Bottle Bracelet.

You can use a utility knife or even a sharp kitchen knife to poke through the side of your bottle. (Be very careful with this! Make sure the bottle is on a stable surface, and anchor it so it want roll or jump.)
Using the slit you’ve just made as your starting point, cut all the way around the bottle, using one of those ridges as your guide. Scissors will work fine for this - use the big, tough ones you keep around for the heftier cutting jobs.

Now, make a perpendicular cut (see the blue arrow above). Then choose another ridge to cut along - based on how wide you want your finished cuff to be. Cut around the bottle again.

Great! You now have a rough bracelet. You’ll want to trim about 1/4″ to 1/2″ off of each end, so there’s a little gap in the middle. You’ll also want to round off the ends. I used a circle template and traced it with a Sharpie, but you can also trim the ends free-hand.

Now, cut two strips of felt. They should be a little longer than your plastic form, and about 1/4″ wider. Decide at this point how you want to decorate your bracelet. There are lots of possibilities here - you can do felt applique, or bead embroidery, or regular embroidery, or silkscreen, or stencils . . . .

Do all your embellishment on one of the felt pieces. I recommend keeping about 1/2″ of felt at each end of this strip unadorned, because you may want to trim it off later. (I didn’t do that here, and it came back to bite me . . . .)
Now, put your two pieces of felt together, right sides out. Begin joining them with a whipstitch along one of the long edges. Stop stitching when you reach the rounded end. (By the way, futuregirl has the best tutorial ever on how to stitch felt.)

Insert your plastic form into the felt, and adjust the felt as necessary so it lies smoothly against the plastic. Wiggle the plastic form a bit so that you have a roughly equal amount of felt at each of the rounded ends of the bracelet. Now, you might need to trim a little felt away from the ends, so that you have about 1/8″ sticking out beyond the plastic form.

After that, continue your whip-stitching until you’ve stitched the felt together completely.

Recycled Silk Flower Brooch!

Yet some upscale women will pay $60 for these things. Well, live and let live.

Or, in true Wise Bread fashion, do it yourself and save big.

Flower brooches are frighteningly easy to make. The basic instructions:

1. Get a silk flower of some kind.
2. Remove it from the stem.
3. Glue a pin to the back, either in the center or just above the center of the back.
4. Cover the spine of the pin backing by gluing something pretty, like a fake leaf or a piece of felt or velvet.
5. Pin to coat or give as gift.

Here are some tips for making flower brooches:

Get your hands on a hot glue gun, if you don't already have one. Using these things is kind of an art, and you will get burned a few times. Practice makes perfect and all that. The glue guns at my craft store cost between $2-15 dollars. Mine is a $9 model that's pretty bad-ass.

Don't buy ridiculously expensive pin backings. Sterling silver really doesn't do much for the backing, and costs too much and won't be seen anyway.

When making brooches, you want the back of the flower to be almost completely flat. Because of the way these fake flowers are put together, sometimes you have to cut off the plastic that holds it all together in order to get a good, flat back. In this case, you'll have to reconstruct the flower using hot glue. It's not too hard, though.

If you have some silk flowers that are less-than exciting, you can always take apart two flowers and combine them. Use the same kind of flower for additional petals, or two or three different kinds of flowers for a sort of hybrid flower.

The little leaves that you glue over the pin's spine can usually be found in the bridal supply section of a craft or fabric store, because they are often used in veils.

The center of the flower is a good place to glue something really cool. On the flower pictured below, I glued an antique button that I bought at a thrift store. It has rhinestones, and complements the subtle colors of the flower perfectly.

You don't have to put anything in the center because a lot of fake flowers look better with their fake centers. But other ideas include regular buttons, smiley faces, crystals, beads, pearls, or even those polished glass pebbles that you put into fish tanks. Below is a small white lapel pin that I made with a cheap mother-of-pearl button for a center.

How to Make a Wire from a Plastic Bottle!

Cut a soda bottle into a spiral. The width of the strip in the picture is about 4 mm. [1]

2

Sit and hold a hair dryer (or a heat gun) between both knees. Heat the plastic strip and wind it around while pulling it with both hands. (Polyethylene terephthalate [PETE] plastic becomes soft by 70 ℃.)

3

Remove the strip from the hot air occasionally to allow it to cool down and fix the shape.

4

Continue until as much of the plastic strip as you want has been twisted.

Recycle Metal Cans into Hanging Flower Basket!

What you'll need:

• Large, empty metal cans
• Drill or hammer and nail to make holes (I used both)
• 20-gauge galvanized wire
• Wire cutters and pliers
• Beads or other embellishments (optional)
• Pebbles and potting soil
• Trailing plants (I used ivy geranium starts in three shades of pink, but petunias, begonias, spider plants, or others you like could be lovely)

1. Use a drill or hammer a nail to make several small holes in the bottom of each can.

Make holes spaced all around the bottom of the can.

2. Next, drill three holes near the upper rim of the can, spaced evenly around the perimeter, where you'll attach the wires to hang your planter.

The holes I drilled were about an inch below the rim.

3. Cut a generous length of wire (mine was about 2 feet long), slip it through the first hole you drilled in step 2, and form a wrapped loop, clipping off the end after you've coiled it three times. (If you'd like a wrapped loop 101, I have a short video showing how I make them here.) Repeat with the other two holes so that you have three wire tails to form a hanger later on.

Wrap your wire three times or so before cutting the tail off.

4. If you'd like, slip a few durable beads you like onto each wire strand. I alternated clear and pink on each one.

I used cheerful acrylic beads that won't mind rain or dirt at all.

5. Now add a thin layer of pebbles for good drainage at the bottom of the can.

The pebbles should just cover the bottom of the can but don't have to be thickly layered.

6. Add potting soil over the pebbles, leaving space at the top for your plants. Now that your hanging basket has some weight to it, hold the three wires tautly above the can so that they hang evenly. Choose about how long you'd like the wire section to be, and make a large loop with all three wires there.

Form a simple loop with all three strands of wire, large enough to slip easily over a hook or peg.

7. Using your fingers or a set of pliers, wrap the three wire tails around to form a coil below this large loop. Wrap them two or three times total, and clip the ends neatly once they're secured.

Wrapping the coil at least two or three times with all three strands makes a strong bond.

8. Add your plants in the configuration you like! I mixed three different colors of ivy geranium starts I got for 50¢ each so that they peeked through each space between the wires and the beads caught the light.

These ivy geraniums will continue trailing downward and to the sides to fill the hanging planter!

9. Make as many as you'd like, and hang your new planters on hooks or pegs along a fence or patio!

Tin Can Herb Pots!

What you'll need:

• Clean, empty recycled cans
• Hammer and nail
• Pebbles
• Seedlings (or seeds and soil if you're starting from scratch)

1. Wash your chosen cans and make sure there are no sharp edges or rough spots. I used cans with the bright label printed right on the metal, but if yours are plain, you might want to paint or decorate them for fun!

Make several holes in the bottom of each can with a hammer and nail.

2. Use a hammer and nail to make several small holes in the bottom of each can. I did three or four on each of mine.

Fill the bottom of each one with pebbles.

3. Fill the bottom of each can with small pebbles, just one layer deep, to help the soil drain well.
4. Gently transplant your seedlings into the planters. (If starting from seed, fill the planters with soil and plant your seeds now.) Water and care for them as suggested, depending on what you're planting. I chose Red Russian kale and Sugar Star snap peas, both of which like full sun.

The kale and sugar snap pea seedlings like living on our porch so far!

5. Put them somewhere special so you'll see the cheerful plants every day! I put ours on our front porch all in a happy green row. Remember, with the holes in the bottom, they may leak when you water them, so if they're inside make sure they're on saucers or dish towels to catch any spills.

These plants will get plenty of sun to grow nicely here, but I can bring them in if it hails or gets too cold. Once they've gotten a bit bigger and hardier, they'll go right into our raised beds.  6. Transplant the seedlings to your garden when they're ready and the weather cooperates!

Plastic Bottle Flowers

looking for a way to reuse plastic bottles? here's a easy, pretty way to give new life to something that may have ended up in the land fill.

Supplies

• clear plastic bottle
• circle hole punch (i used 7/8")
• glossy spray paint
• hot glue gun
• scissors
• rhinestone, bead, jewel, etc for the center

rinse out your bottle several times to make sure it's nice and clean.

remove the label and cut off the top and bottom. then cut a slit all the way to the top so you can unroll the cylinder (or what's left of the bottle). throw the top and bottom in the recycle bin :o)

use your hole punch to punch out circles. i used 5 circles for each flower.

one bottle yields a LOT of circles!

spray paint one side of each circle. make sure they completely dry.

next, using a small dot of hot glue, attach two circles together. the circles will have a slight curve to them. i glued them so that they curved upwards for a fun 3D effect.
*if you're using a hot temp glue gun, it will melt/warp your circles a little bit. i used hot temp glue gun and it turned out fine, but a low temp might have been better...*

attach a 3rd plastic circle. keep going around attaching circles until a flower is formed.

i used 5 circles total for each flower.

add a rhinestone to the center and you're done!

 i then glued them to a cute little bag to make this fab little clutch.