ReCraft

Like many people, I have too much stuff. During my last decluttering session I have decided to buy less and concentrate more on the things I already own and make creative use of them. This little blog is dedicated to my recraft, refashion, redesign, reuse ... projects.

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New Year's Eve party leftovers turned into a little owl.

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More shoe-wlery. These bracelets are also made from the shoes in one of the previous posts and the brass buttons are also the type you usually use to close envelopes. Some are used to close the bracelets, some are used as decoration. Seam rippers are great for poking holes in leather, btw.

I think this is the first time I bought something specifically for a refashion, since I usually don't use clips that small and the bigger ones I had didn't work. I also wanted brass coloured ones for a casual steampunk look.

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A classic sweater to pillow case refashion. Unravelling wasn't an option here, I would have ended up with thousands of short pieces of yarn.

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Although you can't really see it in the first picture - these shoes were falling to pieces. So, I made bracelets. The silver buttons are the clips you usually use to close envelopes.

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When I unravelled this shapeless pullover the plan was to knit it into something more fitted. However, the yarn turned out to be problematic (there's a reason why chenille yarn went pretty much out of fashion ...).

In the end, I decided to use two strands of the yarn to knit some big socks to wear around the house. This is why I only had enough for two and a half pairs.

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No before picture for this, but imagine a light grey shirt with some redish spots. I dyed the t-shirt yarn with tea to cover these spots. This is my first attempt at crocheting in the round and it's far from perfect, but it does a good job at holding my "silverware".

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¿did you use a pattern for getting a tight fit on the denim cover for the office chair? i tried something similar a while back, but at least twice a day i have to replace the cover cause it slips off ¿is the cover removable for washing?

I was really lucky with this chair because it has a plastic casing (you can see a bit of it on one side of the backrest), so I could just cram the fabric in. I had to use a blunt knife and I broke a nail in the process, but in the end I got there. I've been using the chair for a week now and so far, nothing has slipped. I thought about using hot glue to keep the fabric in place though, in case this should happen.

I did not use a real pattern, but I did sketch the outlines of the seat and backrest on a big plastic bag, just to get an idea of how big the pieces of fabric need to be. Theoretically, the covers are removable, but I guess it would need quite a bit of force and probably result in more broken nails to get them off.

I hope this helps :)

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The jeans I used to make the new covers for this office chair was refashioned twice and recoloured once, before it ended up on the refashion pile for having some unremovable paint stains on one leg. That's why I used the fabric inside out for the chair cover.

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Here are some recrafted Christmas ornaments. The "snowballs" are old ornaments, painted with one layer of white and some good old snow-spray on top of it. The stars are made from an old T-Shirt and leftover yarn and the little wooden figures used to be painted in bright colours that have never worked with my decoration.

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This project took almost a year to complete, mainly because I had to collect all these white plastic bottles first. I decided on this unusual material for the wreath because it is going to be used outdoors at a spot which is very exposed to wind, rain and snow (hopefully) ... in previous years, the decoration we put up there didn't always survive.

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*gasp* I refashioned high waisted trousers into presumably less fashionable trousers with a normal waistline. A high waist will make your legs look longer, they say, but if these trousers had said effect I was too busy feeling uncomfortable in them to enjoy it. The problem wasn't so much the waistline itself but the way the trousers are closed and not being able to wear a belt because of this.

So they ended up on my refashion pile and would have become yet another pencil skirt, only, I made so many last summer and really don't need more at the moment. Not in a neutral colour anyway. So I decided to just lower the waistline and make a pencil skirt if the result looks weird, which was quite a bit more work than I had expected. There was loads of seam ripping, sewing and resewing involved but in the end I got there and I'm happy with the result.

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I'm in the middle of making notepads from random scraps of paper, postcards and clips you use to close bigger envelopes. It's hard to decide on what postcards to use because I have hundreds of these postcards you get for free in shops and cafés ...

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This is the second project with this reclaimed yarn and there's still more than a ball left. It's also my last summer project ... I just cast on for a scarf :-/

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It's the thought that counts, right? Because the thought was beautiful ... I had a stretchy bit of lace, some stretchy fabric from an old dress, a little red bow from a bra I recently tossed and thread to match the bow.

I thought this would lead to cute panties but my sewing machine hated the fabric and made such a mess of things. It turned out wearable but only because its underwear and usually hidden.

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Some necklaces I put together today. 1. is made from an old necklace and some bits and pieces. 2. the key used to belong to a diary. I've never been into diaries and I think I eventually used this one as a notebook. It's long gone but I kept the key because it's cute. 3. is made from beads that used to be on a scarf. Sadly, the scarf's fabric was damaged beyond repair.

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This is another work in progress.

The original idea was to create a quilt from black scraps and refashion leftovers, so the squares wouldn't contrast in colour but in texture, although of course, black fabric does come in diffrerent colours too.

I have strayed a bit from that idea now, since I'm slowly but surely running out of black scraps and black clothes to refashion, so I allowed some greys in and maybe I'll add some white too.

If it's not already obvious from the picture - yes, this is my very first quilt. In my defence, the mix of different fabrics, some of them very stretchy, others not stretchy at all, makes accurate sewing hard. I'm sure I would do a better job with all matching and store bought fabrics, but that's not my idea for this quilt.

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Since summer is coming to an end I was thinking about autumn outfits and how one particular dress would work well with a brown turtleneck shirt … and then I noticed there is one in my refashion pile which would just need some fitting.

Projects like this one are the reason why I got into refashioning. Because this one was real shopping in my own closets and it did save me some money.