And being on the receiving end of a treasured mix tape, you knew that your love would last forever. That is until he started to make a tape for that girl in second period math class. Ah young, fickle love. Taking cassettes to the next level, these crafters have taken old tapes and remade them, or remixed them, into some pretty nifty items: Over at Craftster, freepepper has created this wonderful wallet (pictured) out of a cassette tape....
What are they? What about you, what goals do you have? What new skills would you like to learn? What kinds of tutorials would you like to see here at Crafting a Green World to help you with your 2011 craft goals and resolutions?
Enlarging an existing pattern by a fraction of an inch is a pretty common thing to have to do. Sometimes a pattern won’t have the seam allowance that you want, but usually you need to do it when you’re copying an existing article of clothing. For instance, to make my daughter’s Junior Ranger vest, above when it was still a WIP, I copied her Girl Scout vest. That gave me the footprint of the completed vest, sure, but I still needed to add the seam allowances....
A reader recently wrote in looking for projects to reuse prescription pill bottles. She says she’s used larger ones for storing things like charms and buttons but is stumped about what to do with the smaller sized pill bottles. One word of caution: if you have leftover pills, you don’t want to just dump them in the toilet or down the drain. Pharmaceuticals, especially hormones, steroids, and antibiotics, don’t break down in the sewage system....
1. Pillowcase Apron Betz White shows how to turn a reclaimed pillowcase and a couple of yards of ribbon into a 10 minute apron! How perfect would that be for holding craft supplies or as a place to stash cash, pen, and other necessities when you’re vending at spring markets? 2. Pillowcase Laundry Bag This is a fun, quick project! Really, I think this bag is cute enough to function as more than just a laundry bag....
Turn an old coffee container into a DIY play blender for your kid’s play kitchen. Then kick back, and watch the pretend play unfold! My two-year-old’s relationship with blenders is…complicated. He loves smoothies and “banana swirl,” bit the loud noise from my Vitamix freaks him out. He has to actually leave the kitchen before I turn the blender on most of the time. I’ve been trying to help him through his fear of blenders (frappophobia?...
Kool-Aid Dyed Popsicle Stick Bracelets Supplies Popsicle sticks – Not the kind you buy from the craft store. We need the ones you’ve been saving all summer. You know, the ones with cherry stain on the end. Don’t worry, we’re going to fix that! Kool-Aid packet – Cherry or Strawberry work nicely. But use whatever flavor you can find. Hot water Tall glass Juice glass You’ve probably seen popsicle stick bracelets all over Pinterest and YouTube....
Congratulations to Heatheranne99 who is the winner of a copy of ReSew! Special thanks to Jenny the author for sharing this wonderful book with us and for the great tutorial on felt baskets! Thank you to everyone who entered. Heatheranne99, we’ll be contacting you shortly about your winning!
I am super passionate about reusing because I love taking one person’s “trash” and turning it into treasure! So many people take the easy way out and go to big box stores to buy items they could easily find at garage sales and thrift stores. Buying second hand reduces landfill waste and helps you skip the impact of buying new! To help inform and inspire you, I put together the top 5 items that I look for when I go to garage sales and thrift stores:...
Whether it’s the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Gulf, or a cape, we could all four of us manage to lounge and frolic and just plain goof off at the beach every second of our trip. Forget historic sites of interest or fine art museums or nearby cultural treasures- we’ll be right here on the sand, thank you very much. Of course, another thing that I love about the beach is the access to natural materials to craft with that I just don’t find at home....
Remember how I make my own sea glass in my kid’s rock tumbler? One of the projects that I’ve been wanting to use that sea glass for is pull cords, on account of the ceilings in my house are high and I am short. I know several techniques for mounting objects to use as pendants, mostly involving wire-wrapping or drilling through the object, but none seemed quite right for a pull cord, which needs to withstand the force of someone tugging on it several times a day....
Don’t waste your money at big box furniture stores! This shabby chic shelf makeover will save you money and is a great way to repurpose shelves you already own (or find at thrift stores and garage sales)! I create DIY furniture projects for my home and for my craft and furniture booth, so I’m pretty obsessed with giving furniture new life! When I first moved out on my own, finding furniture at thrift stores and garage sales was the only way I could afford to fully furnish my home....
I know that we love to turn our old jeans into quilts and skirts and potholders and tote bags, but the organization Sole Hope has an even better use for them: They save kids’ lives. This was news to me, but in Uganda, where kids walk barefoot, there apparently also lives a horrible parasite, the jigger. This parasite lays eggs in kids’ feet, giving the bottoms of their feet open sores and putting them at risk for all kinds of infections and debilitations....
Is your kid begging for a space hog dollhouse? If so, then you are about to be a hero! Check out this upcycled dollhouse from drawers, via Semiproper. The author constructed the dollhouse seen above from two nightstand drawers, and she even has a tute to walk you through making your own dollhouse from your own two matching drawers. My favorite part is the scrapbook paper embellishments that mimic cut-out features in store-bought dollhouses; what kid wouldn’t be THRILLED to help pick out the colors and patterns for every single feature in his or her dollhouse?...
And then, my friends, I bought some big books of outdated upholstery fabric samples at my local thrift shop (its name, I swear to you, is Thrift Shop), and I have just been crafting the crap out of that stuff! Birthday crowns, crayon rolls, scrapbooking embellishments, wall art, bookmarks–upholstery samples are the perfect size for any of these small projects, their paper backing renders them stiff and sturdy and less prone to fraying, their gorgeous patterns and textures give impact and personality to small-scale creations, and they’re sold in books of complementary fabrics and colors, allowing you to make a huge number of mitchy-matchy items....
Whether you make cards, scrapbook or just need some scrap paper for your craft needs they have a great selection of high quality, eco-friendly handmade paper made from recycled paper. The Twisted Limb Paperworks Mission: I love companies with purpose and Twisted Limb is one of those companies. They’ve made quite a splash in the eco-invitation and announcement circle supplying beautiful invitations, announcements, save the date cards and more for weddings and other events....
Scrunchies are one of my favorite stashbuster projects. Like the other projects that I mentioned, scrunchies are very forgiving, so you can fudge fabric dimensions as needed to fit your scraps. Scrunchies look cute in a wide variety of patterns and prints, from the classic to the novelty. And, for those of us with long hair, scrunchies are EMINENTLY useful! Toss a couple in every bag you own (bonus points if you store them inside a zippered pouch!...
Genevieve over at SEWphisticate has an awesome tutorial on turning plastic take out containers or cups into shrinky dinks! It turns out that #6 plastic, a type that many cities do not recycle, will shrink beautifully in the oven! For her first attempts, she cut the plastic into shapes and punched holes to make shrunken pendants. She said these shapes turned out pretty distorted. After some experimentation and fine-tuning, she came up with a method for turning out lovely plastic rings, like the ones above!...
I know that we’ve covered hemp yarn before from Lanaknits and Autumn talked to us about macrame , but it was Leslie’s quest to try natural dye that got me to take a second look at Aurora Silk’s Hemp Yarn. At first look this yarn from Aurora brings to mind all the stereotypes that Skye talked about when she profiled hemp fabrics. But no it is Not Marijuana. Hemp yarn is derived from the growth of industrial hemp, a different species of it’s more famous cousin....
As previously mentioned here on Yearn Worthy Yarns, Fox Fiber offers naturally colored organic cotton yarns. Well there is also another option for naturally colored cotton yarn and that is Pakucho. Using techniques and know how passed down from generation to generation, in Peru, Pakucho grows six different and natural colored cotton. No chemicals, dyes or other synthetic processes are used in the growth, production or spinning of these fibers....
