Whether you’re looking for a last-minute gift idea or just feeling crafty, this fun, glowing lantern is an ideal DIY project that will bring a little brightness into your space this Winter Solstice week.
All you’ll need is a few cleaned plastic yogurt cups in addition to a plastic water or soda bottle. Easy! Dig through your recycling bin and you’re halfway there.
Cut randomly-sized triangles from the yogurt cups and glue them in concentric rings around the plastic bottle (with the bottom and top of the bottle snipped off).
Let the glue dry, add a pendant lamp socket and a low-watt LED bulb and enjoy the glow!
I made a fun little decoration yesterday – a garland of fluttering paper feathers made from recycled magazine pages and decorated with a bright watercolor wash. Its a Thanksgiving decoration that veers away from the traditional brown and orange palette, and you can give it a try by following along:
Step One: Find recycled magazines or other papers printed on a white background. Then create a feather shape template – I used two different shapes. Accordion-fold the paper and snip out a handful of feathers. Repeat until you’ve got at least 15-20.
Step Two: Get out your watercolors (I used gouache). Mix up some very watery colors, and brush them across the feathers. Make sure you’re painting on top of something you don’t mind getting stained. I used at least two colors per feather and let the colors blend together a bit. Let dry.
Step Three: Snip the fringe. Stack about 4-6 feathers together, and fold lengthwise. Using scissors, snip a fringe along the edges, but do not cut all the way across. Continue snipping all the way to the base of the feather. Unfold and separate the feathers, repeating with the next set.
Step Four: Measure of length of fishing line, and use small pieces of washi tape to attach each feather from behind.
You can hand the garland across a doorway, in front of a window, along the edge of a table, or just drape across a centerpiece. When they hang, the feathers catch any slight breeze or movement and twirl gently.
Its summer, which means its time to sit outdoors quaffing beer and delicately spearing olives with a toothpick. The challenge is getting comfortable on hot sand, pigeon-y urban concrete, scratchy drought-dried grass (for us Californians) and splintery decks. The answer is a cute, compact picnic blanket that rolls into a neat little burrito (and can even be tied onto your bike’s crossbar) and costs just about $4 to make. Your local thrift store or Goodwill has this strange section no one ever goes to, full of household linens. Score yourself a cute curtain or sheet for a liner and a thicker blanket or curtain for the bottom side and you’ve got yourself fifty percent of the way to this DIY picnic blanket. Head over to Inhabitat to read the whole step-by-step instructional by yours truly!
got cabin fever? freezing to death? (if you live anywhere but california, that is…sorry!) try out this fun DIY tutorial i created to make two different couch pillows out of recycled sweaters from a thift shop. one version has a button closure and utilizes the existing hem of the sweater. the other has an envelope-style closure in the back so you won’t need to sew on any buttons. have fun!
experiments in block printing for christmas gifts this year. handmade linen tea towels and cotton canvas duck envelope-style pillow cases. the most successful prints (shown here) were cutouts of thin foam glued onto corrugated cardboard. this provided adequate “give” to get the prints to completely transfer to the fabric with acrylic paint (thinned with fabric medium). linocuts were giving poor transference, either because of the ink, the fabric, or the transfer method (even with a soft surface under the fabric).
DIY Cardboard Christmas Village: all you need are a few of those Amazon Prime boxes you were going to throw away anyway. Recycle them into an architectural masterpiece for your Christmas decorating instead! Check out my latest tutorial here!
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