Recycled Glass Jars into Dazzling Vases!

Measure and cut elastic thread to a length that will encircle glass, plus several inches to tie off. Thread first group of beads on elastic thread, test for fit and tie off. Now you can pre-cut a number of pieces of thread and continue threading until vase is completely covered.

Fill vase two-thirds full with water and floral preservative. Cut stems of flowers (here I used lisianthus) to correct length so that the flowers sit just at the top of the rim of the glass. Continue until the vase is full.

Recycled Frame Jewelry Holder

Rather than replacing the glass, I used it to make a jewelry holder.  

You savvy bloggers have seen these before I am sure, put together with an old frame and some screen or chicken wire.  I have seen them in boutiques for jewelry display, and also happened to notice the one below at the Antique Fair last month.  I was inspired to make one of my own, but I wanted it to be backed by pretty fabric. 

 

How to Make a Recycled Frame Jewelry Holder:

Supplies:

1. Recycled picture frame
2. Fabric of choice
3. Spray paint
4. Screen, chicken wire, or ‘hardware fabric’ from your local home improvement store
5. Wire cutters
6. Box cutters or craft knife
7. Foam board
8. Hot glue gun
9. Staple gun
10. Hooks (optional) for screwing into wood frame

Step One:  Trim your wire mesh with wire cutters to fit inside your recycled frame.

Step Two:  Trim your foam to the exact internal measurements of your frame.  You can use the cardboard that often comes with a frame, but since I didn’t have any, I used foam board, available at any craft store.

Step Three:  If you don’t like the color of your frame, then spray paint your frame in the color of your choice.  I chose a Rosewood tint by Rustoleum.  You can also spray paint your wire mesh for a cohesive look, if you don’t like the rustic quality of the metal.   I also spray painted the little hooks I used to screw into my frame for additional jewelry display so it would all be the same color. 

Step Four:  While your spray paint dries, staple your fabric to your foam. 

 

Step Five:  Once your paint is dry, use your hot glue to secure your wire mesh to the inside of your frame.  Then use more hot glue to secure your fabric covered foam to the backside of your picture frame. 

Step Six (optional):  If you’re using a wooden frame, you can screw your hooks into the frame for added display.

Display your jewelry holder anywhere you please.  I made this particular one for my daughter’s room to hold all of her blingity bling. 

Sidenote:  Please don’t be fooled by the chandeliers hanging from my five year old’s jewelry frame.  I am really not a pageant mom – I am just demonstrating how great this project works for grown up baubles.  And I better take them down quick before she gets any ideas… 

Doesn’t it look so lovely in her room ?

But now that I stand back and look at this creation, I am quite tempted to put it in to use for my own jewelry collection. 

So now I’ll be hunting for yet another “broken” picture frame to transform . . .

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.