Crafts and DIY projects mainly using upcycled materials
Most denim bag tutorials tell you to print a pattern and buy new hardware before you cut anything. Skip both. A messenger bag is a rectangle with a flap, and an old pair of jeans already holds the finished hem for that flap, two working pockets, and a waistband that does most of a strap’s … Read more
Thirteen ways to turn the pockets off a dead pair of jeans into something that hangs on a wall and holds mail, thread, hair ties, or a charging cable. They are sorted by the one decision that determines whether any of them work, which is what sits behind the pockets. Get that wrong and you … Read more
Cut the legs off a worn-out pair of adult jeans and you get four flat panels of heavy cotton, and on most pairs the fabric below the knee never failed at all. A braided rag rug is the only denim project I know of that eats the whole pile rather than one nice pair, and … Read more
Every idea below puts the butterfly on a line the jeans already have: a pocket edge, a felled outseam, a hem, a knee that has gone thin. That placement is the whole difference between embroidery that looks like part of the garment and embroidery that looks like a sticker somebody stitched down. Eleven treatments follow, … Read more
Air-dry clay loses between five and ten percent of its size as it dries, and it shrinks around the hole you punched as readily as it shrinks everywhere else. Punch that hole a full quarter inch wide and the rest of this project forgives almost everything else you do to it. The thirteen stamped clay … Read more
Most wood slice ornament designs are painted for a full tree, where forty pieces blur into texture and no single one gets looked at. A minimalist tree inverts that math: eight or ten ornaments on visibly spaced branches, each read on its own, at arm’s length, against empty air. Detail that disappears into a crowded … Read more
A properly dried cranberry is roughly half the size of the one that went into the oven, matte where it used to be waxy, and hard enough to click against a wooden bead. That is the berry that gets a mantel through to January. The plump one strung straight out of the bag goes soft … Read more
A single strand of popcorn and cranberries covers about four feet of tree and costs roughly what a bag of microwave popcorn does. It is the one decoration that starts as food and, if you make it right, goes back to being food in January. This is the old-fashioned strand built for a sparse vintage … Read more
The fastest way to make one of these ornaments look like a school craft project is to press a real leaf into the clay and leave it there. It rots, it curls, and within a week you have a grey disc with a brown smear on it. The technique that actually works is the opposite … Read more
Most denim Christmas projects start with the darkest jeans in the pile, on the theory that deep indigo is what reads as denim. On a green tree or against dark wood, that’s exactly backwards. Dark indigo goes flat and vanishes from about six feet away, which is where people actually stand. The garlands that carry … Read more
