Crafts and DIY projects mainly using upcycled materials
A soda can tab is high-grade aluminum. Non-magnetic, paint-free, recyclable without end, which is the whole reason upcycling them beats letting them pile up in a drawer. The scrap value is a joke. It takes somewhere between 1,100 and 1,500 tabs to make a single pound, and a pound is worth well under a dollar, … Read more
Paper covers what paint only advertises , a scratched dresser top, a laminate cabinet, the water ring on a thrift-store tray. Decoupage has been the fix for all of it for centuries, from the 18th-century Venetian workshops that glued cut engravings onto furniture to fake lacquer, down to the rice-paper dressers filling Pinterest this week. … Read more
Glass melts down and reforms forever with no loss in quality, one of the very few materials that can make that claim. And yet Americans recycle only about a third of what they throw out, and the rest, once it’s buried, sits there for thousands of years ( EPA put the 2018 rate at 31.3%). … Read more
Most recycled-craft roundups read like a list of things to hot-glue googly eyes onto. This one is sorted for the adult actually running the table: a milk jug feeder you can watch from the window, a pony bead suncatcher that needs exactly one careful grown-up step, seed bombs that leave the classroom and become wildflowers … Read more
The button jar is the original circular economy: a lifetime of fasteners snipped off worn-out shirts, inherited from somebody’s sewing tin, and rattling around waiting for a second job. The eleven projects below run from a five-minute fridge magnet to a thread-wound Dorset button that has been made by hand in England since 1622, with … Read more
Almost everything you need for a wind chime is already in your junk drawer, your recycling bin, or the dish you keep meaning to throw out: orphaned keys, empty coffee cans, a chipped teacup, a fistful of leftover beads. What separates a chime from a tin-can rattle is rarely the materials and almost always one … Read more
Most denim crafts fail the same way: they look like denim crafts. The fix is to stop treating dead jeans as blue fabric and start using what makes them denim, the felled seams, the gold topstitching, the pockets, the way indigo goes pale at the knees. Everything below is built from jeans you would otherwise … Read more
The amber prescription bottle might be the single most useless thing you can drop in a recycling bin, and one of the most useful things to keep. It’s #5 plastic , polypropylene, technically recyclable , but the bottles are small enough that they slip right through the sorting screens at most facilities, and once they … Read more
The pencil holder is where good cans go to die, so none of the twelve projects below leave the cylinder looking like a cylinder. Three tricks do most of the hiding: light pushed through punched metal, sound tuned by the size of the can, and a cut or a length of wire that turns a … Read more
A wine bottle is not a mason jar. The projects that suit it have nothing to do with the chalk-painted, twine-wrapped jar crafts you’ve scrolled past a hundred times. A narrow neck and a tall straight wall want to be cut, hung, and lit , a different toolkit, and one worth owning. Most of the … Read more
