It’s St. Patrick’s Day. You’ve got to pull off a craft…ASAP. And all you have are leftover heart-shaped thingies laying around from Valentine’s Day. Gulp! Are you doomed? Should you just skip over the clover and go straight for Easter crafts? Heck NO! As a friend of Mother Nature, you can’t let a holiday where GREEN is so highly celebrated just slip by. So grab those empty Valentine containers and let’s DIY a shamrock craft....
Raleigh Briggs’ Make Your Place: Affordable, Sustainable Nesting Skills is a fully hand-drawn book from Microcosm Publishing that’s packed with projects for making all sorts of supplies for the home. According to the publisher: The 128-page book is a total steal at just $5! If you’re feeling splurgy, you can pick up Briggs’ other DIY zines, also from Microcosm: Nontoxic House Cleaners and Herbal First Aid for another dollar apiece!...
Whether you’ve made your jar candle or bought it, there will always be at least a little wax left over at the bottom after the wick has run its course. Store-bought candles, which often have inferior and/or improperly sized wicks, are especially prone to this. I often have a LOT of wax left inside a spent store-bought candle! It’s tempting to simply toss that mostly empty glass candle, but where?...
Dumpster-diving one fine Sunday afternoon, my girls and I found an awesome Arthur and Friends alphabet puzzle. Since it was free (coming from the dumpster and all), I let the girls grab it, anticipating the inevitable. It’s a puzzle. Of COURSE it had a missing piece. To stave off the small child devastation, I took a hard look at the puzzle, complete but for that one blank spot, and experienced a burst of inspiration....
What is upcycling? If you’re a regular reader here, you’re probably an upcycling champ, but just in case the term is new for anyone, upcycling is when you take an item that was headed for the landfill and transform it into something useful again. So, if you turn a busted boot into a planter, that’s upcycling. If you buy a pack of tennis balls and use them for something besides tennis, that’s creative, but it isn’t upcycling....
My kid’s ballet program generally isn’t too outrageous when it comes to recital costumes. I know of other programs in our town that require two or more elaborate, brand-new costumes per recital, generally along the lines of rainbow-colored flapper outfits, or leotards with butt ruffles, that you’re never going to get your kid to wear again, because no kid really wants to be a flapper for Halloween. I will tell you another time about my thoughts on the privilege of wealth that lets someone assume that just because you’re sending your kid to dance class, you can blow a bunch of money on an elaborate dance recital costume that your kid will wear once....
My local quilt guild takes donations of kid-friendly and soldier-friendly fabrics for various community service projects, but what if you don’t have a guild nearby? And more importantly, is there anything I can do to find a new life for the perfectly good yarn that I often see abandoned in thrift stores and at garage sales? Here are five organizations that accept donations of craft supplies. Feel free to add more in the comments....
Are you like me in that you’ve seen cashmere yarn in the store, balked at the price tag and thought to yourself “I’ll never try that.”? Well I’m here to give a little prodding to say that its ok to splurge. It’s time to give cashmere a chance. Yes it is expensive but the fiber itself; my god is it soft! Cashmere fiber comes from a specific type of goat, bred to produce soft downy hairs....
Sea Silk yarn is one such yarn that rocks my socks off. This yarn has been around a while, but is making its way around again. It is a blend of Sea Cell and cotton, silk, wool, or a blend of silk and wool. Sea Cell is a plant fiber created from seaweed and tencel or Lyocell. The yarn comes in several blends and can come in a 70-30 blend or an 80-20 blend, with Sea Cell always the lesser number....
Artist Don Simon creates stark worlds that cut to the chase and make thoughtful commentary on human’s impact on animals and their habitat. Via Grist, you can see a flash movie of his work, complete with commentary by the artist. The most striking is Simon’s River series. These pieces show alligators amongst used and worn tires. Simon explains that the alligators are used as a metaphor for transportation and all that it implies....
So yes, it’s definitely a bummer not having my kids around for Easter this year, and do I therefore plan to spend all of Easter day-drinking mimosas and marathoning all the Hunger Games movies? Also yes. However, you know what I DO still have the heart to put out as Easter decorations? All the heirloom-quality Easter crafts that my family has created together over the years! Ephemera is fun, but it’s projects like the beautiful wooden Easter eggs that my children painted when they were small, the little Easter basket and egg stuffies that I sewed them from a vintage quilt, and the wooden bunny and chick figurines that my partner painted that are currently bringing me comfort and filling me with happy Easter memories....
Just because there are so many wonderful nature crafts to do in autumn doesn’t mean that you also can’t raid your recycling bin this season! Here are some of my favorite upcycled fall crafts that you can make right now. 13 Upcycled Fall Crafts 1. autumn tree on a shirt. A painting and button-embellishing project is my favorite way to hide a persistent stain on a kid’s shirt–it instantly turns the shirt from kind of gross into something that always gets compliments....
Packing lunch can be so toxic! It often seems that harmful products are far easier to buy than eco-friendly ones, whether it’s plastic sandwich baggies that you’re looking at, or vinyl lunch bags, or individually wrapped applesauces. It’s definitely worthwhile to spend the money on a few high-quality packed lunch supplies (my Klean Kanteen is practically an extension of my hand), but you’ll be surprised at how many packed lunch storage solutions you can craft for yourself from eco-friendly supplies, whether they be natural or upcycled:...
Fairy gardens are super sweet and fun to make, but I’ve noticed a disturbing trend lately, as the mainstream has picked up on what once was a completely DIY project: There’s now a lot of STUFF to buy for your fairy garden! At the local nursery where I took my kids to pick out a couple of plants each for their own fairy gardens recently, I had to steer them past a huge section of pre-made fairy garden decorations....
Balsa Wood Christmas Ornaments Balsa wood is so easy to work with because instead of a saw, you can cut it with a craft knife! This tutorial shows you how to cut and assemble some really cute animal; to make them into ornaments; just poke a hole in the top and add twine. Building Blocks The day that you realize that you can start crafting with your kid’s old building blocks is sad–how did they grow up so quickly?...
A painted rock. Of course. The painted rocks that you see on Pinterest or perhaps even find as you walk around your town can be SO beautiful that they might seem impossible for a mere mortal to create. I mean, I have one that I found that has an intricate drawing and a funny message AND a cutesy hashtag. How do you compete with that, when the most sophisticated thing that I, personally, can draw is a cartoon cat?...
It’s time to announce the lucky winner of the Make Your Own Gummies Kit from Glee Gum! Is it you? The lucky number (courtesy of Random.org) is: That means that our winner is: Thanks for playing, everyone!
That’s ok, because while April is a good place to start to weed through the piles of fabric and cubbyholes filled with yarn, it isn’t the only month that stash busting can be front and center of my crafty to-do list. To keep you inspired to keep at your stash, here are four awesome stash busting projects you too can try: 1. Cork Jewelry Flickr user brasspaperclip, had the brilliant idea to take a wine cork and turn it into elegant jewelry....
Queral started using phonebooks when off looking for some wood and happened upon some abandoned phone books. They can be advantageous to use as they are often a free material that can be found in recycle bins and trash piles. Queral carves the famous faces into the phone books and slowly peels away the layers to create a low relief sculptural portrait. While Queral may have been reusing discarded materials for about 14 years, it is still refreshing to see another example of how upcycling is used in art and craft....
The results of this round of crafting include a soup can turned vase and a few can creations that could be wedding worthy with a few accessories added. To create these can crafts I just used black spray paint, glue and satin ribbon. The first can I started with was the regular size food can and I used a hot glue gun to attach the red ribbon. That didn’t work so well....
