cozy home upcycling inspiration

Here's a quick inspiration post. The theme is home decor and organization.

wooden pallet jewelry organizer

book mobile


from here and here

royal brooches

Ever since I received my first pink kid-sized Tweety Bird deck of playing cards, I have been losing cards. Peculiarly, I always average about one card lost per deck, which is extremely irritating since I never feel like that is enough to abandon the entire deck. But really, I hate playing with an incomplete deck and I hate throwing out an entire deck when only one card is missing.

I cannot be the only one with this problem. So to all of you kindred souls out there, I offer a solution: playing card brooches.

This tutorial is specific to the face cards, but the same techniques/methods can be applied to the other cards as well. (Really, you can use the same methods for any image you'd like to make into a brooch.)
 
You will need an X-acto knife, scissors, Mod-Podge, a paint brush, a pencil, a hot glue gun and a pin back.

Step 1: Decide what part of the card you want to be made into your brooch and cut it out.

Step 2:  Trace this cut-out shape (this will now be referred to as your card cut-out) onto a piece of thick paper board and onto a piece of patterned paper.

Step 3: After cutting out both your board cut-out and your patterned paper cut-out, glue all three of your cut-outs together. Make sure to keep the image side of the card cut-out facing up and the board cut-out sandwiched in between the card cut-out and the patterned paper cut-out. Press and let dry.

Step 5: Apply a layer of Mod-Podge all over the top/image side and let dry. Do the same for the under side/patterned paper side. Let dry and repeat 2 times for both sides.

Step 7: Using a hot-glue gun, attach a pin back to the patterned paper side of the brooch.

Step 8: Let dry & enjoy.

Congratulations, you just made an upcycled brooch!

on what "upcycling" means + lamp inspiration

When I saw that several of you had left comments asking what "upcycling" means, I realized that I should have explained. After all, this is what I will primarily be posting about here on The Garbage Game!

Upcycling is re-purposing or altering material into a product of higher value. It is important to note that this is different from the recycling that we seem to be most familiar with, which is the recycling of products like plastic bottles. When a plastic bottle is recycled, it is made into a lower grade, and thus, less valuable, plastic. (This process is called downcycling; it is not upcycling.) This is why upcycling is generally more eco-friendly than downcycling is. More in-depth definitions of these terms can be found here.

Now that we have a better idea of what upcycling is, here is some lamp upcycling inspiration:

map lamp

mason jar lights

plastic bottle chandeliers

Photos from here, here, & here

My next post will be a full-on tutorial. I'm keeping the actual project a surprise, but don't worry-- we are starting small. Next post's tutorial will be about something much easier and much less time-consuming to make than these beautiful light fixtures.