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Ever wanted to make your own beauty supplies but wasn’t sure how to start? A couple of my favorite crafters are launching a line of DIY beauty craft kits, but they need your help to get started! Karen Lee of Eco Karen and Mary Kearns of Herban Lifestyle are teaming up to launch Herban Crafts, a line of craft kits to help folks make their own eco-friendly beauty supplies. Not only are the kits eco-friendly, but they want to “do well by doing good,” and the company will help unemployed women by training them and teaching them job skills as they help assemble the kits....

DIY Serving Tray Makeover Materials An old serving tray that needs some love. I find these constantly at thrift stores or garage sales. Recycled paper. I used the same sheet music that I used for my eco-friendly wreath for fall. School glue. If you can, use eco-glue. A small paintbrush A box cutter or exacto knife Polyurethane spray How To Do It: Clean your tray. Mix your school glue with a little bit of water....

Amenity’s fabric designs are based on nature, with names like “river” and “cove.” Don’t think about cute little leaf prints, though, except in their nursery collection. As you can see from the pillows above, made up in their “trail” fabric, we’re talking about some seriously bold and funky design. Amenity was founded by longtime friends Nicole Chiala and Kristina de Corpo in 2004. Their website describes the evolution of the Amenity collection: The fabrics are all 54″ wide, with a 20″ repeat, and they retail for $65 per yard....

Yes, more Aussies. At this point, I am pricing a move to Australia because it’s obvious they get all the good fabric and it’s just more efficient if I live closer to it. If you’re reading this and you’re a fabric designer in the U.S. who prints on organic cotton or hemp or something else eco-friendly, would you please let me know about yourself ASAP? I really don’t want to collect enough cardboard boxes to pack even just the baby’s stuff, and you could save me a lot of trouble....

Is awesome. Felted wool has all the benefits of wool for crafting–it’s sturdy, can be shaped, holds a dimensional structure well, is durable, and has an appealing texture–and has the eco-friendly attributes of being natural and second-hand. As part of my green crafting manifesto, I do not buy new things, nor do I intentionally buy products exploitative of the world’s creatures (please, don’t ask me about glue!), and yet when I buy a wool sweater from the Goodwill Outlet Store, I don’t have to worry about whether or not the wool has an organic certification, or about the high price of organic wool....

St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner. If you’ve got party plans in the works, why not spice things up with a little bit of DIY action? By focusing on using eco-friendly materials, you can make this the greenest St. Patty’s Day party ever. 1. St. Patrick’s Day Banner Whip yourself up some pretty, St. Patrick’s Day bunting with our fabric scrap banner tutorial. Just choose fabric in green, white, black, and a little bit of yellow....

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I think that giant boxes are one of the most important things for a kid to have as a plaything. Kids love super tiny toys, and they love super BIG toys, especially ones as versatile as a cardboard box. Consider a giant box as an entire environment that the kid herself can manipulate–how often does a kid really get to do that? She can move it herself, paint it inside and out, cut it with a box knife, tape and glue things to it, and then she can play in it for as long as she wants....

We all get misled or confused sometimes when we’re buying craft supplies. When that happens, it’s easy to give in to green guilt and kick yourself. This is the story of the time that I tried to buy some Krylon H2O to review and accidentally bought plain old stinky spray paint. Why am I telling this story? Because this is not the first time something like this has happened to me....

If you knit or crochet or even sew, you’ve likely discovered, by now, how satisfying it is to create a warm hat. Compared to a dress or a sweater, a hat is a quick project, but there are so many different patterns and styles, and so many ways to make it beautiful, that it’s hard to get bored. Your friends and family have enough hats by now. Make your next one for Halos of Hope, an organization that puts handmade hats on the heads of cancer patients....

Knitters are always on the lookout for the next pattern. And, of course, once you’ve found the perfect pattern, you’ve got to choose the perfect yarn. Also, do you have the correct knitting needles? Know all the techniques that the pattern requires? Have your “Made by Me” label ready to go? And all that’s before you can even cast on your first stitch! That’s why knitting kits are so fun to receive as gifts....

I have so many pieces of scrap fabric from old sewing projects in lots of different colors, on top of old t-shirts that are too warn for other uses. These end up being perfect for this rug. All you need are a large assortment of scrap fabrics, which you could separate by color, pattern, or fabric type. From there you just need a large crochet hook, a ruler, and some scissors....

All of our Christmas decorations are put away, but this stack of Christmas cards stayed on our counter. I always feel guilty about throwing them away–especially the personal, handwritten ones. However, with New Years Eve in mind, I came up with a way to reuse those old Christmas cards! Many New Years Eve parties have banners and lots of fun decorations, but are far from eco-friendly! What is the solution?...

What You Will Need: A large stick Low VOC spray paint Painter’s tape Sand paper How To Do It: Find your stick. I live in a wooded area, so large sticks are easy to find. The boys loved exploring to find the “perfect” stick. Clean your stick and remove any of the bark if you’d like. They removed the bark from the top so it would be smooth to hold....

The only thing about Mason jars is that..well…they look all the same. Sure, they’re lovely enough, but so uniform! Fortunately, with a little fabric, some thread, and a bit of upcycled cardboard, you can package your Mason jar gifts for the holidays, personalizing them by gift or recipient or just making them look nicely festive. First, fill up your Mason jar in a way that looks pretty. Admittedly, there’s not a lot of flair in my homemade lavender and rosemary laundry soap (I know, I know–it doesn’t sound like such a super gift, but I swear that the recipient is going to love it!...

Coffee staining is an easy way to give an antique look to paper. Here’s how to antique paper with a simple coffee staining technique. Using coffee staining, you can give pristine white paper a browned, unevenly-colored aged appearance and parchment-like texture–just the effect that I wanted to give on my daughter’s pirate birthday party invitations! Here’s how to antique paper with plain old coffee: To coffee stain paper, you will need:...

Have a dowel? Have a ribbon? You can make a ribbon wand! Kids love these sweet, floaty wands made for dancing and leaping and running. You’ll mostly find them in the hands of the preschool set, but my eleven-year-old rediscovered the ribbon wand during a recent trip to a local children’s museum, and rather than buy her the lovely but expensive one in the museum gift shop, I promised her that I’d help her make one of her own when we got home....

Sewing pants for a kid? Save yourself some trouble in the long run, and just add knee patches from the get-go. Here’s how to make patches that are built in! If you’re using a pattern with separate pattern pieces for the front and back of the pants leg, then adding the knee patches as you sew will barely take any time–certainly WAY less time than it would take to mend the knees and add the knee patches later!...

Kelly has written about Ex Libris journals and Night Owl Paper Good journals, and Tara tipped us off about her friend Nicole’s recycled wallpaper journals from Freshly Blended Press. I took a spin through Etsy to see what other upcycled, recycled, and handmade journals I could discover… Holy cow, it’s insane over there! I had to narrow it down to journals that use recycled, found, or scrap paper inside as well as recycled material in the covers, because otherwise my brain was overloading....

Except that LEGOs do have a couple of qualities that make them very intriguing to someone interested in eco-friendly crafting: Not every LEGO project is a sustainable one–that LEGO TIE fighter set that you bought just to build and look at isn’t serving a purpose beyond helping you get your nerd on–but there are a few specific categories of LEGO projects that do help you avoid further consumption and disposal of new goods....