Tutorial: How to make an organizer for tools, pencils, etc.

Today’s blog post will teach you how to make an organizer, e.g. for kitchen tools, pencils, stationary, other tools, etc. from a piece of fabric. You can either make it from new fabric or from a garment you wish to upcycle into something useful. 🙂

You will need:

• a piece of fabric which must be twice as large as the size of your intended organizer (the other half of the fabric will act as lining!); or two different pieces of fabric if you want the lining to be in a different colour or pattern
• sewing machine
• thread, needle, scissors, pencil

Instructions:

1. To determine the size of your organizer, start by placing the tools which you want to store in it on the fabric. Your piece of fabric ought to be a few centimeters longer than the tools. Determine the width of your piece of fabric by adding the intended height of your organizer to both the left and right of your tools.

2. Now cut the top and bottom pieces for your organizer. The height of the small rectangle must be the same as the height you added to the left and right of your tools to the fabric. The width of the small rectangle ought to correspond to the width of your organizer. Cut the strip of fabric double the size again (it will be folded, one side acting as lining) – if you use different fabrics for the shell and lining, cut a rectangle each from the fabric for the shell and for the lining.

 

 

3. Now sew the top and bottom squares to the main body of your organizer. Repeat for the lining.

4. Now sew the sides of the small rectangles to the sides of the main body. Repeat with the lining.

5. Put the two ‘containers’ inside each other – the seams must be on the outside!!

6. Sew the top edges of the two ‘containers’ together, leaving a slit open at one side.

7. Turn the fabric inside out so that the seams are now on the inside. Sew the slit shut.

8. Your organizer is now almost finished.

9. For more stability and a better look, sew around the top edge of the seam once more (very close to the edge of the seam is best). Optionally and if you wish, you can insert pieces of cardboard in the size of the sides into your organizer for extra stability before closing the seam.

Close-up of the strengthened seam.

10. Your organizer is now ready.  If you find that the organizer does not hold your tools properly and is rather ‘loose’, you can also add some ribbons to both sides to hold the organizer together.

Zero Waste: How to shop groceries plastic-free

Today’s blog post continues our series about a Zero Waste and plastic-free lifestyle, and we will show you how you can shop groceries without using plastic bags or other single-use packaging 🙂 .

The first thing you need will be a variety of cloth bags, e.g. simple bags made of unbleached canvas, in various sizes. You will need some large ones for buying things like potatoes, tomatoes or lettuce or such like (these don’t necessarily need a string to close them, a simple open rectangular bag will do), and some smaller ones with a string for loose bulk food like rice, lentils or beans, etc. You can either buy these ready-made, but you can also easily make them yourself if you are the crafty type 🙂 . For example, if you have old silk or cotton scarves (=very thin fabric) you no longer want or need, you can use those for making bags for bulk supplies. Because of the thin, light flimsy fabric of many scarves, they are ideal for shopping.

Instructions for upcycling a scarf into a grocery bulk bag: Cut up your scarf in the middle so that you have two lengths of rectangular fabric. Fold each rectangle in the middle. Sew the edges together on either side, either with a sewing machine or by hand. If you want to use your bag for small bulk supplies like beans, make a seam at the top end of your bag and pull a string through it. Finally, weigh your bag and write its tare weight (=weight of packaging) directly on the bag so that the shop assistants at the customer desk won’t have to weigh it every time before you go into the store and fill it in the bulk section.

If you want to buy ‘wet’ bulk supplies like e.g. pickles, olives, ‘wet’ cheese like feta, etc., you have several options, depending on whether you have a car or not. If you have a car, you can simply use empty glass jars which you bring along when you go shopping. If you don’t want to have them weighed at the customer desk every time before you fill them, write their weight (=’tare’) on the jar with a permanent marker. However, if you don’t own a car (like us!) and cannot lug around a variety of heavy glass jars when going grocery shopping, you can use lighter metal containers for ‘wet’ bulk supplies: very useful are light steel or aluminum soupcans that are normally used as portable lunch containers, but use can also use cookie tins or even metal tea boxes. 🙂

Happy plastic-free grocery shopping!! 😀

Do you use other containers or bags for buying plastic-free bulk groceries? Let us know in the comments! 🙂

Upcycling:bag for clothes-pins made from an Indian dress

Today’s blog post is about upcycling textiles and old clothes again. More precisely, we made a bag for clothes-pins from an old Indian dress.

The dress was a bit difficult to upcycle because it had embroidery all around its neck opening and along the cuffs of its sleeves as well as an opening with no buttons, which we did not want to destroy, but which were difficult to incorporate into a more ‘ordinary’ upcycling object. So we came up with the idea to leave the embroidery with the non-closable opening as it is and turn it into a small bag for clothes-pins, for which just such an opening is ideal. 🙂 Since we love turtles and tortoises, we designed the bag as a turtle. 😀