Green Options

My girls and I tend to craft with scrapbook paper often enough that I buy it when it’s on sale, but not often enough that I tend to use up all the paper that I’ve bought. Coincidentally, I also love photography, long to display my photos more around the house, and loathe store-bought photo frames–it just seems like I’ve sold, donated, given away, or thrown out enough photo frames over my lifetime for various reasons, you know?

Here’s another stash-busting project that I’ve been working hard on this week: covering recycled cardboard with pretty stash scrapbooking paper to use as wall photo frames around the house. The benefits of these photo frames are that they’re cheap, light and easy to mount without a lot of hardware, amenable to a plethora of modifications that will allow you to match your room or express your personality, and quick to make, letting you get as quickly as possible to the point of the project: getting your beautiful artwork out there on your walls.

Fleece isn’t a natural fabric, but it is vegan, is often (although it’s just as often nearly impossible to tell when) partially to completely made from recycled plastic bottles, and has many of the same qualities of wool, in that it’s breathable and wicks moisture away from the skin. It doesn’t readily hold stains, doesn’t ravel, is thin and light and yet soft and plush, and can be washed easily.

It’s one of the staple fabrics that, as a cloth diapering momma, I bought every time it was on sale. Only now? All my babies are toilet trained, and I still have, pardon my French, a butt-load of fleece.

One of the things that I like to do as an eco-friendly crafter and that I like to teach my children as a natural parent is to remember to have respect for our stuff. We should keep only what we can use or enjoy, and we should use and enjoy what we have. Thus I need to either use or lose my fleece stash, and that’s my goal this week.

Fortunately, the same qualities that make fleece an excellent material for cloth diapers also make it an excellent material for a light and comfortable matress pad. Additionally, it comes in a width that’s perfect for my queen-sized bed and workable for my daughters’ full-sized bed, and the sewing on it will be absolutely minimal because fleece doesn’t ravel–just cut it to shape, throw on some elastic, and we’ll be good to go. Here’s how:

In celebration of my first week of summer vacation (and to make up for totally blowing off my Crafting a Green World blog responsibilities while I graded 42 final papers and calcuated 42 final grades), I am posting a serious, savvy, stash-busting craft project every day this week. I’ve put off the mending, the upkeep, the interior design, and the works-in-progress for too long, and it’s time to bust some stash and clear out some projects.

First up: my favorite pair of jeans. My dancing jeans. The jeans I hemmed with bias tape. The jeans that I wear most often when I carry my sketchbook around in my back pocket.

The jeans with the two huge, gaping holes in the back pocket.

Hurry and go dig out your favorite pair of jeans with the hole in the back pocket, because we are about to mend it.