#zero waste upcycle

[theinfamousdoctorf]

I saw a discussion happening the other day and wanted to throw my two cents in. If you have livestock then you probably have feedbags aplenty. And some of our bags are made of pretty tough material that I was looking for a way to reuse. We never seem to have enough baskets for eggs around my house, so I started cutting feed bags into strips and weaving my own. These are zero waste projects made from bags with a woven core rope made out of even more bags. If they get dirty you can fully submerge them in hot soapy water and then just set them someplace to drip dry.

[These are very time intensive to make. Please realize that the cost reflects the number of actual hours spent cleaning and cutting materials and weaving them.]

[calendulacraft]

Fast Fashion to Slow Fashion :: a DIY guide to up-cycling and mending clothing on a budget.

For those of us living on a small income, buying from sustainable fashion brands is often out of reach. I would like to point out that *buying new but ecological garments isn't the only way to cultivate a slow fashion wardrobe*. Here are a few options for transforming *upcycling* your clothing, thus making fast fashion into slow fashion:

Mend and repair :: patch hand-me-down sweaters, fix holes in leggins from target and other department stores. By giving items a longer life, and preventing unnecessary garbage, fast fashion items become slow fashion! Here are two tutorials I have written on how to mend a torn belt loop on jeans and patch leggings.

Up-cycle clothing that doesn't suit your style :: when preparing for a trip back home and wondering how to acquire some nicer clothing for the trip a friend of mine gifted me a big bag of clothes. Almost all of them were items that we could call "fast fashion" and nearly all also had stains or rips that needed mending. By fixing and adapting these items and then going on to wear them for several years longer, I am keeping them out of the cycle of buy then trash.

Tailor items that don't fit you :: Taking in clothing is quite simple and there are lots of tutorials on how to hem pants and skirts or take in a size or two. I recently made a tutorial on how to take out a skirt, or make a skirt bigger by adding panels.

At some point, we must face the fact that a t-shirt is totally worn out and cannot be used for clothing any longer. In such cases here are a couple of crafts to utilize the fabric and other items from the scrap pile:

Create a Quilt :: if you find yourself with a pile of beautiful & memory-filled scraps -- transform them into a quilt as I have done in this post.

Make Twine :: Longer scraps of fabric, especially those from stretch materials like leggings or jersey cotton t-shirts can be made into a thing rope also known as fabric twine. I wrote a tutorial on how to make twine out of fabric scraps.

<<Best of luck in all your crafting endeavors!>>

[avid-miscellanea]

I heard underconsumption-core was trending so here’s my watering can. There’s one hole drilled into the top of the handle to allow air in so the water comes out of the cap smoothly. Is it aesthetic? No. Was it free (with purchase of oat milk and access to a drill with bits of varying sizes) and does it work? Yes!

[ninamation]

Sweater collar mend

Thrifted this sweater for $3 and immediately ripped the back of the collar when I washed it. There are probably better and prettier ways to mend this, but I just ironed on some interfacing and secured it with a few stitches.

Current works in progress:

Tons of origami roses for the wedding

Make up bags for my bridesmaids

Painting a thrifted coat hook with folk art inspired designs

Knitting a hat for my fiancé

Lots of mends for other people that I put off

[msnogood]

Junk as Art & Craft Material

Suffer from hoards of junk from your dungeon

Realize you despise each and every one of them

Stop, before you burn them with heck fire, and think

Can I use any of them as materials, and turn them into something less despicable?

Bonus points for combining more than one junk into new art

If yes, profit! You shall art and craft with free materials!

If you ever stumble upon this post, please tell me about trash you creatively used for art that you thought was so clever you want to tell everyone about it (I want to hear it).

Mine are:

Packaging closed cell-foam blocks as needlefelting base

Using all sorts of fiber for needlefelting, my cut hair, my cat’s hair, my mom’s and aunt’s dog hair, unraveled yarn wool, unraveled wool from felted phone case for a long-gone dumb phone, and my most proud one was poly-liners from grocery deliveries from the panini era (absolutely atrocious and opulent one-use material cause poly-fluff isn’t even cheap from crafts stores)

Random plastic pieces incorporated as parts for my projects like little red heart tabs from bubble tea bottles as ears, salvaged plastic flower stems for my strange flower. Colored plastics and plastics in interesting pre-mold shapes are my preferred junk.

Using junk doesn’t mean the end result ought to be flimsy either. It really depends on your choice of junk and how they are used. I recommend paying attention to the material of choice, and recall / visualize how they behave from your own experience. Some plastics are more brittle and UV susceptible than others, and I avoid those.

I also used to scoff at plastics and prefer biodegradable materials. Then I had a brain thought on: if the junk biodegrades, they don’t really need saving (unless they’re really interesting). So it seems sensible to incorporate non-biodegradable junk in my projects.

Downside (sort of) is, sometimes one of these creative use of junk becomes a preferred method of doing things and you either have to loot your friends and family’s dungeons or buy more for your future project.

But I am grateful for the original junk that gave me these crafting ideas out of necessity, and implore everyone to really reimagine your trash as art and craft materials. This practice opened my mind about how strongly my preconceptions can be about inanimate objects sometimes due to frustration, sometimes due to environmental / context associations.

Every object can be deconstructed, some are useful for your work while some may not be. Your choice of material can be your inspiration. I am no master at this, but when a piece of “junk” clicks with my project seamlessly, it’s like the stars aligned and I discovered a secret thing that was meant to be. As if the Muses say: hey, here is a great piece of guilt-free money-free material for this exact project you will want to make.

It’s a blessed thing. Junk.

[catschimericalcreations]

Happy Easter from Soup the Jackalope, a repurposed TY Beanie Babies plush by Cat's Chimerical Creations

Did you know:

With every donation you make at https://ko-fi.com/catschimericalcreations you can unlock one fun fact about any repurposed Beanie Baby hybrid plush beast of your choosing!

[borninwinter81]

DIY budget cyber/industrial outfit - first time in public!

I made a couple of previous posts about this dress here and here, as well as the matching collar, and I thought it would be fun to show how I styled it when I wore it for the first time on Friday. Honestly I was a little concerned it would just look dumb, but when I tried it with the full makeup and shoes I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked it.

Apologies for the abysmal photo quality, especially in the first image. I don't have a good camera and I wanted to try and show the full outfit. That blurred mirror selfie is the only head to toe picture I got.

I didn't mention in my other posts but in addition to making patches for the dress I also nipped in the seams so it fit me better (it was my size but kinda shapeless, and I wanted to give myself a waist). This is very easy to do with almost any dress, skirt or top, you just put the garment on inside out, pinch in the side seams so they fit the contours of your body (try and do this equally on both sides) and pin them together. Safety pins are best so you don't accidentally hurt yourself.

Take the garment off and draw a smooth line with tailors chalk connecting all the pins, then sew along that line, either with a machine or by hand. Turn right side out and try it on again. Provided you're happy with the fit, trim away the excess fabric. You may need to be careful if it's a fabric that could fray - I usually go over the seams again with a zig-zag machine stitch to try and minimise this. There are also products you can buy like fray-check. If in doubt, or there isn't much excess fabric you could just leave the seams untrimmed.

The length is a little out of my comfort zone so I wore gym shorts underneath to help myself feel less exposed and reduce the risk of flashing - I tend to do this with any dress or skirt that's above the knee anyway.

Continuing the budget theme, rather than buying any new accessories (again, cyber stuff is mega expensive) I looked through my wardrobe for items I already had that might work.

These goggles are not the usual kind of cyber goggles, but they matched everything else I was wearing. I was given them by a friend who was getting rid of them ages ago so they cost me nothing!

I really didn't feel like making and wearing cyberlox, so instead I just got some yellow hair elastics and did a ponytail.

I made these arm warmers about 12 years ago. You can probably tell that they began life as a pair of skinny jeans. To cut down on the amount of sewing I needed to do I used the existing hem and seams. After cutting them to a length I liked I did the pinch and pin thing to make them fit to my arm, and put in zips along the outer seam to make them easier to put on. As it turned out this wasn't necessary because the fabric is stretchy enough that I can pull them on and off. The zips add a nice bit of visual interest though.

I ripped a hole in each one for my thumb, and I had a pack of extra large hook-and-eyes, so I sewed the "eye" parts down them and added some old bootlaces. I've never been 100% happy with this decoration, but I haven't had any inspiration on how to change them in the last 12 years.

I wanted a necklace in addition to the collar, and couldn't think of anything more appropriate than this. I originally got it for a cosplay, Vasquez from Aliens, and with the big yellow industrial loader from the end of that movie which Ripley uses to fight the Queen alien... it seemed there was kind of a connection there.

I once met Jeanette Goldstein whilst dressed as Vasquez and told her she was my childhood hero and she signed these tags, but unfortunately most of the signature has come off when I was cleaning them.

Lastly, the boots. As with any goth outfit the footwear tend to be the most expensive, particularly if you want ridiculous platform heels like these.

When it comes to footwear, I really would not recommend any alternative brand names like Killstar, Koi or similar. They're often terrible quality, the heels will snap, the soles will peel off, zips will break. In my opinion the only decent specifically alternative shoe brand are New Rock (even they're lower quality than they used to be in the 90s) and although New Rock do make heels I wouldn't wear them often enough to justify spending £200 on a pair. I prefer flats the majority of the time!

The brand of these is Funtasma, and I believe they are intended for use by pole-dancers, meaning they're decent quality and will be up to a night of dancing in a club. I took a change of shoes along with me to put on at the end of the evening but they are surprisingly comfortable for the first few hours.

I got them about 15 years ago on sale, and at that time they were around £40. Not cheap but not super expensive either, and I've definitely got my money's worth out of them. I had them re-soled once with special toughened soles that have extra grip so they're safer to walk in, but that's it. One time I even did the 3 mile walk home at 2am in 6 inches of snow wearing these because I didn't want to wait hours for a taxi (an occasion where I did not take a change of shoes!)

So, not your standard cyber outfit, but one that gives my own spin on this look (which should be the goal with any fashion style - a guideline to create something unique, not a rulebook that you have to follow 100%) and was put together super cheaply. The only new things I bought were the dress, fabric to make the patches, and a pack of multicoloured hair elastics.

[nellameresova]

[pillowpest]

mending

[reasonsforhope]

“In order to keep their little island the pristine Aegean paradise it is, Tilos has gotten rid of their landfill, and replaced it with a circular system that has reduced total waste by 86%.

After being implemented this May, the island of around 750 inhabitants quickly saw progress, after they transformed the landfill into a recycling center and removed the large public common bins for trash.

Set up by Polygreen, the Just Go Zero initiative is hoping to steer other Greek islands towards similar programs.

All biodegradable waste is turned into soil treatments, while plastic, metal, glass, and paper are all recycled.

For non-recyclable goods there is an upcycle center for still-working, as well as for electronics and clothes, either for re-use by someone else, or for artistic creations.

“A new culture starts today in Tilos,” said Polygreen founder Athanasios Polychronopoulos, “a culture characterized by 100% landfill diversion, full circular waste management and, most importantly, a completely new perception of life. We are envisioning a future, where waste will only be seen in museums.”” -via Good News Network, 11/30/22

[catschimericalcreationsbirthdays]

Ahklut the Whale Wolf Frankenplush is four years old today!

If you'd like to help celebrate his fourth birthday, please consider supporting me with a donation over at https://ko-fi.com/catschimericalcreations

[sidewalkchemistry]

How to Upcycle Herbs After Making Infusions, Oils, Tinctures, and More

[goodthingstoknoww]

(Forgot to save link to video, apologies. See more by this creator @ mxrichmakes on TikTok)

[everydaydeeds]

Day 3647 - Baby shower was a smashing, waste-lite success! Most of the credit goes to my amazing sister who helped coordinate and managed all of the decorations, and our guests who really took to heart how much we love secondhand gifts <3

[soniadiez]