How to make a Bottle Cap Mosaic

I recently made a decision to actually start using all the fabric and craft stash that I have accumulated over the years, rather than just keep adding to it and 'planning' what to make. I wrote about that here.
So, this is me making a start on using what I've got!


 We've been collecting bottle caps for a couple of years now and have a decent sized collection. Although the tops do have the recycle symbol on them, they can't be recycled at our recycle facility up here in Cairns as they are too small and jam up the machines. Not wanting them to go to landfill and stay there forever, we've been saving them to do something creative with!

A couple of years ago, I made a lamp with my elder daughter using some of the caps we'd collected. 

This school holidays my younger daughter and I finally got a round to making this mosaic.We've been talking about making one for a long time. The bags sitting in my cupboard were growing and a constant reminder that I needed to do rather than talk about it!

We'd seen lots of these mosaics on Pinterest so had a look at my plastic lid upcycling Pinterest Board for some inspiration.

My daughter settled on a turtle.

First we laid out the caps in a rough design to see what size piece of backing wood we needed.

Then once we'd bought the board (we got a piece of MDF), my daughter painted it on both sides with some blue outdoor paint we had left over from another project. We want the mosaic to be outside to had to seal the wood to prevent warping in the rain.  The blue also worked well as a background colour for our picture.

Once the paint had dried, we laid out the bottle caps on the wood to finalise our design, then gave the bottle caps a final good wash and dry.

To attach the bottle caps, we just used liquid nails glue. I had a tube in my tool box, so used that first.

Then when that glue ran out, we moved onto a bigger tube of liquid nails that fitted into my caulking gun. This was so much easier and less messy! Next time I would go straight to this!

We started gluing with the turtle, right in the middle of the board, then worked our way up from the bottom of the board with the deep sea and coral, right up to the frothy white waves at the top.

  Sometimes the tops didn't fit too well together. The glue didn't set too fast so we had a chance for a bit of shuffling and adjustment. Plus with the background painted blue, the gaps didn't really matter.

Overall, we're really pleased with the result!

We haven't decided on it's final display spot in the garden yet. Once we've chosen, I'll secure it with screws to the fence!

This was fun to make, easy enough for my daughter to do most of it by herself, and she's already talking about the next one!  Yes, we still have lots of bottle caps left!

At least it's used up some of my stash, and I know the rest will get used up soon too! We also have a fabulous piece of unique art to display in our garden too!

Do you have anything saved in your cupboards for a project that you've been planning for a long time but not yet started?

Maybe it's time to get A Round Tuit!!!

Decluttering, Stashbusting, Use What You've Got

Declutter and Stashbust

We all feel the need to declutter our houses at times, and all you crafters and sewers out there, I'm sure there are plenty of you like me that have an enormous stash of fabric and 'resources' that is probably far bigger than your needs and every now and then you do a bit of  'stashbusting'.

Well, I do a lot of both decluttering and stashbusting, but I still seem to have just as much 'stuff' as I did a few years ago! 

What I have in my stash

My fabric stash consists of 5 x 55L boxes of larger pieces of fabric. That's 575L of fabric!  Sounds (and looks!) like an awful lot!!

Then there's my boxes of fabric scraps - those smaller pieces that I'm sure will be useful for plenty of little projects. All nicely colour coded and packed into 6 smaller boxes that sit under my sewing desk.

Then of course there's all the other things I keep for crafting projects. I see all kinds of cool projects on Pinterest that I think I'd like to try. I also save things that I don't want going to landfill; that seems like such a waste, when I could instead create something cool with them!

So I have lots of..

Plastic Bottle Caps.

CDs

Corks

Bread Tags and Bottle Caps

Pieces of Drainpipe

Of course endless notions for sewing - zips, buttons, clips, rings, anything that might be useful.

And then there's the clothes - always so many old clothes that I can't bear to through out or give away. Plus, a lot of my friends know that I upcycle clothes and they've started passing their old ones on to me, saying, "I thought you could make something with this"!!




Previous challenges

Back in 2011, I started my clothes upcycling with a month long challenge. I looked at the pile of old clothes I was accumulating and decided I needed to do something about them. I completed that challenge, sharing something every day in May that year that I'd upcycled. Finishing off with a stuffed fabric monster to use up the last of the scraps on the final day! One month, a large box of clothes - success!

Then last year I set myself a challenge to upcycle a HUGE pile of clothes I got from our school carnival, into things to sell at the carnival the following year. Here's what I started with.

I spent about 9 months sewing and creating. I had lots of fun, produced plenty of new sewing tutorials and in the end had a whole stall full of upcycled things to sell.

You can read about how that all went here if you're interested.

So I thought that I've done it before with a big challenge to 'use things up', why not try doing the same with my enormous stash of fabric and crafting resources?




Where did the stuff come from?

My fabric stash has largely come from charity shops, remnant boxes and a large chunk from a lovely old lady I used to know from when I had a market stall at the local shopping centre. She also had a market stall where she sold kids clothes that she sewed.  She quickly learned that I used up fabric scraps, so used to bring bags of hers to the markets and pass them on to me.
A few years ago, she moved away from Cairns to live in a retirement village further south near where her children live.  When she was preparing to leave, she was clearing her house out, and had a very impressive fabric stash to get rid of.
She showed me through her house - all the cupboards and drawers were crammed with fabric. She told me that when her husband died, she just filled up his sides of the cupboards with fabric!
I left her house with a whole car full of all kinds of fabric - and sewing and crafting books too!




I was thinking about this lady, my stash and my constant feeling just now that we have 'too much stuff'.  
What am I saving it all for?  It's not as if I'm looking forward to my retirement where I can sit and craft and use everything then.  When our girls grow up and leave home, we want to travel, go and explore, do, see and live an active and exciting life! Crafting and sewing is more what I'm doing at this stage of my life - with my kids at home to share that and learn things with me too.



Too much stuff

I like the idea of having a clear house, with lots of space and not so much 'stuff'.   

I thought lots about this when my parents visited us recently from the UK.  My parents always want to help us out where they can, and kept asking if they could buy us things - just small things and gadgets that they thought might make our lives easier - gadgets for the kitchen, new mugs to replace the ones we have that are chipped, new  things to replace those that are getting old and less efficient.

I felt a little ungrateful turning these offers down, but I just don't want or need more 'stuff' in our house.  I'm working on slowly decluttering and getting rid of things, the last thing I need is people working against me filling our house up with more stuff!! I have two kids to do that!!




Use what you've got

So that leaves me with my fabric and crafting stash and what to do with it.  I don't want to through it away - too wasteful and damaging for the environment.
Neither do I want to give it away for it to just sit in someone else's cupboard for years.  
So I've decided to use what I've got!  To make all these cool things I've saved oddments for, try out new crafts. Sew more things for us, for family, for friends or to sell or give away.

The size of my stash makes it quite overwhelming to set a time limit on it just yet, so I'll start with just using something up every week - and I will post about it to keep me accountable.

Maybe you have things stashed away too for projects that you've wanted to try for a long time but never gotten around to it!
Then why not join in in some SERIOUS STASHBUSTING!

Use what you've got 

and finally get 

A Round Tuit!!  


Do you think it's too large a goal to use up my stash completely?
Am I crazy?
Would you attempt to use up your entire stash?
I'd love to hear your thoughts - and if anyone is inspired to do any stashbusting of their own, no matter how small!

A denim skirt for doing cartwheels! - more clothes upcycling

This year my daughter is in the school musical production, Superkids.  I am helping out with the costumes.

My daughter has been cast as one of the school bullies, and they have to wear denim shorts or skirts. Since she has to do cartwheels and other gymnastics on stage, she asked me to make her a denim skirt that she could do cartwheels in!

I don't sew a lot of clothes, and when I do I like to keep it simple.  

I saw this as a great way to use up some more of my denim scraps too, so asked my daughter if a patchwork skirt would be ok.

She was happy with that, so I set to work with my denim scraps cutting strips the right length (measured from the length of one of her other skirts).

I also got a piece of wide elastic (from my Wonder Woman costume I made last year) and cut that down to her waist size - making a simple waistband.

I then stitched the denim strips together (they were all just roughly cut, not measured) and then joined them in a loop and simply stitched them to the waistband of the skirt.

Since the denim is rather thick fabric, I didn't want to just hem the bottom of the skirt.  We decided on snipping around the base and will 'ruffle' the fabric to create a raggy edged look.

The skirt is nice and simple and soft enough for my daughter to do her gymnastics on stage in.

She tested it out with the boots she will wear and was very happy with it!

The teacher directing the musical also asked me to make some denim accessories for the school bullies, so I made a few denim cuffs and collars with a bit of bling attached!  Jeans waistbands for the cuffs, and seams for the collars!

I had a couple of other costumes to create for the school musical. One for Captain Vegemite. This one was easy as all I had to make was a cape, then add the superhero logo to that and the t-shirt.

The other costume was for "Wholemeal Kid". For this one I found a brown skirt and t-shirt in the charity shop at a grand total of $2!  I adjusted these to a small kid's size, and added a logo, cape and a little bit of pink too!

Finally there were a few capes to decorate and make more 'super'. So my daughter and I spray painted some silver stars on them - again nice and simple.

I had lots of fun making these costumes, some fun school holiday sewing and creating. I can't wait to see them all up on stage when the musical opens in a few weeks time.

Plastic Free July - Never use a plastic shopping bag again!

Plastic Free July started in 2011 in Perth, Australia as a way to raise awareness of the huge amounts of plastic in our lives and the waste this produces.  The aim is to get people thinking about single use plastics in their day to day lives over the course of a month, and to try to eliminate them.

This is no longer just a small movement here in Australia - more than 40,000 people in 90 countries worldwide now participate in Plastic Free July. 

Will you try too?

Go here to read more.

Probably one of the most common single use plastic object found in daily life is the plastic shopping bag.

It is also one of the simplest things to cut out of your life simply by taking your own reusable shopping bags with you when you shop.

You can buy some or better still make your own. You need nothing more than an old sheet and some basic sewing skills!

Then there's the fruit and veggies you buy - and the small plastic bags you put those in too.

Once again - reusable bags.

Make your own - these ones are made from an old set of net curtains!

Or keep a folded handibag with you for unexpected shopping. This one is simple to make from a pillowcase!

It's all very well to have all these reusable bags, but how many times have you forgotten to take your bags with you? or left them in the car when you went into the supermarket?

I know I used to do that all the time!

So that's why I designed a special handbag that has all these bags inside, so you never forget your reusable shopping bags again!

Every week I get nice comments from people at the shops, and my weekly grocery shopping looks like this!

To try to help others reduce or even cut completely their consumption of single use plastic shopping bags, I put the sewing tutorials for all of these bags together in an ebook for anyone interested in making a set of their own.

All of the bags can be made using mostly recycled fabrics, and the tutorials are written clearly with plenty of photos meaning that anyone with basic sewing skills and a sewing machine can give these a go.

So why not take this step towards reducing your single use plastic consumption.

Soon you could have your own complete set of reusable shopping bags, never to be forgotten at home or in the car.

The E-book is available for free download by clicking this link:

Eco-Friendly Handbag Shopping Bags E-book

I myself have been using my reusable shopping bags for several years and have refused countless plastic bags.

I have also signed up for Plastic Free July this year to see if there are more ways I can reduce my plastic consumption.

I shall be sharing my journey here and on my Facebook page.

I hope you'll join in too - whether it's by making your own reusable bags or simply by refusing plastic straws.