Denim ornament upcycle

 

It's the holiday season. While my Jewish-Muslim family does not do a lot for Christmas, many of our friends celebrate. I had a few events to attend, a few gifts to give and a desire to be sustainable. My stash of scraps and materials to upcycle is also getting too big for the space that I have in my house.  Given all that, I decided to start crafting. 

While I seldom wear jeans because I can't find jeans that fit well (but someday maybe I will make a pair),  I have found that I  like to work with denim especially piecing together different colors. I found the directions to make quilted denim stars from Pillar Box Blue and thought I would make a few as Christmas gifts for a few of my friends who celebrate. 

The directions from Pillar Blox Blue were fantastic, so I won't repeat the step-by-step, but I will share my tweaks. 

I made the first star using a 7cm template as described in the blog, but that turned out a little large for a Christmas ornament so I created a 6 cm template for the additional ornaments I made. The seams on the first one were a little messier than I wanted so I switched my sewing foot to a quilting foot and that helped me sew more precise about 1/4 inch seams. I also chain-stitched the diamonds for multiple starts didn't have to waste time or thread. 

 

I basted the ribbon I wanted to use as the hanger on the edge of the right side of the denim star before I sewed the denim to the backing. That way the ribbon emerged nicely from the seam once I turned the star right side out. I also used small pieces of fabric to stuff the stars. The opening from which I stuffed it was pretty small so I used a funnel and a chopstick to help push the scraps in.  While I did attach a button to the center, the ornaments looked good without additional quilting stitches so I skipped that as well.

I  was pretty amazed at how well the stars turned out. And I was able to wrap the stars with upcycled materials before gifting. 

Upcycled holidays

This year it appears that we have reached 1.5 C of warming above preindustrial levels.  This level of temperature increase is not sustained at this point, but things don't look great for Mothership Earth. I am freaked out. I am also human and therefore a social creature. I have been thinking about recent temperature anomalies and I was invited to two holiday/birthday social gatherings this weekend. It can be hard to reconcile my desire to consume less and participate as a member of society and the consumption that entails. 

These two events involved gifting items to multiple people. So, as I often do, I decided to incorporate zero-waste principles. I did purchase a few new items such as a bottle of wine and books. But then I had fun getting creative with the garbage.  Instead of purchasing gift wrap that would be used once and then tossed or recycled, I chose to reuse other items. I wrapped a few gifts with an old map and even created bows with strips cut from it. 

The bottle of wine came in a bag so I cut a '5' and a '0' from a catalog that came in the mail and pasted them on to create a birthday theme. I also turned a coffee bag inside out to create a gift back for another item. I wasn't so thrilled with how simply turning it inside out looked so I cut the bag into a rectangle and transformed it into wrapping paper.  I cut a few narrow strips from the bag and ran scissors against it to create curly ribbon. 

I also made some upcycled gifts for these events, and you can read more about that in my companion blog post. 

When we exchange gifts within the immediate family, we now use cloth bags that we then save for the next time. We have been using them for the past few years.