More Cheap Crafts

When I start looking at craft ideas, I nearly always find myself saying "I can make that cheaper!"

I have even thought about doing a series of frugal - really frugal - crafts, but I am lazy when it comes to writing instructions and taking pictures of projects as I go. Okay, I will be honest here. I forget to take photos until it's finished.

So... rather than bore you with craft after craft that's made cheaper than most anyone else, let me just list some substitutes that may help you do your craft projects cheaper, or at least give you some ideas you can work from.

Here we go:

If you cut a circle out of an old cardboard box then cut the center out of that, you have a wreath form that you can pin or glue things to. If you need one that isn't flat, add some stuffing under fabric to the front, or put a few more circles on it, in smaller sizes.

Bits of leftover yarn is great for doll hair, angel hair, and stuffing small objects, among other things. For fluffy angel hair, fasten the yarn then comb it with an old comb to separate and fluff it.

Use yarn instead of ribbon to dress up a package.

Instead of a styrofoam cone to make a Christmas tree, make one from paper. I just use a plain rectangle, put the edges together until it's cone shaped, then cut off the excess. Card stock works best... no cardstock? Use the sturdy front of a catalog or magazine.

If you get packages with those long strips of brown or offwhite packing paper, save it, iron it and use it. For what? Wrapping paper, paper to make patterns on, paper to draw or paint on and anything you'd use brown kraft paper for.

Also, save some cereal boxes. The pasteboard is useful for many things. Paint it for signs, cut and fold it for miniature furniture, make notebook covers from it, among other things. 

Picture frames are easy to make from cardboard or pasteboard and you can decorate them so they look expensive. Cut the back and front the same size, then cut out the center of the front piece for the frame. Attach both pieces together except for the top, where you will insert the photo or artwork. Decorate the frame with cloth, paint, yarn or any combination. For instance, soak cloth in white glue/water combination, then attach to frame, add yarn in swirls or whatever shape you like. When it's all dry, paint it.

Don't run out and buy special craft paints if you have leftover latex paint at home. Use that. If you have food coloring you can tint the latex whatever color you like. You can paint cardboard, paper and cloth, so let your imagination flow.

Save odd shaped bottles or jars to make vases or to use for gifts. If you need to camouflage the screw top, paint it and/or tie ribbon or yarn around it.

I don't even remember where this bottle came from, but the grasses came from my backyard. Frugal enough?

There are many, many ways to save when it comes to crafting. The bottom line is to think of what to subsitute before going out and buying supplies.

Frugal Crafting

Do you enjoy crafts, but hesitate to buy craft supplies that seem so expensive? They're not always necessary. I have been browsing through some craft blogs and while most of them have great ideas, so many of them list materials that seem unnecesarily expensive. Jars, paint, posterboard, all kinds of paper punches and cutters, beads and so on. There's a better (frugal) way!

Here are a few substitutions:

For posterboard, try cardboard, pasteboard (from shoeboxes, tablet backs, shirt forms, etc.) cardstock if you already have it. Glue two sheets together if you need to.
For beads, check your jewelry for something ready to sacrifice, or your button box, Some buttons are beautiful and can be made to fit the situation. Learn how to make paper beads and you'll never have to buy them.
Mason jars - this is an easy one. Save any unique jars that you come across. Labels will peel or soak off and if the lid labels won't come off, you can paint over them.
For paint, first look around for what you might have. Small jars of leftover acrylic paint is great, but wall paint or even house paint, works too. Don't forget that nail polish is basically paint. If you just need a tiny bit, a bottle of cheap nail polish will save you money on small projects, and look at all those colors!
Special paper or foil for crafts: Check your gift wrap supply. And don't forget the alumimun foil, wax paper and freezer paper. Of course, it helps if you save odds and ends of foil or pretty paper throughout the year.

I keep a craft stash that includes odds and ends of ribbon and lace from old clothing, elastic from the same source, very inexpensive floral wire, odds and ends of paper, cloth and other materials. I have saved, at one time or another, a few empty food cans of various sizes, shoeboxes, facial tissue boxes and old plastic table cloths.

They all came in handy. For instance, I had a black plastic lid that just fit a small glass bowl that I wanted to use for refrigerator storage. The lid had the logo of something or other on it, and to make it more presentable, I cut a circle from an old tablecloth which had a pumpkin on it and glued it to the lid. It looked like it belonged there, honest!

Crafting doesn't have to be an expensive hobby. Paying a lot of money to make something kind of defeats the purpose, as far as I am concerned. Look around at what you already have and use it.

Uses for Old Pantyhose

I'm of the school that says "Never throw anything out if it can possibly be used for something else." With that in mind, here are my favorite uses for old pantyhose:

Cut appropriate size lengths and put a simple knot in one end. Fill the resulting sack with herbs for a bath or potpourri for a dresser drawer and tie the open end closed.

Use them as Halloween masks. They will flatten your facial features and make you unrecognizable, but you can breathe and see through them - the perfect mask for a small child.

Slit the side and cut a piece the right size to stretch over a small embroidery hoop. Fasten securely and use it as a strainer.

If you have several, make a washable, soft throw pillow from them. It's easy!

  1. Cut off the waist bands of panty hose and discard or find another use for them (use them like huge rubber bands - hold flowers together in a vase, keep mail or papers together, etc.).

  2. Cut two cloth rectangles the size you want the pillow to be and sew three sides.

  3. Stuff the pillow with pantyhose until it's full.

  4. Turn under the open edges and whipstitch or blindstitch the pillow closed.

  5. To help keep the pantyhose stuffing in place, use a large needle with yarn or small ribbon and make a single stitch in the center of the pillow, leaving both ends of the yarn or ribbon loose. Draw these up and tie in a bow.


Make a granny doll with one leg of an old pantyhose:

  1. Start at the toe and stuff the first two or three inches with another piece of old pantyhose. Tie a string around it, then stuff another section, this one four to five inches, with yet another pantyhose piece. Make yet another section about six inches long, but before tying off the last section, put something heavy at the very bottom so the doll can stand up. A few washers or nuts, sinkers or a handful of small pebbles will do the trick.

  2. With a needle and thread, make a firm running stitch up the center of the last section, making "legs" for the doll. For the arms, make a running stitch about a half inch from either side of the body section.

  3. To make the face, using a needle and thread, enter the doll's body from a point several inches away and bring the needle out on either side of where a nose would be and draw the thread firmly back into the face to make an indent. By using the needle and thread, you can create a facial shape, indenting where eyes and mouth should be.

  4. Using yarn, embroider eyes and mouth. Add yarn for hair and dress granny in an old fashioned doll dress or let your imagination run with it.  You can make a dress for the doll by cutting a circle large enough to drape from shoulder to toe. With needle and thread, tack along the inside of the arms and around the waist, gathering the excess material to make a full skirt. 

Creative With Cardboard

Still got cardboard boxes hanging around after the holidays? Put them to good use! Cardboard is a surprisingly sturdy material that's also easy to cut, fold and otherwise manipulate. The only downsides are that water will destroy it and it burns quickly.

You can cut it with sturdy scissors or a sharp knife, paint it, decorate it with contact paper or colored tape or decoupage it. As a matter of fact, it will do a lot of things that wood will, and it's a lot cheaper (free!).

I just came across a really cool shoe rack you can make of cardboard here, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. You can make anything from emergency tables for kids to "paper" chains that will last holiday after holiday.

One of the easiest things to make from small cardboard boxes is storage boxes and bins. Sure, you can use them just like they are, but what's the fun in that? Go dig up some leftover paint and/or a leftover strip of contact paper, or yesterday's newspaper and decoupage glue. Have fun decorating a few boxes that you can leave out in plain sight instead of shoving them to the back corner of the closet. You can make them a lot prettier than any storage box you can buy and you can customize them to exactly suit your room!

Never get rid of a cardboard box without asking yourself if it will fill a need in your home. There are lots and lots of pages on the internet with so many projects made from cardboard that I couldn't even list them here.

Let us know what you find and what you decide to make! 

Christmas Uses for Cardboard Boxes

If you shop online at all, you probably have quite a stash of cardboard boxes. Besides sending gifts to loved ones far away, they can be used to make some frugal and cool things.

Try your hand at a shadow box. You can put in an old fashioned scene, a "Nativity Scene," a mountain covered with snow or let your imagination roam. Use pictures from old Christmas cards, advertisements, catalogs or whatever strikes you as interesting.

You can use small boxes in lieu of Christmas stockings or baskets, filling them for specific individuals, or making more generic, frugal last minute gifts out of them. Cover them inside and out with wrapping paper or foil.

Fill a few with candy, cookies, notepads, etc., wrap and have them ready for those "Oh, no, I need another gift!" times. If you don't use them all, give them away to the postman, a retirement home or charity.

Five More Things You Never Need to Buy

Quart sized freezer bags. You probably throw them away every week if you buy frozen vegetables. Those bags are freezer bags. They wouldn't sell them in those bags if they weren't capable of keeping the vegetables fresh and frost free. Cut them carefully across the top when you open them and use a twist'em tie or rubber band to close them securely when you fill them.

Refrigerator containers. Cottage cheese, sour cream, yogurt and more come in resealable plastic containers that can be used over and over again. Get some cheap masking tape to label the contents. A bonus is that they're ultimately stackable and hold more than they look.

Canisters. Storage jars are free. Really. Check your local restaurants to see if they will save you a few gallon jars. They buy them with everthing from pickles to boiled eggs in them. Most come with sealing lids so your flour and sugar will be safe. You can also use them for beans, pasta and other food products.

Compost. Make your own, of course. That's a no-brainer, but sometimes it's hard to accomplish, especially if you have limited space or it isn't conveniently located. Invest in a bowl with a lid to hold your compostable kitchen scraps and simply dig a hole in an out of the way place in your yard and dump the goods in there. Cover them with dirt and that's it. It will take longer to make if you don't turn it now and then and if it's dry, but it will eventually make good compost. Hurry it by turning and keeping it moist.

House slippers. If you have a warm sweater or one that is felted accidentally or otherwise, simply make a pattern by standing on a newspaper and drawing around your foot. Cut two pieces to match this pattern, then measure along the side from toe all the way around and back to the toe and cut a strip about two to three inches wide this long. Sew the strip. starting at the toe, to the sole so it's the side, then gather the edges of this strip with a piece of sturdy yarn in a needle, weaving back and forth. Draw the yarn up so that the shoe fits your foot and tie a knot, then a bow. Done.

Frugal Crafting: Weaving

This was written a few years ago for a now defunct little magazine called "Homewords."

I have been thinking of how crafting has grown naturally out of our needs, as our mothers and grandmothers found ways to create solutions for the problems they had before mass production made those things cheap and easily accessible.
Today, most of us have the option to buy items already made that fill our needs but crafting still satisfies a basic desire to create. Even more satisfaction comes when we can create something useful and beautiful from materials that would otherwise be ignored or thrown out.

Weaving is one of those crafts that uses these kinds of material. Now, before we get started, let me say that I am NOT a weaver! There may be those out there who are, and we would certainly appreciate any information you'd be willing to give.
Weaving at its most basic, is fun and productive. Almost anyone can weave a mat of sorts without a pattern, simply by understanding what weaving is, an 'under/over' 'in-and-out' process.
You might want to practice with paper first, but soon you will want to try cloth or natural materials. Buying those materials can be very expensive, though, and take the joy out of crafting.

"Bulrush is a very light material and there are approximately 60 rushes in one half pound.  Price per half pound is $9.00."
Willow, starting at about seven dollars a pound...how much is a pound of willow, anyway? Can I get a whole place mat out of 60 rushes? Is 9 dollars a place mat too much to pay?? Will a pound of willow make a clothes basket?

To get around these kind of questions, look first at what you can find naturally. For instance, wheat weavers use a special, hard to grow wheat that bends easily when wet, and holds its shape when dry, but any kind of wheat or wheat-like plant will substitute when you are learning this craft.

Any kind of long stemmed grass, or slender pliable branch will substitute for bulrush and willow, respectively. If you are experimenting (isn't all crafting without a pattern experimenting?) almost any material will give you an idea of what happens when you do this or that.

One year we had quite a bit of a slender, very tall grass that grew along the ditches in abundance. Its always been there, but this particular year, its abundance caught my attention, and I cut some of it and put it to dry in bundles. When it dried, it became brittle, so I soaked it overnight, and the next day I began to braid a strip, winding into a coil as I went. It was easy to work with, and surprisingly sturdy.

As you poke around looking for things to use, remember that plants act differently when dry than when green. Allow for shrinkage as well as loss of pliability.

If you'd like to try to make a circular mat, first gather several bundles of any long grass like blades, the longer the better. You can use it green, but you might want to put some away to dry and work with later.

To begin, cross six blades at the center, and, using another one, fasten them together. This is much easier said than done, so be patient and wind the grass around several times in different ways. Once this is completed, you should have what looks like a wagon wheel without the wheel..in other words, spokes. Using a seventh blade, attach it at the center by pushing it into the grass knot you created. You'll need an uneven number of spokes to weave on.

Begin weaving your blades from the center out, being careful to keep the strands close together. When you come near the end of one blade, insert a new one between it and the next 'spoke', and weave with both a few times, until the ends are hidden.

As you work, the area between spokes will become too wide, so at more or less even intervals, insert another one simply by pushing a blade into the mat a few rounds deep. Don't trim the ends exactly until you are through.

A project like this will take some time with narrow blades, so think about it as you look and gather. You might want to look for the widest blades you can find.

Another weaving product is cloth, and I'm sure you've all seen the potholder looms that come with jersey loops. A loom of this type is simple to make from a flat piece of board or an old picture frame. Whichever you use, it needs to be the same size as the piece you want to create. Simply line up small tacks along each edge, then begin by tying yarn or string on one corner tack, and looping it back and forth from one side to the other, around each tack. When you are finished in one direction, go the other direction. Weave under one strand and over the next, pushing each strand firmly against the last one.

Of course, this can be adjusted many different ways. One idea is to make a loom large enough for a floor mat, using nails instead of tacks, and cloth strips instead of yarn. At the other extreme, use a small soft wood board and gently tack in straight pins, then use thread to create a fine piece of cloth, which could be used for a small needlepoint picture, or a special pocket or collar.

The applications of weaving are endless, it seems. No matter what your tastes, you can find something to weave, and make something special out of nothing at all, as our mothers and grandmothers did.

Image courtesy morguefile.com

Send Me Your Plastic Bags!

I'm kidding. I have plenty of my own. Well, at least I had plenty.  That was before I got on this kick of using plarn. In case you hadn't heard, plarn is "plastic yarn," more specifically, yarn made from plain old plastic grocery bag type of bags.


I tried the plarn ideas around the internet, but they all turn out a fine plarn that's more suitable for table cloths or baby bibs, maybe. I tried knitting with it, but it's not very yielding and my old hands began to hurt after a little while.

It took awhile, but I figured out what to do. If you make the plastic bag strips much wider - about four to five inches instead of one - the plarn will be fatter. Okay, so that didn't take a lot of brains to figure out, but if you've tried using the one or two inch strips like the youtube videos show and found them hard to work with, try again with much wider strips.


It will take more bags, but isn't that the idea, anyway?

Don't stop with plastic grocery bags, though. Plastic bread bags, produce bags and any other clean plastic bag will do. Thinner plastic just needs wider strips.

Why not use plarn to knit or crochet? It's free. 

KIP week

Do you knit? This week (June 12 - 18) is the worldwide "Knitting in Public" week. Take your yarn and needles with you to the bus stop, the doctor's office, a concert, a picnic... wherever you happen to be in public. Let them know that knitting is not a dying art! Some people make it a demonstration, knitting on the library lawn or in front of a yarn shop, in a shopping mall and so on. Get some knitting friends together and have a "knit-in."

Frugal? It can be. Reuse yarn, buy at super sales and be creative with what you have.

Related posts and articles:


Mug rugs and quick gifts - A free pattern and some frugal thoughts about it

Frugal toasty toes - Recycle an entire sweater to keep your feet warm this coming winter.

Draft dodgers

AKA, draft stoppers, draft snakes or draft guards, these soft log-like forms are great for stopping cold air, insects and dust from entering your home under a door or a window.

As frugal luck would have it, they're easy to make and chances are that you have something already on hand to make them from.

I say "something" because they can be made from a lot of different things. If you're in a big hurry and don't have time to cut and sew, roll up a towel or rug to place under the door.

If you want to make a real draft dodger, you will need some kind of material. Closely woven works best, but if you don't have any, use what you have and of course, used fabric is perfect for the most frugal draft stopper.

Besides that you will need 

• Needle and thread or a sewing machine 
• Stuffing, which can be dry corn, beans or rice, cut-up rags or yarn scraps, or (better because of its insulating nature) use newspaper rolled to fit the tube. If you don't want to use newspaper or rags, remember that something rather heavy will keep the draft stopper in place better, but even plastic bags, crunched and rolled tightly, can be used. 

Here's the way I do it: I cut the material at least 12 inches wide (wider if you have a healthy gap to fill) and 8 to 10 inches longer than the bottom of the door.

I fold the fabric in half lengthwise and sew the side to make a tube, then I sew one end firmly closed. I have gathered the material with thread and then tied it closed tightly with ribbon or string but I like the sewn end better.

Then I just stuff it and sew the open end. That's all there is to it.

Keeping out the cold is more important than making something look good, but when you have time, you can decorate your draft dodger with embroidery stitches, ruffles, lace or rickrack, or make a cover for it that can be laundered.

I don't need them at the outer door, but I use them against the bedroom door during the day to keep from heating it. You could use one against closet doors, or any door to a room that doesn't need heat.

Since they're so cheap to make, why not?

T-shirts and frugal braided rugs

I decided to make a braided rug for my living room out of old t-shirts. The problem is that I'm not really a t-shirt person. Most of my t-shirts are polo style or at least have a collar, and there are very few of even those.

I dug through the rag bag and I asked my youngest daughter to save any she might throw out (that was a long shot - she never throws anything out).

So... I slowly started sorting out some old ones that I have worn and enjoyed over the years. By "years" I mean 8 or 10 - maybe 12. They really are getting a little worn, but they're still good. I mean, they're all in one piece, no holes at all.

It's kind of strange, but old clothes sometimes seem like old friends (or enemies). I remember when I found this one at a garage sale and I remember wearing that one to that Christmas party... I remember someone's comments on that one.

I'm NOT sentimental. Memories wouldn't keep my from cutting up a shirt. What stops me is... well, I hate to destroy something perfectly good. I keep thinking that I could do this or that to them. Embroider a little flower on this one, dye this one, split the front and add some buttons to that one.

I keep weighing the desire to have a neat braided rug for the living room against my natural frugal (ok, cheap) nature and I'm still not sure how it balances!

As soon as I get some old, free t-shirts, I'll start on my rug. If they're not good enough to wear, I mean.

Frugal Sheets

I ran across a sale on sheets the other day. It's kind of unusual to find that kind of sale this time of year, but it looked as if they had been cleaning out their inventory, maybe to make room for more summer gear.

At any rate, there were some pretty twin size sheets for $5, so I grabbed up a couple of matching top sheets.

Did I hear someone asking why two top sheets?

To begin with, good new material costs more than $5 for 66 X 96 inches (about 2 1/2 yards 66 inches wide). For another thing, the material is hemmed in a good, wide hem that works perfectly for curtain rods.

Besides curtains, you can make a lot of things from sheets, as I discovered and talked about in this article: Bed Linens: Not Just for Beds

So... I bought two. I brought them home and spread one on the bed to see how it would look. Gorgeous! So I went back and bought another one. I will have new curtains, a summer spread and pillow shams, a dresser scarf and trim for a throw rug for $15 plus tax.

That's a frugal bedroom makeover, if I do say so myself!