Today is the day that crafters become green crafters.  It’s the day that reminds us that in order to ensure the planet will be healthy enough to sup­port our lifes­pan and our children’s lives and our grandchildren’s lives, we must take care.

Con­sump­tion is the action we need to focus on.  Reduce con­sump­tion and when we do need to feed our con­sum­ma­tion addic­tion, we do so with great intent and only buy the things we love and need.

That being said, you can still craft away to your heart’s con­tent.  Use what mate­ri­als you have until they’re gone.  After that, repur­pose other items into your mate­ri­als, or buy mate­ri­als sec­ond­hand.  It’s not chal­leng­ing, it just requires a bit more search­ing (which is part of the fun) and it hon­estly makes every­thing you craft unique.

Please take today to con­sider your cur­rent craft­ing rou­tine: where you pur­chase your mate­ri­als, what the mate­ri­als are made of, the waste you cre­ate while craft­ing, the pack­ag­ing used in ship­ping them per­haps.  All of those things con­tribute to the Earth’s demise, but if you take the time to pledge to con­sci­en­tiously reduce your waste or pur­chase mate­ri­als sec­ond­hand, you are mak­ing life bet­ter for your­self and every­one on the planet.

Today is the day you become a con­sci­en­tious green crafter.

These (some­what creepy) fig­urines are at EVERY thrift store I’ve been to.  It’s sad that every­one doesn’t col­lect ceramic fig­urines any­more, but what is one to do?  I say we search out these poor lost crea­tures and re-​​purpose them!

You could sand them a bit and spray paint them a bright, mod­ern color; maybe you could group three or so of the same color.  Paint­ing them by hand could also have some fun results!

Some­one who’s handy with tools might be able to fig­ure out a way to cut the top off or drill a hole into the top of a fig­urine to make a vase, planter, tea-​​light holder or a piggy bank!  (Would a dremel tool work? Maybe a jig saw?)

It may be worth­while to break fig­urine and cre­ate a mosaic pat­tern with ceramic pieces.  Maybe you could use them as dec­o­ra­tion or a coun­ter­top backsplash?!

Here are a few ideas to get your brain churn­ing… any other suggestions?

Our week­end didn’t go as we had orig­i­nally hoped.  We got a late start and real­ized we didn’t have the nec­es­sary mate­ri­als, so a trip to the thrift store was in order…

There we picked up three tee shirts: one for Between the line’s quick fix gro­cery bag tuto­r­ial and the other two for our spin off of Tea Rose Home’s Ruf­fled Shirt tuto­r­ial.

The mar­ket bag was easy peasy and as we progress through farmer’s mar­ket sea­son we could totally see us whip­ping up a dozen or so of these (to coör­di­nate with out­fits)!  Just as eas­ily one could tote them to their local gro­cery store on a reg­u­lar basis.

The ruf­fle top went along fairly smoothly.  We found a slightly sheer, light­weight cot­ton top in a lovely soft shade of peach and couldn’t imag­ine mak­ing the ruf­fles in any­thing else!  When we used the long stitches on the sewing machine, it ruf­fled for us; no top­string tug­ging required!

Tea Rose Home cre­ated a very fem­i­nine top and we’re not quite brave enough to dive into peach when we’ve been wear­ing neu­trals all win­ter, so we chose a grey jer­sey tee for the base.  To make it less sporty look­ing we cut out the elas­tic around the neck and cut the sleeves and bot­tom.  That allowed the raw edges to curl slightly and the shorter sleeves and body gave it a more fem­i­nine (less uni­sex) look.  We can’t wait to wear it out and about this Spring!

Did you par­tic­i­pate in Leethal’s 24 hour Make-​​A-​​Long?  Share what you made in her Make-​​a-​​Long Flickr group and if it was made using recy­cled mate­ri­als add it to the Craft Evolve Flickr group as well!

We know we’ve been itch­ing to do some hard­core craft­ing, and Lee Meredith’s announce­ment of the 24 hour Make-​​a-​​Long is just the excuse we’ve been wait­ing for!  Remem­ber our inter­view of Lee way back when?  Well, that girl’s been busy!

You can check out her post for more details, but the basic premise is that you take 24 hours (or as much time as you can) start­ing this Sat­ur­day to go all out and craft what you usu­ally are unable to take the time to make.  Lee tells us to NOT knit for 15 hours straight!  Sounds good to us!

We’re going to spend some qual­ity time with the sewing machine.  We’ve got some thrifted fab­ric built up and we need to prac­tice our machine sewing.  We’ll be tweet­ing our progress with the hash­tag #makea­long, but oth­er­wise avoid­ing the com­puter until after we fin­ish our long run!  Don’t worry — we’ll post our fin­ished projects in the Craft Evolve Flickr group and we hope you’ll do the same!

What recy­cled projects are you plan­ning on attack­ing this week­end dur­ing the Make-​​a-​​Long?

A cou­ple of months ago we posted a how-​​to use cot­ton pajama pants for knit­ting, cro­chet, spin or macramé.  We also showed you our final result — a cute but­ton­ing bracelet!

Well, obvi­ously our pants cre­ated much more yarn that we real­ized and after using the rest, we had three neck­laces on top of the bracelet!  When knit­ting the mate­r­ial, we wor­ried we were going to run out so we kept start­ing very small projects with the fear we wouldn’t be able to fin­ish.  Now you know — if you use a size Large pant, you’ll have LOTS of yarn — so don’t fret.  Here are the three neck­laces we knit:

Now that you know about how much yarn is in a large pair of pajama pants, what would you have made with them?  That striped pat­tern is so clas­sic — it’s hard to go awry!