A Month of Repurposing—Day 8

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Each day this month I will post a repurposing idea.

DAY 8—Jar and Can Candles

Remelt your candle stubs and wax drippings. Blend your scraps into new colors, or peel old crayons to create the color of your choice. Place a small dab of melted wax to secure the wick to the bottom of a recycled jar or can, then fill. Use ribbons, trimmings, or garden odds’n’ends to decorate.

A Month of Repurposing—Day 7

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Each day this month I will post a repurposing idea.

DAY 7—Sock top inchworm

Got some worn-out socks? Use the tops (which don’t show wear) to create a toy for a baby. Add a fun sensory experience for little hands by including different sounds in each section. Order washable/dryable rattle inserts, jingle balls, squeakers, and crinkle material at https://feltandcraft.com.

A Month of Repurposing—Day 6

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Each day this month I will post a repurposing idea.

DAY 6—Domed Lid Candle Drip Protector

So you sprang for the whipped cream? Alleviate your guilt by repurposing the plastic domed lid. Flip it upside down, encircle a candle, and you’ve got a shield to protect against wax drippings.

A Month of Repurposing—Day 1

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Each day this month I will post a repurposing idea.

DAY 1 — Advent Calendar

My daughter repurposed 24 jean pockets, attaching them to a French ticking background cut from an old sofa slipcover. Four loops attach to over-the-door hangers—like a shoe bag. Each pocket holds a special gift.

Scanning for Stripes: Barcode Play

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How I love patterns! I have an embarrassing number of striped sailor shirts. With the advent of barcodes, invented in 1951, and prevalent since the 70s, our world has been inundated with stripes. Everything is scanned. I can’ help my own kind of scanning as I look for patterns in the world around us. Here is a gallery of my barcode play.

Limited Resources + Divergent Thinking = Expanded Possibilities

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What can you do with a brick?

Years ago in a college assembly, a couple of psychology students challenged each of us in the auditorium to develop a list of all the possible ways to use a brick. We were timed. Ready, set, go! We had two minutes. The Alternative Uses Test was designed by J.P. Guilford in 1967 as a means of evaluating divergent thinking abilities. The goal is to list non-obvious uses for a common object.

Components of Creativity

I took several psychology classes to qualify for my teaching degree, and since my focus was art, I thought a lot about attributes of creativity. This test measures four areas:

  • Fluency – how many uses can you think of?

  • Originality – how unusual are those uses?

  • Flexibility – what is the range of the ideas, in different domains and categories?

  • Elaboration – what level of detail and development is there for these ideas?

Try it! Re-examine common things around you

Resources galore are in plain view. We just need to notice and sharpen our divergent thinking skills to explore possibilities.

What can you do with mesh?

Onions, garlic, tomatoes, limes, avocados, sweet potatoes and other produce are often packaged in colorful mesh bags. I save these bags. Here are a few possible uses for them.

  1. Slip a mesh sleeve around a bar of soap to make a great exfoliator

  2. Cinch some mesh bags together to create a pot-scrubber

  3. Drill holes in a paint stir-stick. Cinch mesh bags at one end; add a loop at the other for a handy back scrubber

  4. Wash your delicates in a mesh bag with twist-tie closures

  5. Organize your packing with mesh bags

  6. Create colorful gift wrapping with mesh bags

  7. Design a holiday wreath using mesh

  8. Use mesh as hat netting

  9. Crochet mesh strips into a doormat

  10. Play dress up with a mesh tutu

  11. Create a crazy clown costume

  12. Protect your seeds and plantings with mesh covering


reflect, retool, rebound

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Time can seem suspended in these lockdown days of the COVID 19 pandemic, yet the pendulum still swings. Again and back, again and back. What does our future hold? Will we return to another Great Depression?

reflect

Throughout the Depression years, my grandmother harvested what resources she could. She redeemed old flour sacks, reusing the printed fabrics in dresses and quilts. She removed lace and buttons from old garments, reworking them into new ones. Nothing went to waste.

retool

Plato said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” When a need becomes imperative, we are forced to find ways of achieving it. What do we need today? Vintage lace and buttons are not high on the list. In demand now are face masks. People sheltering in place are finding inventive ways of making them from materials at hand. There are DIY videos and instructions featuring bandanas, socks, and even bras! People are using hair elastics, string, ribbons, bungee cords, and shoelaces to fasten masks.  

After reading that dense fabrics helped filter out germs, I cut up an old pair of denim jeans. I downloaded a pattern with a pocket area designed for positioning a wire to fit snuggly on the nose. I thought the flatness of a coffee bag tin-tie would feel more comfortable. It works great!

rebound

I will continue to explore these “re” words in my blog. Implied in all of them is a sense of flexibility and hope. Though difficult times may lie ahead, resilience lies in our ability to adapt and grow.

Making do

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I can make something out of nothing. I claim this as my superpower. This was not a power magically bestowed and I am not the only one with this power; it is a power that can be cultivated by anyone who has had to make do with limited resources. 

Raised by a single mother, I was part of a have-not family. What I did have was lots of experience taking care of my brothers while my mother worked. That gave me babysitting credentials, so I was allowed to work outside the home at a young age. With my earnings, I bought patterns and fabric and sewed most of my own clothes. I repurposed our old clothing and reworked thrift store finds into new fashions. 

It’s all in the perspective

What seemed like a disadvantage turned out to be an advantage for me in several ways. I learned to be resourceful, developing a host of DIY skills, as well as an eye for seeing the potential uses for many things others discard. Because I was a first-generation college applicant with financial need, I was offered a complete tuition grant at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. 

Unfortunately, when I graduated, the country was in a recession. I had studied fine art and was certified to become a teacher, but there were no job openings. I spent my first year after college as a substitute teacher, never knowing from one day to the next, if I would get called into work. My roommate was also a struggling teacher without proper employment, and between us, we had very little income, so we were excited the first month we actually saved enough money to buy a broom. Still, we found ways to enjoy our new grown-up life. We hosted friends and served what seemed sophisticated to us at the time—French-onion soup, made mostly of onions, bread, and water! 

Precious little

My first teaching position was as a middle school art teacher in West Linn, Oregon. I taught all the students, fifth through eighth graders, yet I had a measly annual budget of $400. I had to extend what resources I had and access additional ones. For an animation unit, I made a zoetrope out of an empty Baskin Robbins ice cream carton and used adding machine tape for the zoetrope strips. After I scored discarded films from a Portland TV station, my students scratched, bleached, and colored directly on the films to make their movies. In a weaving unit, my students spun dog hair combings into yarn and dyed it yellow from onion skins or brown from walnut hulls. We experimented with handmade paper, recycling scraps in a blender. We created life-size human sculptures using chicken wire, and paper mâché made from newspaper strips and paste made from flour and water. There was much we could do with little.

Today, with uncertainty about the financial impact of COVID 19, I anticipate that we will all need to tighten our belts. I know how to do that. I’ve been doing it my whole life and it has always stimulated creativity. Let’s approach this coming time as an opportunity to rethink how we use the resources around us. In future posts, I hope to provide inspiration to teachers, crafters, and anyone like me, who feels rich and empowered by making.