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You don’t have to be satisfied with art supplies that are simply “non-toxic.” Art supplies that come directly from nature, with minimal processing, are healthier, more environmentally friendly, and can still be of excellent quality, often allowing you to create effects that it’s difficult to obtain with their artificial counterparts. Textured paint: Although it’s not archival, this nature paint from Teach Preschool gives children a hands-on way to add a natural sensory component to their art....

Which do you prefer: crafting with recycled materials or crafting with natural materials? Either way, there are tons of Thanksgiving crafts out there for you. If anything, Thanksgiving is made for you nature crafters out there. You have all of autumn’s harvest to work with. Things like pumpkins, squashes, gourds, fall leaves, acorns, walnut shells, you name it. While recycling crafters are painstakingly cutting leaves out of cereal boxes to make a door wreath, you’re busy hot gluing on real leaves, and then you’re done!...

Thanks so much to everyone who entered the business cards giveaway from UPrinting. We used a random number generator to choose the winner, and the winner is….. Adrienne who said: Thanks so much to everyone who entered and to the folks at UPrinting for sponsoring this giveaway. I loved reading through all of your comments. Didn’t win? Don’t fret! You can still take advantage of eco-friendly business cards printing by UPrinting....

Got a stash of plastic bags that you can’t bear to toss? Try some of these plastic grocery bag crafts to give them a new life instead! Oh, plastic grocery bags! No matter how I try, you seem to make your way into my life. I’m not always entirely clear where you come from. I bring my own reusable bags to the grocery store and stash purchases at the drug store in my purse rather than taking a plastic bag, but here you are....

The Box Doodle Project even has an online tool, so you can still join in on the fun if you don’t have boxes waiting to be recylced. It gives you all kinds of paint colors and marker sizes. This is a great option if you would rather recycle your boxes than make art with them, but like the idea of recycled art, or if you’ve already sent your boxes off to the recycling facility....

Although Jeffrey Yamaguchi’s 52 Projects, based on his 52 Projects blog, is a little light on the how-to, step-by-step, hands-on tutorial component of your typical crafty book, 52 Projects works through a premise that we have the responsibility to bring meaning to our own lives through our own work, and this is a very green and crafty mindset. If you’re a photographer, and especially if you’re a scrapbooker, 52 Projects will likely offer the most inspiration to you, since the book is extremely weighted towards photography projects....

– Carried babies cry less. – Carried babies can be included matter-of-factly, without fuss, in most of our daily activities. – Carried babies learn about the body’s movements, about human behavior and interactions and about their environments, all from their comfy, safe spot on their parent’s body. While one can certainly buy the native-syle carriers most suited for babywearing, it’s also possible to recreate, with some basic tools and minimal previous sewing experience, most of these best-loved carriers....

In our purview, we talk a lot about closing the loop, or removing items from the waste stream, specific actions that we, personally, can take to avoid the problems of excess stuff and needless trash. The techy, geeky part of me, however, has long also been interested in how technology can help us out with this–there are only so many scrap fabric patchwork quilts that one human can make in her lifetime, you know?...

If you’re a gardener, then chances are you’re probably already pretty crafty. You could buy pots the right size to start any plants or seedlings from any gardening center, but none of them, even the ones made from natural or recycled materials, are as good as simply bypassing the consumer market altogether and making your own DIY pots. Whether you’ve got tiny seedlings or giant plants to pot, you can put them in the DIY pots pots below....

So we know that you can recycled old sweaters into yarn, but repurposed sweaters can be valuable for seamstresses, too! Wenona talked just last week about 10 crafty ways to repurpose old sweaters, and it got me thinking about what a useful material this is! Whether you take the garment apart and make it into something completely new or use your crafty skills to reshape and rework something old and frumpy into a cute, recycled garment, you’re helping to keep all of that fiber out of the landfill!...

If you’re a thrift store junkie like me, surely you’ve spent some time ogling the lovely old necktie selection at your local Goodwill. They can feature patterns from the classy to the hilarious, and they all have beautiful textures to work with. Here are some project ideas that make use of those lovely vintage neckties. Whether you combine them with other fabrics, like in the photo above, or stitch them together in a quilt formation, neckties make for lovely purses....

One of the most heartbreaking examples of textile dyes’ impact on the environment is the denim industry around China’s Pearl River. This video about the industry is extremely eye-opening: Finding Eco Alternatives And denim is just one example. Conventional dyes are loaded with harsh chemicals, just like the ones used to turn denim navy blue. Whether those dyes end up polluting the water or not, some of those chemicals remain on the finished fabric....

The number of manufacturers carrying eco-friendly labels and hangtags is slowly increasing. When I first ordered labels for Tiny Décor, one of the few places offering eco-friendly options was BCI Labels and they came highly recommended. I chose to order embroidered hemp labels. After patiently waiting the qouted 2-3 weeks I received an e-mail stating there had been an error with my labels. They were unable to produce the labels in the ordered 1″ by 2″ size and instead made them 2″ by 4″....

I have two little kids, though, and a loving partner. There’s no WAY I’m giving up the glory of Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, and heck, I’ll do my part on Father’s Day, too. And it is nice to have a sanctioned event handy to remind us to honor and celebrate our loved ones, to demonstrate our gratitude and appreciation of them. Especially when we’re honoring mothers. As in me....

First, of course, we’ll use the shells in our homeschool–cleaning, sorting, identifying, labeling, and displaying them. We’ve got big plans for studying the life cycle and anatomy of the bivalve, and the ocean biome in general, and so you can’t have too many shells for that! In my house, however, homeschooling only just barely wins out over crafting in terms of priorities, and so you can bet that at least half of our seashells are going to end up sacrificed to the greater good that is the handmade project....

You probably already know that with so many sustainable, reusable menstrual supplies out there, there’s no reason to use disposable ANYTHING during your period. But even though there are a lot of great manufacturers of reusable menstrual supplies out there, if you’re feeling crafty, there’s no reason why you couldn’t make nearly everything that you need all by yourself. When you DIY, you can make your stuff extra comfy, extra cute, of just the right absorbency, and even completely from stash, if you’re super-resourceful....

Egg cartons are an ideal place to start your spring seeds. The small Jiffy peat pellets fit perfectly into the egg holder areas. Just place them inside and water them and poof instant garden soil! Or if you prefer, you can fill each little egg cup with a small scoop of organic soil. Once the pellets are fluffy or the soil is packed in you can place the seeds inside and water....

Here’s what I found: Country Living Magazine’s website has some really cute and clever ways to reuse and repurpose items you have lying around the house. One of my favorites is the old jewelry they transform into magnets. Another is how they turned old button up shirts into pillows. Very stylish. A storage solution craft they show is the jelly jar shelf– perfect for your craft or sewing room. My husband actually uses this idea in his workshop....

You totally can! It turns out that chocolate is a pretty do-able DIY project, and easy to customize with your own mix-ins and flavor combinations. Never had a peanut butter/sesame seed/dried cranberry chocolate bar? Well, now’s the time to make that happen. Being DIY chocolate novices (and one-half of us being under the age of 10), my family made our own chocolate using Glee Gum’s Make Your own Chocolate Kit, given to us by Glee Gum....

After a little too much time on Pinterest this past weekend, the wife and I decided to try our hands at making a few DIY gift candles for some of our friends and family. I can’t say the project was a complete success (more on that in a minute), but we were able to put a bunch of our saved-up mason and jam jars to good use and ended up with more than a dozen cute gift candles....