By Cleo Clark-Athans
This one is a simple trash hack by a 7 year old.
1) Take clementines out of wooden clementine box.
2) Place small towels, rags, hand-knit blankets, anything soft inside the clementine box to make a “mattress.”
3) Find a cute fabric scrap, a doll’s blanket, or a pretty place mat to use as your bedspread.
4) Add a small pillow (mine was hand sewn at sewing class).
5) Put your favorite little animals or dolls to bed!
Visiting grandma means we get to dive into her boxes of fabric scraps. For 40 years, no fabrics have been wasted in her house. Just last month, she passed on several boxes to a local quilt-making organization, but luckily we found a few more up in her attic.
We looked in the Trash Backwards app for some good fabric scrap reuse ideas for small hands and landed upon a fun tutu tutorial for a little girl. My daughter decided she wanted to make it for her stuffed panda. So, we took our lead from the tutorial at Home Sweet Home and made a mini version for a doll or stuffed animal.
1) First, cut your fabrics into 1/2 inch to 1 inch wide strips. We made ours approximately 6-8 inches long.
2) Find an elastic waistband, about 8-12 inches-worth and sew 2 ends together so you have it in a loop.
3) Fold your strips in half length-wise and place them underneath the waistband with the loop sticking out of the top and thread the ends of the fabric scrap through your loop, tying half of a square knot. This is how you tie on your skirt scrap pieces.
4) Tie your scraps on one after the other and gather them together tightly.
5) We wanted to be sure that the waistband was sewn together well, so grandma reinforced it with some hand-sewing.
You’re Done! Spread around your strips so they even-out your skirt and you can add on more strips of color wherever they’re needed.
Most of our ornaments are handmade or free finds we’ve rescued from the landfill. That’s not to say our tree looks like it’s decorated with junk. Quite the contrary. Each little piece has a story to it: where was it ‘recovered’ or who created it.
We love to find small dolls the children are finished playing with and turn them into ornaments. This one’s so easy it takes all of 30 seconds to make…er…once your glue gun is heated up.
Doll Ornaments Look Like Angels, Photo © Liesl Clark
All you’ll need is:
An assortment of dolls
A glue gun
Scissors
Ribbon
All you need to make your dolly-ments, Photo © Liesl Clark
Glue the ribbon together into a loop. Then glue the loop to the back of your doll. Ours have hats which make the gluing really easy. Now hang your dolly-ments onto the tree! Other toys lend themselves to ornamentdom if you’re so inclined. We’ve made lego ornaments, matchbox carnaments — you get the picture.
Pioneering The Simple Life 