Pincushions made from bottle caps and felt scraps.

Also in the “I’ve been saving for awhile, why am I just making these now?” category: Wristlets made from recycled fabric.

Wristlet made with upcycled fabric from linen pants and a vintage sheet, and embellished with a bit of embroidery.

The fabric comes from a variety of places, clothing from thrift stores and from pants and shirts that are perfectly nice but for whatever reason are no longer being worn, thrifted vintage sheets, and from my giant collection of fabric scraps. Every sewing project generates scraps of fabric, and I haven’t the heart to throw out perfectly good, but tiny, pieces of fabric, so I save them for “someday.” Until someday comes, I risk being buried alive by fabric scraps and bottle caps and all the other little things I save to upcycle. Well, someday has come, and I’m glad I’ve been saving my scraps. The fabric scraps are particularly useful for adding applique embellishments to bags.

Upcycled wrislet with applique mushrooms.

It feels so satisfying to give something new life instead of trashing it. I just need to do it more often, so I don’t end up featured on an episode of Hoarders!

I’ve got lots more to make before the festival, so I better get back to work. I’d love to hear, though, how you use recycled elements in your art and craft. And what are your plans for celebrating Earth Day?

P.S. If you like seeing a peek of my projects in progress and what I’ll be debuting at upcoming events, check out my Facebook page. I frequently share mini updates there that don’t always make it to the blog!

One of my most beloved sweaters was a beautiful cream colored cable-knit sweater that my mother bought for me during my first semester at college. I wore it all the time.

Me and my sweater. Oh, and a friend. ;)

Like most beloved sweaters, it started to fall apart after years of constant use, and I eventually had to set it aside. I didn’t know how to repair it properly, but also couldn’t bear to get rid of it, so it lived in a closet for years. Then I had this great idea to turn it into pillows, and it continued to live in the closet, but now with a purpose!

Since I have quietly, and only to myself, declared January the month of finishing unfinished projects, I finally got around to turning that unwearable sweater into something special. I cut it (oh, it was so hard!) into two panels, and used them to create two envelope-back style pillow covers. I only had one pillow form on hand, so I quickly made up a second pillow form while I was at it. Years of sitting in the closet, and the whole project only took about an hour at most.

My old sweater, transformed into pillows!

Aren’t they lovely? Now I can continue to love my sweater, and I bet these pillows will last a long time.

As for the month of finishing the unfinished, I also spent less than an hour making a body pillow cover for SciFi Man out of fabric that has been waiting for just that purpose since last spring. SciFi Man is happy, I’m happy to get that project out of my pile, everybody wins! Other unfinished projects on the docket:

1. A “charming handbag” from Bend the Rules Sewing that was cut out last spring but never assembled.
2. A quilt for my bed, the blocks for which were cut out but never assembled.
3. The zig zag quilt, which just needs a few more lines of quilting and a binding.
4. Bread bags made from tea towels.
5. Produce bags made from netting.
6. 2 wristlets I have cut out, but not assembled (are you noticing a theme here?)

Do you have any unfinished projects you want to finish this year? Feel free to jump on my bandwagon!

While I’m making things, I decided to create a new Flickr group for handmade items for your kitchen (like cloth napkins, but also anything else you’d use in your kitchen), called Handmade Kitchen. Please join and share all the wonderful things you’ve made for your kitchen. You can also share handmade things you’ve purchased for your kitchen, or things you’ve made for someone else’s kitchen. I can’t wait to see all the creative things you’ve been working on!

G2BGreen.com has an excellent article about plastic and reusable bags that includes some eye-opening statistics. Statistics that make me think I need to stop putting it off and get my reusable bags made. I did not know that it could take 1000 years for a plastic bag to decompose, and with the number of plastic bags most of us are using, that amounts to a massive pile of plastic bags. I wonder where that pile is? Perhaps part of the pile is in that garbage vortex in the Pacific ocean.

A lot of grocery stores have started to sell their own reusable bags, which I think is wonderful. And if I understand correctly, some of them will even credit your bill when you use those reusable bags so that they ultimately pay for themselves. I think this is wonderful. If it weren’t for the fact that I like to make my own bags, I definitely would have picked up a few reusable bags at the local grocery store by now. If you are like me, and want to make your own reusable grocery bags, here are a few excellent free patterns I found:

• Simple Cloth Grocery Bags from Jan Andrea’s Baby Crafts
• How to Make a Canvas Bag from Pie and Coffee
• Wallet Size Fold Up Reusable Shopping Bag from Whip Up
• A TOTE-ally Easy Way to Help the Earth from Instructables
• Fabric Shopping Bag from Dye-abolical Designs
• Cheap & Easy Fabric Grocery Bags from Wisdom of the Moon

With so many patterns, what are you waiting for? Go make a reusable grocery bag!

I also finished up a bunch of card wallets I’ve been working on through the week and listed them in the shop. I’ll try to do a few more tonight and get them listed tomorrow. I’ve got some pretty cranberry red ones coming up next that I think are going to be lovely. One of the wallets I posted today is a bit more environmentally friendly that my other wallets have been. It includes a denim lining made from recycled jeans. The jeans were still in great condition, and I hated to see them go to waste, so they went to wallets instead. I think it makes the wallet a bit more “heavy duty,” too.

If you’ve read many of the recent posts on this blog, you know I’m interested in doing what I can to have a smaller impact on the environment, so the idea of recycling clothing into something new appeals to me. But what do you think of the idea? Would you buy a new product made from recycled fabric?

Given all this, it seemed like it was time for me to find a reusable bottled in which to carry around my much more affordable tap water. I thought about picking up a plastic bottle, but after doing a little research I thought I might as well avoid plastic altogether if I could. I found two companies online that sell reusable water bottles in stainless steel and aluminum that last for decades, are recyclable when you are finally done with them, and appear to be safe for your health. I checked out the bottles at Kleen Kanteen and Sigg. SciMan and I decided to each get a 1 liter bottle from Sigg, although the ones at Kleen Kanteen look great, too. If you decide to buy a bottle from Sigg, check online for a coupon. We found one that covered the cost of shipping and then some. Since the bottles aren’t cheap (in the short term), saving a bit certainly feels good! They arrived quickly and are surprisingly lightweight. And, well, they hold water like they’re supposed to.

Here’s to 20 years of the same reusable water bottle!

• Fairythreads has a very nice article about recycled packaging, with lots of suggestions for how to incorporated reused materials, or just more earth friendly materials, into your packaging.
• G2BGreen has an excellent post about taking reusable bags with you to the store, complete with statistics about the impact of plastic bags and a list of cities that are banning or thinking about banning plastic bags.
• Eco-Libris reminds us that every book we read used to be a tree, and thanks to them, we can now plant a tree for every book we read. (You buy Eco-Libris stickers to put on your book, they plant a tree for each one you buy.)
• While you’re at it, why buy a new book when you can find a gently loved copy at BookMooch or PaperBackSwap? Recycle books you’ve finished and get new books from someone else’s personal library. I’m already in the middle of reading my first BookMooch book. (Want to know more about why you may want to share books, instead of buying new? Check out Read More, Consume Less.)
• Did you know you can recycle the Tyvek envelopes you get from the post office? DuPont, the manufacturer, has a program to recycle them and provides instructions here.

Also, there were some great suggestions in the comments to my last post. Felicia shared that she uses a rubber stamp to put her return address on packages, which saves on labels. And Erin wrote that she uses pretty paper scraps from scrapbooking and other projects to re-cover used padded envelopes. She prints the recipient’s address on white paper and pastes this on top of the decorative paper. Great idea– I bet those envelopes are lovely! Plus, of course, reuse boxes, tissue paper, bubble wrap, and packing peanuts that find their way to you. Thanks for the great suggestions! I’d love to hear any more you may have.

My solution to this dilemma: a fancy new rubber stamp! A stamp seemed like a good idea for a recycling message, because it’s inherently reusable. I poked around online for a stamp I could use to mark packaging as clearly recycled and wasn’t able to find much. I did find two (only two!) Etsy sellers with recycling rubber stamps, but they weren’t exactly what I was looking for. Sweetpaperie has a lovely recycled packaging stamp, as does Terbearco. Finally, I came across the Roughstock Blog, which had a free recycled packaging image that seemed to be designed just for me. A bit wordier than the other two stamps, I think the Roughstock message most clearly communicated that I was recycling for the sake of recycling and why I was doing that. The image read:

reduce. reuse. recycle.

This packaging has been reused
or made from recycled materials
to ease up on our environment.
Please consider using it again!

Perfect. Except, it wasn’t a stamp. Just an image that I could make into a stamp. My mom, ever the problem-solver, sent me a link for RubberStamps.net, where I could get a custom stamp made with my image for a great price. They made the image into a stamp and it arrived in my mailbox in just a week! And I promptly ran out, got myself a green ink pad (don’t recycling messages look better in green?) and stamped up some recycled envelopes I’d packed some books in.

Do you use recycled packing? If you do, do you mark it in some way? How have the recipients of your reused packages responded?