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.

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Pratt was the star of this year’s ICFF Design Schools’ Exhibition with their Design for a Dollar contest. Amazingly, with the design constraint of using a buck or less, the Pratt students invented brilliant eco home ideas (many upcycled from totally discarded items). The competition required students to create designs that include manufacturing costs, transportation, energy, material, labor and waste issues.

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Thank you to everyone who entered. We here at CAGW have been rejuvenated and inspired by all of your upcycling ideas! Don’t forget your other chances to win this beautiful book, you can find out where to enter here.

I know you’ve waited with bated breath so here it is, your chance to win a copy of Sewing Green, the latest and greatest book by Betz White, author of Warm Fuzzies.

Sewing Green offers 25 cute projects made from repurposed or organic materials. Learn how to make aprons and wallets from dress shirts, and sandwich wraps, and lounge pants from organic and thrifted fabrics. The projects are are direct and easy to follow even for this crafter who likes to skip ahead and tweak things. I especially like the sandwich wrap project and the use of PUL - a material that is not vinyl and one that I need to look into more.

White’s favorite project from the book is the woodland draft buster, a much more refined version of the draft catcher that I created a while back. This version looks like an adorable tree branch that helps you save money on your heating bill. White wanted everything in the book to have a good purpose without being preachy. She wanted everything to be fun and easy and show that any one can do these projects and be eco-friendly. “You don’t have to suffer,” she said. “Suffering is not involved.”

Continue reading to enter the contest!

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Using silk ties that are destined for Good Will, a bit of scrap fabric, and boiling water, you can dye eggs. Yup, dye them with the ties! It is sort of like magic, or chemical reactions even.

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To upcycle all’s you need to do is take ordinary materials, craft left overs or items destined for the trash or recycle bin, and turn them into something new and better.

Once you do that, you can enter your new and improved crafty awesome into the Upcycle Contest with Sublime Stitching.

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I am inspired by this creative way to upcycle felt with these little tabletop cup cozies. Their goals for showcasing craft designs are admirable and charming:

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“Food and Interior Stylist, Paul Lowe of Sweet Paul has been styling a series called The Written Word“. The paper sculpture vases and the picture holder in the pics above show some of Paul’s creative spark.

If your in the mood to create functional upcycled art here is an adorable tutorial on how to make a book table, if you are looking for a stylish book recycling project.

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So get your thinking caps on, brush up on your upcycling and take that trash and turn it into treasure for the SMART Art ‘Trash into Treasure’ competition. Your sculpture, functional item, photograph, video or music could net you fame and fortune, or a winning cash prize, as long as you can show reuse.

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The Sundance Film Festival kicked off on January 15th and wrapped up yesterday. In amongst the films and snow, celebrity attendees participated in green crafting at an event called The Green Lodge with Mark Montano author of The Big Ass Book of Crafts. The craft-a-thon was sponsored by Amazing EcoGlue from Eclectic Products, Inc.

The Green Lodge focused on eco-crafting by using products that can be recycled, upcycled and restyled. Celebrities including KayCee Stroh of High School Musical cast, Aubrey O’Day from Making of the Band 3, actress Anya Monzikova from Tropic Thunder and a Deal or No Deal alumna, and Alice Greczyn from Privileged and Lincoln Heights, were were inspired to create eco-chic and sustainably stylish projects and gifts alongside the expert crafter and designer.

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The Baltimore Center for Design has a utilitarian goal, one that will bring together the city’s designers for the purpose of discussion, and to provide community members a valuable resource. As an up and comer, the Center for Design is all volunteer run, with little to no budget. Though this is a challenge it has not stopped them from moving foward with all the things that a resource like this needs, all with an environmental bent.

Their business cards are made from the extra runs that a print shop uses to get their press set. These test sheets usually end up as waste, but not in this instance. Working with their local printer they were able to source these test prints for free!

To personalize the cards, the Center for Design used label paper and printed up their url and attached the labels to the cards. The result is a simple and easy way to make buisness cards.

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Since I don’t work in an office, How to Fill an Office with Packing Peanuts seems out. Which is too bad because it looks like an awesome prank!

The next best thing to do with them, if you don’t have an office to pull off the prank, is to use them for what they were made for in the first place - packing! Sentimental Holiday ornaments and decorations can be safe and snug for the next year when you reuse the peanuts as you put away these things.

Use them loose or wrap them in newspaper so they don’t go flying everywhere. Gently nestle the more breakable pieces and feel secure in knowing that they will be safe until you pull them out next year.

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That is the challenge set forth in Open Architecture Network’s contest: Discarded Dreams.

With over 40 million mattresses discarded every year in the U.S., this challenge asks that over 80% of the mattress be reused. Careful consideration should be made to the mattress’ deconstruction, as the Open Architecture Network is looking for a way to divert these mattresses away from the landfill and into new life.

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Art and craft has played a big role in both bringing awareness about the disease and how to cope. One of the most prominent displays of craft is the AIDS quilt.

Made up of individual “squares” that memorialize those who have been lost to the disease, the AIDS quilt is the largest on going community arts project in the world. It holds more than 44,000 individual panels made by friends, family and loved ones. And the 91,000 plus names displayed on the quilt, represent only 17.5 % of U.S. AIDS deaths.

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My favorite part of the weekend? Tucked into a corner was Good Will Industries and D.C.’s own Goodwill Fashionista. For those of you who arn’t familiar with the Fasionista, she writes about how you can find amazing fashion right at your local Good Will shop. Finding gently used clothing and reusing is a concept that is nothing new to readers of this here blog.

What was even more great about the D.C. Fashionista being there, was she was teaching everyone how to make a market tote out of a t-shirt. Genius I say! T-shirts are definitely something Good Will always has in spades.

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Loosing heat out of these cracks not only ups your electric bill due to having to heat the house more to compensate for this loss, but it also contributes to our carbon footprint. So here is a quick and easy tutorial on how to upcycle an old long sleeve shirt or sweater and make, what I call a draft catcher. This is a temporary band-aid fix for the larger project of having the door replaced, which us renters might not be able to do.

Start by sorting through your pile of clothes destined for the scrap pile or Good Will. Look for a shirt that has long sleeves and a pattern or color that you like. I found a shirt that I had long wanted to make into a pillow.

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You will need: a pair of jeans; double-fold bias tape (or you can make your own!); cardboard; rotary cutter and mat; sewing machine and thread

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We know that vegetables led me to bees, but the vegetables also got me to thinking about canning. Then the act of canning led me down the road of the cans themselves and particularly tin cans and then that naturally led me to tin can phones. Phew!

The tin can is such a sturdy and mutli-purpose recyclable. I might be dating myself but, remember playing with a tin can phone? Stretching a line between two tin cans and talking nonsense to your best friend? Well, beyond making these fun and science filled relics of my childhood, I thought I would hunt for some other ideas on what to do with your leftovers and found some great crafters that have taken the tin can and made some beautiful art.

Etsy user MariposaAvenue has created amazing lamp shades from tin food cans. I especially love the organic shapes cut into the cans that create soothing patterns on the wall when lit from within.

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Welcome to the Third Carnival of Green Crafts!

Before we begin, let me just thank all of the crafters who participated in this month’s carnival for taking a weight off my mind. After reading all of these posts, I now have NO worries at all about landfill space anywhere in America. Seriously, y’all, crafters are obviously the solution to the trash problem. Go us!

Before we begin, a few administrative notes: We’re pleased as punch to announce that the fourth Carnival will be September 4th at Whip Up. Send in your posts via the carnival submission form today! For background information about the Carnival, please see the Carnival of Green Crafts home page. And in case you missed the previous editions, here are the first Carnival, here at Crafting A Green World, and the second Carnival, at BlogHer.

Thanks so much to all the crafters who shared their posts with us for this edition of the Carnival. Let’s dig in!

Eco-Friendly Materials

Tiny Decor gathered a list of the Top 10 Modern and Eco-friendly Fabric Sources on Etsy. You HAVE to see what she’s collected, there are some real knockouts.

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We have been so pleased that so many green crafters and craft aficionados out there have sent in posts, commented, and visited the carnivals thus far.  For those who haven’t, we have the following invitation for you:

• Submit one of your posts! Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis.  The next two carnivals will be here at Crafting A Green World and then at Whip Up.  The blog carnival submission form is the easiest way for us to keep straight who’s sent in what, but if it gives you fits then email us at greencraftscarnival (at) gmail (dot) com.
• Suggest someone else’s post! If you see a post out there and you think “this would be perfect for that green craft carnival thingy,” then by all means let us know about it.  We’ll touch base with the author and make sure it’s ok with them before we link to it.
• Host a carnival! If you want to be more involved in the green craft community or get more exposure for your blog, hosting a carnival is a great way to do it.  Don’t be scared, we’ll help make it easy and fun.
• Let us know about your blog! We love it when people send in their posts, but we also know that people get busy.  So we have come knocking to several of you and asked for permission to include your posts.  We’d also love to build up a list of blogs that hosts can pick from and know that the blog owner is fine with being included in the carnival whenever.So if you have a blog, and it has some green crafting content, and you just keep forgetting to send in a post - or if you’re shy about submitting - leave your blog’s address in the comments here.  You can feel free to send in a post when you have something you’re extra proud of, but we’ll also keep an eye on it and quite possibly surprise you.

So that’s our invitation to you, to help make this carnival a fun community event. Let us know if you have any other thoughts as well.

Now you can take a virtual walk with me through a few of my favorite festival crafts…

It never ceases to amaze my inner child when I see someone has taken funked out metal parts and welds them together to make whimsical creatures. This flying bird monster & friends looks like it all began with a tiny BBQ propane tank.

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