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November 18, 2009

Typewriter Key Jewelry

Being a self-proclaimed word nerd, of course I would love the awesome jewelry made by the folks at The Weekend Store. They offer rings, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and cuff links made using the the thin flat serif keys of Smith Corona typewriters rescued from the junkyard. Now that's character!

November 16, 2009

Sleepy Salvator Sock Monkey

The world needs more sock monkeys. There. I said it. There's much to be said about taking something as old and inanimate as a sock and breathing life into it in the crafting process. Slovenia-based Cardboard Castle definitely has a knack for just that. Pictured above is Salvator, one of the crew of "models of sustainability" made from recycled materials. Don't you just want to hug him? Pictured below are Zora, Handsome Stan, and Anabel.

November 15, 2009

Toilet Paper Tube Yule Log

Lori at Pretty Little Things shows you how to make a yule log from a toilet paper tube and a couple of egg carton cups. It's a great way to package stocking stuffers!

November 2, 2009

Recycled Paper Tree

Learn how to make this recycled paper tree using old magazines, packaging, and old phone book pages by Jodi from the creative JAR. This tutorial was created by Jodi for elementary students on Lockeland Spring. See these recycled paper trees being made by kids all over the world. Below is Ms. Hahnel's class in Australia.

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How-To: Newspaper Dress

Instructables user prixprix went as The Old Gray Lady (a nickname for the New York Times) for Halloween this year. In her tutorial, she shows us how to pleat and sew newspaper by machine to make this newspaper dress.

October 30, 2009

Sculptures from Packaging

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Kazuma Takahashi made these little sculptures out of common packaging materials. [via BoingBoing]

October 29, 2009

100% Reuse: Industrial Pallet Sectional Couch for Outdoors

Palletcouch Main

100% Reuse: Industrial Pallet Sectional Couch for Outdoors
By Wendy Tremayne

With more people recognizing the value of scrap materials it can be hard to find great stuff in the waste stream. These days I rely on the surplus store as much as the curb. Surplus stores often carry industrial waste materials: tough, oversized items that come in mass, like 4' diameter round metal dishes, human-sized wooden cable spools, or a gross of 1'-tall iron springs, to name a few.

Last spring I ran across half a dozen 2'×3' clay-colored plastic pallets at a Surplus City in Albuquerque, N.M. They were likely used to ship a high-end non-consumer item. When I saw the pile of them, weeds grown over the top and wedged under a giant machine that looked as if it may have come out of New Mexico's Sandia Labs, the image of a sectional couch for outdoors flashed in my mind. I had wanted to build one for my porch but had not yet found the right materials in the waste stream. As is often the case in surplus yards, I tried to find an employee to help me dig it out and then got my work gloves out of the trunk and freed my future couch from the clutches of further decay. Then I turned to my little Maxima and wondered how I would get these babies nearly 200 miles south to where I lived. I crammed three of them into my car: one in the trunk, one in the back seat, and I jammed one up front with the passenger seat pushed all the way back. I was a tad nervous that the spiders living inside the pallets would lurch out and find me while I was driving home. A stick of Nag Champa incense that I keep in the ashtray of the car, lit periodically along the drive, helped transform the musky mold smell of the junkyard into the musky smell of a yoga studio. The bounty made it home safe and sound.

Last week I went back to Surplus City and found the fourth and last pallet to complete the set, and I made the couches. Here's the project, easily adapted to any industrial pallet you can find.

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October 16, 2009

How-To: Create Faux Porcelain Pottery

P.S. I Made This shares a brilliant transformation of old vases, bottles and cans to faux porcelain pottery with the help of a little puffy paint and spray paint. [via @thingswemake on Twitter]

October 14, 2009

K'Nex Lightbox Tutorial

Kristin Boehm has posted a great detailed tutorial on how to make a lightbox out of K'Nex pieces for product photography. She was digging for the perfect materials and stumbled across a box of K'Nex from her childhood, and the rest is history.

How-To: Rainskirt

How-To: Rainskirt
Take an old raincoat and make it into the perfect garment to slip on over pants or skirts.
By Diane Baker

When I moved to Seattle I spent a considerable amount of time looking for rain wear for my lifestyle. The only gear that covered my legs were rain pants, which were not only hard to get on and off, but ugly, and incompatible with skirts. The solution turned out to be cutting up an old raincoat and making what I call, the Rainskirt.

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October 11, 2009

Silver Spoon Crafts

Yesterday while I was at the Whiskerino, I took some time to shop around the Petaluma Farmer's Market. There were some great craft vendors alongside the fresh produce and foods. I scored two wonderful pieces, a keychain and a ring that embody crafty recycling and the beauty of vintage collectables.

Both pieces are wrought from the handle of silver spoon. The keychain pattern is called "Orange Blossom" and was made in 1910. The artist, Norman, even had the original spoon with him. Norman was a true throwback, no URL, not even a business card. While he truly knew each detail on the silver spoons he worked with, all he could tell me about his business was that each piece was made right in town and that he occasionally made appearances at the farmers market. I loved Norman's old-school spoons, and his old-school attitude. Farmer's markets, FTW.

October 9, 2009

Chest of Drawers Redux

My husband came to our relationship with a particleboard chest of drawers covered with candle wax. This is not the sort of furniture I would normally allow in my dwelling, even back when I used "fancy" cinder blocks and boards as a bookshelf. He'd had the dresser since he was a child, and had been allowed as a teenager to let candles drip all over it, giving it what he considered to be a groovy 1970s bachelor pad feel. Whatever. I was in love, the dresser was large and sturdy (they don't make particleboard like the used to), and my husband assured me I could paint it however I wanted. We started chipping away at the candle wax and started our life together.

In the late 80s it was painted in a two-tone Southwestern motif -- turquoise drawers and pastel pink handles (and yes, we had a howling coyote with a bandana around its neck sitting next to it). A few years later it moved into the tool shed, and there it sat until our oldest son wanted an astronaut room. Then out it came for a repainting. This time we used silver paint on most of it and red paint around the bottom third. We glued NASA and mission names on the sides and built a cone-shaped frame to sit on the top. For an 8-year-old it worked like a charm.

Last year, it was revamped again, this time as an Octopod ship for the Octonauts-themed room I've mentioned before. It was our most ambitious reworking so far -- it needed tentacles coming out the side, it needed to evoke a sense of roundness, it needed eyes, it needed legs, and it needed an environment, both inside and out. And dang if we didn't come up with just that!

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October 2, 2009

How-To: Cardboard Tube Wall Sculpture

Tali of Growing Up Creative has started a new series on her blog called Eco Kids Craft, that focuses on kid-friendly craft projects with recycled materials. Her first project shows how you can turn simple cardboard tubes into striking wall art.

October 1, 2009

How-To: Recycle a Sweater for Yarn

Shortly after I learned how to knit I read about how one could recycle a sweater for the yarn. Sweet! Cheap yarn I thought! I went to the Salvation Army and picked out a sweater I thought would be good for recycling. Huge, an XXXL, and 100% cotton. It was all cream colored and pretty nice. I took it home and gave it my best shot. Which failed pretty miserably at first. I wasted so much yarn that first time around. I still got enough to make into a sizable bath mat. I used the pattern from Mason Dixon Knitting (what a great knitting book).

After a whole lot of trial and error over the last three years, I've been able to get the recycling of sweaters down pretty well.

First you need to pick out a good sweater.

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September 30, 2009

Mixing Fibers: Free Knit Pin Cushion Pattern

A common problem when working from the stash, is having only a small amount of each type of fiber left. How can you successfully combine cotton and wool in the same project? How can you combine acrylic with silk? Should you? Would you? Could you dare? (Yes, I totally stole that line from the Spooky Old Tree). Yes to all three! Of course your should.

By combining fibers in the same project you can start playing with texture, color, and drape in ways never possible. I love taking advantage of a fiber's inherent property and pairing it with another to create various affects and looks.

A few guidelines to get started
1. If using a combination of wool and anything else remember that the wool will felt and the other fibers will not. This can be used to your advantage, or end up in the reject bin. I combine wool and cotton in the Perfect Dishcloth so it will intentionally felt the wool as you use it as a dish rag. In this case it make a semi harsh scouring pad perfect for use of teflon and the like. The un-felted cotton gives it a nice texture that a just wool felted rag would not have.

2. If you don't want your project to gather, use the same gauge throughout your project. Like the felting, this is not a rule, just keep it in mind. This can mean using all the same weight, or changing needles/hooks for each section of yarn. It can be used to your advantage to have a thinner stretching yarn combined with a thicker yarn that has less give. Like an alpaca with cotton.

3. Winding yarns together is a great way to get a new yarn from three old ones. I used a cotton, wool, silk, and acrylic all together to make the great bulky yarn in this crocheted scarflet.

Knit Pin Cushion Pattern

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September 29, 2009

Picking the Right Hook and Needles

One of the things that many experienced yarnies take for granted is how to know what hook or needles to use for the yarn you have. This is especially important if you are making up your own project as you go along or if you are altering a pattern you already have. Being able to take a pattern and look at your stash, grab the right yarn, and then grab the right hook or needles is so handy to getting your yarn leftover pattern off to the right start.

First, take a good look at the ball band. It has a ton of great information to get you started in the right direction. You can see what all the symbols mean by going to Skein Lane Studio and Yarn Standards.

Look at the yarn's weight (lace, fingering, sport, dk, worsted, aran, bulky, chunky - each yarn brand is different though) and the suggested hook and needle size. You can see general yarn standards for weights and suggested hook and needle sizes on Yarn Standards as well as suggested gauge.

Now here is the tricky thing - we all knit and crochet differently and with different tensions (how tight our stitches are) so for me I like to knit worsted yarns with size 6 needles tops. And I often crochet it with a size D hook. And it also depends on the type of fabric we want to create. Do we want a tight thick fabric or an open fabric? Not to mention all yarns are not created equal so some yarns are spun tight and others loose. You have 1 ply, 2 ply, 3 ply, etc ply yarns all wound up different ways. And then there are fiber types. Some fibers look a lot better knit loose while others tight. Alpaca will drape heavily and straight wool will have a bit more bounce.

I make sure to look at the weight they say the yarn is, what the suggested needle size is and then what the gauge is. Those are the big indicators of what the yarn will knit up like. All the same it's always best to get it wrapped around your needles/hook and work a few short rows to see what it's like. The yarn shop I used to work at had a huge basket of yarn just for this purpose, so crafters could see what the yarn worked up like and if it would be right for their pattern.

The easiest thing to do is to knit with the recommended yarn and needles/hook recommended by your pattern - but who does that? In an ideal world sure, but we work with what's available, what's on hand, what's in our stash or our local yarn shop. Yarns get discontinued too, so sometimes it's just impossible to find.

I found this great "Thinking Beyond the Pattern... A field guide to yarn substitutions" on Knitty.com about doing yarn substitutions. And this is wonderful to know. I think that was the number one question I was asked while working at the Yarn Exchange "what yarn can I use for this pattern?"

So to recap - swatches are your best bet, experience will help you get a feel for it, there are standards but they don't always apply, once you figure out how to do yarn substitutions you are golden for any project.

I hope this helps and that you will be well on your way to grabbing the right hook the first time around!

September 28, 2009

How-To: Recycling Awareness Ribbons

Swiss Miss features this video tutorial from Swiss designer, Mayari, for making your own Recycling Awareness Ribbons from aluminum cans. Just be sure to watch for sharp edges!

[ via DudeCraft ]

September 23, 2009

Heath Nash's Bottle Pendant

I have seen many different takes on the recycled material pendant lamp. This very colorful and dynamic version is by far my favorite. Via Moco Loco.

September 22, 2009

How-To: Recycled Magazine Business Card Holders

Jessica from How About Orange shares how to put together these stylish recycled magazine business card holders.

September 17, 2009

Non*Mart Trade-Based Shop

A new design studio and shop is opening in San Francisco and they are looking for product submissions. Non*Mart, as the shop is aptly named, touts an interesting alternative to traditional commerce by promoting the barter system. Artists are invited to submit pieces for inclusion in the shop. From the site, "To be considered, your piece must be made (in part or whole) of post-consumer waste and/or address ideas of consumerism, waste, and the ramifications of our consumer culture." Upcoming events at the shop include the opening reception on November 6th and a special event on November 27th to commemorate the annual Buy Nothing Day. Great idea!

Recycle Home | Next >

Craft:

Typewriter Key Jewelry

Sleepy Salvator Sock Monkey

Toilet Paper Tube Yule Log

Recycled Paper Tree

How-To: Newspaper Dress

Sculptures from Packaging

100% Reuse: Industrial Pallet Sectional Couch for Outdoors

How-To: Create Faux Porcelain Pottery

K'Nex Lightbox Tutorial

How-To: Rainskirt

Silver Spoon Crafts

Chest of Drawers Redux

How-To: Cardboard Tube Wall Sculpture

How-To: Recycle a Sweater for Yarn

Mixing Fibers: Free Knit Pin Cushion Pattern

Picking the Right Hook and Needles

How-To: Recycling Awareness Ribbons

Heath Nash's Bottle Pendant

How-To: Recycled Magazine Business Card Holders

Non*Mart Trade-Based Shop

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