundance of the most beautiful of birds: the cardinal. My children love spotting the red and tawny birds foraging in our yard, and I’ve been wondering for some time how best to help them feed. They don’t seem that keen on my hanging bird feeders—the perches are too small, the birds too big. Being natural ground feeders, cardinals prefer flat surfaces, but put a flat surface full of bird seed in our garden and the squirrels will consume it in moments....

My kids and I have done this craft before with lots of little treasures, but on this particular occasion, we are going to make a treasure in a bottle charm or two out of some small fossilized shark teeth that we collected ourselves. We love fossils, and we love sharks, AND we love things that we do ourselves, so there’s no way that we weren’t going to show these beauties off!...

I hope that you are buying LOTS of Girl Scout cookies right now! Unless your kids are selling Girl Scout cookies… if so, I hope that you are selling LOTS of Girl Scout cookies right now! One thing that Girl Scout cookies come with, however, is packaging. It’s distinctive, and it’s adorable, and it has pictures of your favorite cookies on it, but it’s packaging nonetheless, sigh. Fortunately, that distinctive, adorable, picture-of-your-favorite-cookie business is an advantage that can allow you to divert a lot of that packaging out of the waste stream....

There is general consensus within the DIY community that what we do has a uniquely positive effect on the world. Our universal philosophy suggests that embracing methods to handmake your own belongings is fulfilling and thought provoking. Yet, quiet debate continues as to the long-term advantages of buying handmade. Is it a truly effective way to bypass corporate interests and consumerism? Ironically, the modern craft movement relies on technology only made possible by mass production....

I gather almost all of my fabric from thrift stores, yard sales, recycling centers, and the occasional dumpster, and its condition generally ranges from very well-loved to near-pristine with the odd red wine or tomato sauce stain. A lot of vintage fabrics can be restored, but some stains, or fading, or damage from long-term folding, can’t be restored to the same color or strength of the the original fabric. And that’s an additional challenge to the fun of working with thrifted or vintage fabrics....

Fortunately, there are just as many easy quilt patterns out there in the world as there are complicated ones. Below, check out my list of my absolute favorite easy quilts to sew. Whether you’re a beginning sewist longing to make something cool, or you’re in a time crunch and want to get something sewn quickly, or you just want to enjoy yourself and not fuss too much over patterns, there’s something on this list for you!...

But if the plastic that goes into those items comes from plastic that’s been recovered for recycling, that’s not a bad thing – right? Sure: obviously, there’s a demand for those tchotchkes, knick-knacks, and trinkets, so if we’re going to 3D print these things, why not do it from waste plastic? We’ve seen a number of efforts along these lines already; the latest effort comes from Brooklyn-based design firm 3D Brooklyn....

On Wednesday, Senator Lugar wrote me back. Here is his reply: Dear Ms. Finn, Thank you for sharing with me your concerns about legislation that was recently enacted to modernize the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). I appreciate knowing of the difficulties individuals such as yourself and other small toymakers expect to face in complying with this new law. While I supported efforts to make this legislation more responsive to the needs of small business during Senate consideration of this legislation, I supported final passage of the CPSC Reform Act in order to protect our families from harmful products....

If you sew, you know that you’ve had that moment, plenty of times, when you look at a pattern and think, “If only it had a collar like the one that I saw the other day! If only these cuffs looked just like the cuffs on this other, completely different pattern!” Altering a pattern is a learned skill, and even if you’re new to sewing, you can absolutely learn this skill....

By those standards, the Ojo de Dios is the perfect summer camp craft. It’s interesting, with a history that dates back far before the Spanish colonizers gave it its name, back at least to the Huichol Indians and other native peoples. The materials are easily found–you can make a beautiful Ojo de Dios from just a couple of sticks and whatever yarn you have on hand. And although you can create wonderful, elaborate designs, at its simplest the Ojo de Dios practically creates itself–just wrap and turn, wrap and turn, and the Eye of God will reveal itself to you....