Hello!  I’m Amber and MiniMak asked me to do a guest post for you!  I can usually be found at Amberism on MiniMak’s blogroll.  oh wait, I’m not on the blogroll.  hmmm…. interesting that. 

Still, I am very excited to be here where I intend to ramble on (and on) about crafting. 

I am a dabbling crafter.  I can’t say that I have any mad skills in anything really, but I do love to craft and therefore force all my children to craft too.  A family that crafts together, well, crafts together. Plus they make a wonderfully big mess which annoys the hell out of the Papa, and who doesn’t want to annoy the hell out of the Papa?  Exactly.  An added perk! 

So while I am not passionate about any one type of craft, I am passionate about re-using as many materials as I can, and I get downright giddy if I can take an item and re-craft it into something else entirely.  This is especially easy with clothes and I know a lot of people who are crazy talented and can repurpose just about any article of clothing.  Personally I’m not much of a sewer, although my most recent foray into re-purposing clothes was turning fake-silk pajamas into a Super!Claire! costume for my eldest daughter and I was really very proud of the results.  Of course she promptly refused to wear it because she is a toddler and toddlers are like that.  There are days when it is hard to remember that we craft for ourselves and not for the accolades that may never be forthcoming.

Repurposing clothes is always a lot of fun, but what I really love is when a microwave stand becomes a play kitchen or a spice rack turns into a puppet theatre.  I can spend hours just mindlessly walking down thrift store aisles wondering what I can find that can be made into something else.  Scrabble pieces turn into fairy stools, and remnant skeins of yarn into funky socks.  Right now a lot of my re-crafting ideas are definitely kid-focused because I am knee deep in kids, but I must admit that trying to think like a kid again has been a lot of fun.  It brings me a lot of pride to show my kids that the most creative and engaging play items don’t have to be cheap, mass-produced plastic doodads.  Plus having the kids be a part of the creative process makes the item that much more special.

The re-crafted item I am the most proud of was neither my idea, nor did I do much of the work but my passion nevertheless fuelled the idea.  I was coveting a hand-crafted wooden kitchen for my kids and simply couldn’t afford to buy one.  The thought of a plastic kitchen made me antsy so my Mom drafted up some plans thinking that between the two of us, and my husband, we could come up with something.  Then while walking the aisles in our favourite thrift store she came upon a microwave stand and envisioned a play kitchen.  With a little ingenuity, some mad measuring and calculating skills, she created the perfect play kitchen and the only new items she bought were the knobs and oven-door hinges.  No other toy in the house gets as much play time as this one does, it was the best $20 my mother has ever spent.

Beyond the play kitchen, I love creating felt food from thrifted felt and have made dozens of little cupcakes from an old horse blanket.  Play mats and messenger bags have been made from old curtains, a doll bed from a thrifted tray.  Child-designed creatures were made from thrifted scraps, fairy-dolls from old wooden spools, and a fairy house (in progress) from an old birdhouse.

Even the (incomplete) “mural” on my kid’s wall is made from recycled cardboard and old scrap papers that have been in my stash for years.

I really feel that all of us have a need to be creative in some capacity, and I love bringing together that need with my passion for this earth and finding ways to keep on crafting with a smaller impact on our planet.  I hope that one of these ideas inspires you, too.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 24th, 2010 at 11:07 pm and is filed under DIY, Guest Blogger, Makin'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.