In My Studio- Using up Scraps

After a busy holiday season January is the perfect time for me to have a big sort out of my supplies. One area that threatens to take over is my remnant stash, one scrap of fabric seems to multiple overnight and becomes an overflowing colorful hoard.

Each small scrap seems so precious to me, knowing its origins and its possibilities. I endeavor to try and use up all my scraps not only because I love all of these fabrics and can't bare to throw them away but in an effort to save money, to do a small bit for the environment and because I want to breath new life into these redundant offspring.

January seems like a perfect month to use up the scraps, maximize my existing supplies, organize my remnant stash and get creative with the possibilities.

Here are some ideas for projects to get crafty with your own scraps:

Butterfly Hair Barrettes



Monster Tooth Fairy Pillows





Flower Brooches



Flower Birthday Cards



Heart decorations

"I'm a little bit of a fabric lunatic" John Malkovich

Good Luck and Good Making!

Sarah Omura

So Handmade



The Quest for Materials

There are many reasons to love summer; warmth, flowers, swimming, fireflies, grilling, gardening, and spending time outdoors.  One activity that I look forward to every summer is going to yard sales.

On the Saturday mornings that we have no plans, my husband and I have a ritual. We search through Craigslist for local yard sales. We usually don’t have to travel too far and rarely come home empty handed. Often, we meet interesting people in our town.

Today, we went to a barn sale, which was actually a garage and driveway sale,  and a flea market that was held on the grounds of a local church, and included multiple vendors who were selling vintage items. While my husband ran an errand,  I  was able to visit my favorite place for gathering supplies; Hoffman’s Barn in Red Hook, NY, which sells used vintage furniture and housewares.

At garage sales, my husband usually searches for computer parts, gardening tools, and musical instruments, while I search for materials to use in my mosaic pieces. I look for items that have a wooden base, china dishes, bottles, boxes, silver plated dishes, old photos, and vintage books.

Today, we both got lucky. I came home with a vintage wooden framed mirror, a wooden bread tray with handles, 2 vintage bottles, 4 flowered china teacups, a silver plated plate, and an aluminum bowl. My husband came home with a computer to refurbish, a mechanical drum set, and after having a conversation with a garage sale seller, he was offered one a free ticket to the Clearwater Festival for tomorrow!

Jenny - Reclaimed Designs

Earth Day Revolution

by Neely Coyote McCormick from NellsBelles

I have a real knack for shopping. I mean I can walk into a place, find what is on sale, identify what is terrific about an item that has been passed over and breathe new life into it and pay practically nothing for it. It’s all about time and place and not having a judgement about something coming from the road traveled to long and too far. I lived a lot of my life sport shopping, accumulating lots of things I love and more that I absolutely never needed. That all changed very painfully and very abruptly a couple of years ago.

Two things happened in quick succession. First, my husband and I got caught in the real estate collapse right about the time we had decided to downsize. We had bought a smaller house with a barn for me to work in while still in possession of the larger home we lived in for the last 10 years. The upshot of that experience was that we never moved into the more modest house because it was easier to sell and we were on the verge of foreclosure on four We were drowning in paper obligations we never had any business taking on in the first place.

The second thing that happened was after talking to my girlfriend, she said something that changed my life. We were talking about Christmas shopping. There was barely money for groceries so Christmas gifts were out of the question. She told me that she was in Macy’s and when she arrived on her floor, she stopped for a moment and looked around. And then it hit her - every single thing in the store, including the construction of the building, everything within her sight, would end up in a landfill. Every dress, every screw, every floor tile, every shoe, every makeup brush every yard of fabric and carpet every rhinestone every watch…would eventually end up as trash in a landfill somewhere on this planet of ours. I can tell you, my mind was blown forever at this thought.

I would identify every single place and every single day as a way to reuse something instead of buying more. Fortunately, my work at the time was broken piece mosaics so I already had a reuse, recycle, reinvent mentality about using my materials. Not only was I using old china but I would purchase the chipped stuff on sale tables and friends were bagging up everything they broke and giving it to me. This way of working caused me to begin seeing things in components. A plate that was not really much to look at but had one beautiful rose right smack dab in the middle of the plate was a find. An otherwise white plate with a beautiful gold border around the edge would make a perfect border around a house number was a keeper. I was developing an eye for salvage.

When I started making jewelry, I ran to Michael’s to stock up on materials. Looking at all the findings, beads, pendants, wire, I was struck by two things. One, these materials were not going to express the vision I had in my head. Two, more than the materials themselves was all of the packaging. Everything came with cellophane, cardboard, staples, tape, wire - all manner of packing materials that would end up in the garbage before I even made my first necklace. The image of the Arthur Kills landfill flashed before me and I no longer had a feel for my new jewelry line.

One day I was cleaning out a drawer and there were several pieces of junk jewelry, those impulse buys from Target or H&M that you wore once and then wondered why you bought it to begin with. I also came across some old grandma pieces that I would never wear but felt terrible tossing out. I opened myself up to the possibility in these tidbits and then I began to see components. If I disassembled the jewelry, there would be clasps, jump rings, beads, chains - all the things I had walked away from at Michael’s were staring me right in the face! I could make the jewelry I was envisioning by disassembling and recomposing them in a new and creative way. Suddenly, everything I laid my eyes on became potential material for all of my work.

We on this planet have enough. Some of us have too much and some not enough but there is enough stuff for everyone. We as artists can create a revolution now. We can explore the esthetic of recycling and reimagine what is beautiful. We have a power and a responsibility, as artists, to see the world through different more thoughtful eyes. Let’s make our contribution to our planet this earth day by pledging to develop new eyes. Let’s see the treasure not the trash.

Earth Day

Tomorrow is Earth Day and while we have come a long away being more socially conscious, we still have a ways to go. The members of the Hudson Valley Etsy Team don't need a special date or month in doing our part to help the environment and recycle goods.

Noelle from Moonfire Studio has a fun activity in stored, "My kids and I are making recycled paper for Earth Day. We use my scrapbooking scraps and other acid -free papers and dried leaves and flowers from the garden. We also iron different textures into the paper with lace shapes that I have - butterflies, leaves, etc. We did it last year too and it's alot of fun."

Judy from JSWMetalWorks.etsy.com uses vintage components in some of her pieces like in her Light Blue Vintage Japanese Bead Byzantine Necklace , "I just got a bunch of old jewelry and antique keys that used to belong to my grandmother which I'm planning on incorporating in to my jewelry."

Gwen from Beyond The Picket Fence uses produce from the local markets to make her soap and will only use natural, sustainable ingredients.

Jenny from ReclaimedDesigns mosaics are made with recycled and repurposed items.

Visit tomorrow for an entry by Neely from NellsBelles on her discovery of simplfying and new use for old materials.

Green Packaging

So we start off a new year and a new decade with good intentions. Perhaps one of those is to consider ways to green up our daily living practices. As I've looked more closely this past year at where our food comes from, ways that I use and waste energy, etc., I"ve also thought about my art and its impact on the environment.

Take the simple process of getting a pin to a customer. What are my options for packaging? Factors that might go into my choices would be where my materials will come from - how far away? Are they made from recycled products? Can they be recycled themselves? What is a fair trade off for aesthetics and practicality vs greenest option and cost?

So far I use hang tags that are printed locally, using non-recycled card stock. I couldn't find a good card stock that had recycled content without buying much larger quantities than I'd ever use.

I do use cardboard gift boxes made from recycled paper. But they are sent from California - and perhaps somewhere else before that. A lot of fuel goes into delivering them to me!

Then I mail them out to customers. I'd been using bubble mailers till I read about other solutions on Etsy threads. Since then I've been looking for the old fashioned padded mailers that are recyclable, but in the meantime have been wrapping the box in bubble wrap and putting it in a regular mailer. This way, at least, the bubble wrap can be reused if someone cares to - and the mailer can be recycled. Recently I did find the padded mailers I'd been looking for at Target's. They're made by 3M so now the task is to try to find a wholesaler to buy them from so the cost will be a little more reasonable.

I write this not having the answers, but hoping to get a fruitful dialogue going, so that we can all move ahead in our businesses, knowing that we're doing what we can to live carefully.