Recycled Picture Frames

Sorry about the hiatus folks, the summer was pretty hectic and I honestly forgot about this blog until just yesterday. However - I am excited to be writing again and sharing the cool stuff we've done with other people. Our first teen programs of the school year were this week, and we started them off by making picture frames out of recycled library cards. Why we have all these cards from other libraries, I'm not sure. We got new cards awhile back, so these must have been sent as samples, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. It's always nice to do recycled crafts - so cheap!

All you have to do is cut the cards up and glue them on to a frame. We have a frame die for our Accucut machine and we get mat board donated from a nearby

framery, so that was no cost to us either. I'm sure other picture frames would work well, we were just going with what we've got. The first one I did, I tried to do even sized squares (top right pic), but I think I like having all the different sizes better. The few kids that showed up really liked it (this first one wasn't really well advertised), and I think I'll use it again in the future.

Stay tuned - I'm going to try to catch up on the last few months that I missed!

Plastic Flowers

Further in my quest in all things recyclable, I turned to plastic bottles. I had seen plastic flowers online (along with ones made of egg cartons), and decided to try my hand at it.


It's fairly straightforward. Find a clean plastic bottle, and cut it into a flower shape. The top two flowers in my pictures are a couple of my early prototypes. The red is made from the top
of a water bottle - I just made the neck of the bottle the base of the flower and then cut the bottle in half. I then cut down to the neck, making petal shapes. The blue flower is made using the base of the bottle. There are a lot of bottles that have a natural 5 petal pattern at the bottom. I just cut the bottle in half, and then followed the "natural" already made lines to make a flower shape. Both of these flowers were painted with tempera, though it is a bit messy and difficult to use. I also hadn't figured out anything to do with them. Because of the way they were made, I couldn't use it for jewelry. I could've tried attatching them to pipe cleaners to make a stem.


The other blue flower was made using a different method. I took a larger bottle - 2 liter (the other two were made using water bottles or small soda bottles), and cut flat flower shapes out of the main body of the bottle. I then colored them with sharpies, which is cleaner and gives a translucent color, and glued a couple of layers together. I then added a little glitter and a rhinestone, slapped a pin on the back - and voila recycled accessory!

The teens seemed to like this well enough. Depending on the thickness of the plastic, it can be a bit hard to cut sometimes. Cheap water bottles are the easiest to cut.

Computer disk notebooks

I found these babies over at Lexacat's blog. They are super easy to make, and now that almost no one uses these anymore, you should be able to find plenty of them in your house or library.

It's really simple. All you have to do cut paper into 3.5" squares, punch holes, and put the whole thing together with loose leaf notebook rings, key rings, or some other metal loop. And if you say, "But my disks don't have two holes!", look again. Most have a sliding lock. If you slide that down or over, you should see another hole there. There are some disks that do have only one hole though. I also used the stickers that come with most disks to decorate my notebooks.

The teens really lived this craft. It was easy for them to do, and it allowed them to personalize it and really be creative and make it their own.

Rubber band jewelry

Now you may be thinking to yourself "Yeah, yeah - we've seen rubber band jewelry before. It's nothing special." And for the most part I would agree. The rubber band jewelry featured in a particular book my library was sent was abysmal (along with most of the other crafts in the book). However, in my journeys online I found this via Junk Jewelry blog and was inspired. So I pulled out my needles, thread, and seeds beads, and after an hour or two of twisting and turning the rubber bands, and trying different things out, I decided I had an awesome craft.

I made a string of examples of some of the different things you could do with the medium. Unfortunately, it was all for naught. The teens had a really difficult time holding the rubber bands in the right shape while they poked the needle through, so most ended up looking nothing like the pics I've posted. Some took the bands and cut them open into long strips and strung them on that way. All in all, I don't know that this is something I'd repeat again. I'm definitely interested in doing other jewelry things with them, but I would only do this particular one if I had a really artsy/crafty group I knew could handle this.