Upcycle/Recycle T-Shirt

UPCYCLE/RECYCLE T-SHIRT

A simple DIY project to upcycle/recycle an old T-shirt from boring to kool!!

 

All you need is an old T-Shirt, scissors, unpicker, sewing machine and 30 minutes!!

The first step is to unpick the hem.

Now cut the hem off at the old stitch marks, then cut that in half at the fold. You should have 2 thin strips.

Lie the T-Shirt flat on the ground

Cut off the sleeves as close to the seams as possible.

Now cut straight across from one side to the other keeping as close to the front neck hole as possible.

This is what it should look like.

Fold to the inside and pin the top/neck edge. Both front and back.

Now sew it

Thread the thin strips you cut off in the first step into the newly sewn edges

Try on the shirt and tie the strips at the right length.

DONE

How KOOL is that!!

BOOK PAGE FOLDING

Book Page Folding

This is not a hard thing to do, time consuming maybe but not hard!!

This is a great gift idea as you can personalize the word or image to suit anyone!!

 

The first thing I did was to print out the word and size I wanted on some graph paper.

Then counted how many pages I needed. You don’t need to leave any pages/spaces between each letter. Some letters like ‘s’ ‘c’ ‘b’ etc you need extra pages as each page you only fold once and when there is a part of the letter (vertically) top and bottom in the same line you use two pages. With a ‘B’ you even need 3 pages per line at some parts!!

 E.g. with this ‘B’ alone you need 79 pages to fold. As you start folding it will all make more sense.

For this word ‘Books’ I needed to fold 320 pages so the book I got had 640 numbered pages (as every page has a numbers on both sides!!)

Now the easy bit!! You need a pencil, ruler and book with enough pages.

On the first page place the ruler as close to the spine as possible and lightly mark the page at the top and bottom.

 

Slip in the graph paper until the edge of the ‘B’, making sure that you line up the top of the page with the top of the graph paper.

Again slightly mark where the top and bottom of the letter ‘B’ is with pencil on the first page.

Remove the graph paper and mark your spot on it too!!

Now match top two top marks (top of page near the spine and top of the ‘B’) with the ruler and fold

Repeat to the bottom two marks. Frist page done!!

I used a bulldog clip to keep the pages out of my way.

Keep doing the above steps of marking (both near the spine and the letter) and folding, don’t forget to mark your place on the ‘B’ template so you can keep track of where you are up to.

When you get to the busy bit of the ‘B’ you will need to fold 3 pages per vertical line

This is what the ‘B’ looks like when finished

 

Slowly work your way through the word and book.

When I got to the end I still had some pages left over (the book had more than 640 pages) so I folded a little heart in the top corner. You could also neatly remove some pages if need be.

HOW COOL ARE THESE !!

Wobbly Egg Heads

Wobbly Egg Heads

 

As kids I remember making these Wobbly Egg Heads with my brothers!!

The first thing we did was to ‘blow’ the eggs. One hole needs to be small but the top hole (small end of the egg) can be a good size. We used a pin to create the holes, then blew through the little hole so the egg yolk and white came out of the bigger hole. After the eggs were ‘blown’ we rinsed them out then put them into the sun to dry.

The next step was to evenly weight the base of the eggs so they can stand upright. We used UHU tac but you could use anything – clay, plasticine, playdough etc. There was a little bit of fiddling to get it weighted correctly.

Now we drew and cut out a circle from decorative paper. We put a cut up to the centre.

We slip one cut edge under the other to make a little pyramid shape hat, then stuck it together with tape.

The fun part was drawing faces onto the eggs using permanent markers. Now we popped the hat on with a bit of glue.

DONE!!