Christmas can fill the wheelie bin while emptying your bank account. The amount of waste we produce goes up 30 per cent at Christmas! One way to reduce the rubbish load is to go for re-usable fabric wrapping instead of the paper stuff.
It could feel a bit weird and intimidating the first time, but it takes the same amount of time to learn as wrapping with paper, only you don’t have to find scissors and sticky tape!
Here’s a few simple ones:
Wrap a bottle in a napkin!
Small rectangular things like make-up, perfume, glasses, pen sets – you know – small rectangular things!
Oval and round things are easy to wrap.
Biscuits and a Scarf! Someone is lucky.
When the wrapping is part of the gift…
Make your wrapping part of the gift, with themed presents, for example:
a cookbook wrapped in a tea towel or apron
a bucket and spade wrapped in a beach towel
jewellery, sunglasses or an item of clothing wrapped in a matching scarf
a book wrapped in a library bag or tote bag.
A quick search of google, Pinterest or Youtube will yield a plethora of tutorials on wrapping with fabric. It’s not exactly a new idea; the Japanese art of furoshiki has been practiced for centuries.
If you can sew, a simple gift bag is one of the simplest things to whip up and can add a nice hand-made element to your gift.
You really don’t need special equipment or specific sizes, you just need to be willing to play around a bit until you are happy with the result. And it is well worth the effort. According to the CSIRO Australians use more than 150,000 km of wrapping paper during the festive season- nearly enough paper to wrap around Earth’s equator four times!
I’m dreaming of a Green Christmas where we try to minimise the waste and excess of the season, but keep the fun and delight.
I’ve been madly making things from reclaimed materials that are so beautiful (yes, I am humble) that you will want to use them year after year or be proud to give them to someone you care about.
I am only doing one market this year because I’ve got a lot of other stuff on, so I am hoping to sell as much as possible this Sunday 30 November at the Merri Community Shed Market, 11am – 3pm, 19 Harding Street, Coburg.
Fabric gift bags
These are made from dust bags that come with fancy bags from a fancy brand. My wonderful friend who gave these to me has been collecting these for some time, so there are 23 of them! I covered the branding with the seasonal fabric around the bottom of the bags and made a little detachable greeting card baggie. I also replaced the original drawstrings with something sturdier and more festive, and used the cat brush to get the tassels to form on the ends 🙂
These are great to use within your family year after year, or to give to someone who would appreciate the wrapping as part of the gift and reuse them. Also good for people who don’t enjoy wrapping, scissors and last minute fights with sticky tape.
Upcycled drawstring dust bag to waste-free Christmas gift bag!
Pencil coasters and treat containers
Project Stationary do an amazing job collecting and redistributing excess stationary every year. There are always some donated items that nobody wants, which is how I came to possess a bunch of stumpy pencils!
I used resin to fix them together inside a stacked chips tube and then went to the Merri Community Shed where I had plenty of wonderful help from fellow members slicing them up to use as coasters! The bandsaw is not for the faint-of-heart. After a few messy experiments I decided it was best to place the pencil slices inside cork coasters and pour more resin to create the final product.
By chance I realised that the coasters fit absolutely perfectly as a lid for these Chris’ Foods terracotta dip containers. I think a teachers’ desk needs a special container for lollies, and this combo delivers.
Fabric tinsel
There is no better way to make use of fabric scraps than turning it in to ‘tinsel’. It’s just so pretty 🙂 I seemed to catch a bunch of viruses this Spring. Serendipitously, this coincided with a friend passing on her neighbours’ unwanted fabric stash to me. In between blowing my nose, feeling sorry for myself and watching total brainrot on the TV, I made fabric tinsel. You literally tie scraps to a bit of string, so it was the right level of intellectually demanding (ie: not).
Tie knots onto string to make fabric tinsel!
Paper Angels
Years ago I came across a book of Christmas Carols in an op shop and every year I make a batch of paper angels from it. You can follow this tutorial to make your own from any bit of paper you want. I get to use up some of my everlasting stash of second-hand buttons and beads.
Soy fish coasters
We visited the amazing Mill Market in Daylesford a little while ago where I came across these cool paper napkins. I am not normally a fan of a paper napkin but I love this design based on The Great Wave of Kanagawa, (c. 1830) a famous Japanese wood block print. I had a depressing thought about how different the ocean was in 1830 compared to now (it was lacking in floating waste plastic islands) which made me think of my collection of empty soy sauce fish gathered from the Darebin Hard Rubbish Heroes pop up shop a couple of years ago. These things banged together in my brain with the resin coasters I’ve been making and became these soy fish coasters. I added a little bit of the plastic net that garlic inexplicably comes in to set a little plastic fishing scene.
There’s some other cool stuff too, but my lap is getting hot from the laptop, so you will just have to come and see me at the market! Feel free to ask me questions or get in touch to buy something! I gotta pay for all this resin 🙂
Well that was fun and exhausting! It’s the first week of school holidays and the wonderful Keon Park Children’s Hub in Reservoir put on Keon Crafting morning for families looking to keep kids entertained. The event was booked out and filled up fast with creative kids and their carers.
I facilitated a table for children to make birthday cards, as it seems there are so many birthdays in September. A special thanks to the legends at Project Stationery who donated some very popular alphabet sticker decorations.
All the materials for decorating blank cards were donated from the local community or sourced from local charity shops. It was especially nice to see ‘happy birthday’ cards being re-used to say ‘happy birthday’ for a second time to a new recipient. That’s the thing with birthdays – they’re kind of an annual thing 🙂
Some school fundraisers are just magic. The Brunswick Northwest Primary School Spring Magic Market lived up to its name. I wish I had more time to leave the stall and check out the other great stuff on offer. As it was I spent a fair bit of what I earned on other makers’ wares and on delicious cakey type snacks.
I was pleasantly surprised to sell out of my Soy Fish Lamps fairly early on. Did you know you can colour glass by mixing PVA glue, water and food colouring and baking it at 90 degrees celsius for 15 minutes or so? Thusly I achieved my ‘fishes in the watery green reeds’ effect!
The fish themselves are spray painted soy sauce fish (thoroughly washed), collected from the 2023 Darebin Hard Rubbish Heroes pop up shop and are now living in some (thoroughly washed) donated bottles that once smelled very strongly of home-made port.
It’s great to think that these wasteful little plastic boogers might be on their way to being banned across Australia, with South Australia leading the way from September 1 2025. Hopefully other states will follow, but so far only New South Wales has proposed to make the move. I guess that means my fish lamps can only increase in value as they become a rarity item 🙂
SUNDAY 31 August 2025 11AM – 3PM, 19 HARDING STREET, COBURG, VICTORIA
The “Remaki Dad” collection will be debuting at the Merri Community Shed‘s maker’s market. Why is it so hard to make things specifically for men? There seems to be a really narrow aesthetic pathway to travel to fit generally acceptable Dad Vibes. I was inspired by a lovely bit of printed vinyl that’s a little bit JAZZ HANDS to widen the path a tiny bit to include the geometric masculine-leaning types not afraid of a flash of metallic leather. I combined it with a whole lot of leather samples diverted from landfill to make:
bookmarks with tassels
card carrying key chains
magnet bookmarks
“Flash Dad” keyrings.
The card carrying key chains are the idea of the Resident Dad in my house, who wanted something he can put his Myki card, work building pass and credit card in, with house key attached. That way he’s got everything he needs in one neat package that fits in his pocket. The other pocket has the phone and he’s ready to go. Yup, Man Life is outrageously simple. I guess the narrow aesthetic pathway is the price many men pay to achieve the kind of simplicity I would need to get special training for.
Fits three cards, no falling out!Flash Dad key ring
On Friday 16 May come and say hi at the Thanks Neighbour event – a Free community market at Keon Park Children’s Hub, 1-7 Dole Avenue, Reservoir. The event runs from 4-6:30pm and you can pick up FREE Clothes, Toys, Books and Kitchenware, all of which have been kindly donated by your local neighbours.
I’ll be running an upcycling craft activity for kids – we are going to make thank you cards for our neighbours with repurposed materials. It is AS CUTE AS IT SOUNDS!
May the Fourth is not just Star Wars Day this year (“may the fourth be with you”); it is also Merri Community Shed Market Day. A great place to shop local for those in the Northern suburbs of Melbourne, and pick up a gift for Mother’s Day (which is the following Sunday 11 May) that supports local small businesses, makers and artists. (You know, like me :-))
An April encounter with the new strain of flu has left me shorter on time than I had planned, so I’ve been panic-crafting this week to make all the things I had in my head for this market.
But I did have a few things already mostly done, which is why this collection is called “Mother’s Day In the Bag”. A little while ago, my wonderful friend, Jo P, gifted me an amazing upholstery fabric sample book, that included a few coated versions of thick, gorgeous cotton prints. I went on a ‘bathroom bag binge’ using an elaboration on this pattern to making some zip up bags suitable for toiletries, and for setting down in wet places. The outside of the bags is made from the cotton upholstery samples, with the bottom quarter using the coated fabric, so a wet bench won’t ruin your bag.
I also lined the inside with advertising banner material which is water resistant, so nothing is getting in or out. (exploded toothpaste will not get on your clothes if you travel with this bag)
And because I can’t help myself, I added a little matching zip pull tassel handmade from some leather samples. These bags take time and care to make, but I think they look great, and they work great too.
The other thing I got inspired by was a lovely scarf gifted to me by the incredible sister who visited with her family over Easter.
I wanted to wear it more, so I turned it into an upcycled throw-on layer, similar in process to the tablecloth-to-top and scarf-to-top upcycles I have made in the past, but more suited to the cooler weather, which suits the darker colours and print.
Then I challenged myself to see if I could wear it all year round. Yes! I’m keeping it.
So what other textiles could be upcycled into winter throw-ons for an extra layer? Well, it turns out, a mohair lap blanket and a sofa throw sourced from the Sacred Heart Op Shop in Preston:
I’m going to try and make a few more to sell before this Sunday’s market.
But I got distracted by my order of candle refills from Kanuka Candles arriving. You just microwave the pack they send you, the wax melts and your pour it into whatever you want. If you’ve ever made candles you know it can be a messy business, and this made it a lot cleaner. I refilled my empty candle container then remembered the time I made tea cup candles for my kids’ school Mother’s Day Stall. So back to my second home (Vinnies Coburg) with an excuse to buy some of the super cute tea cup sets.
I superglued the cup and saucer together (because I don’t want anyone accidentally drinking out of this tea cup once the candle is burned!) and made a cute little matchy matches box. So I used up my whole candle refill order but if the teacup candles don’t sell, I’ll still have candles, and if they do sell, I can buy more refills. I also have a bunch of candles that have gotten a but dusty that I might melt down and re-pour. I don’t know if that’s a thing, but surely worth a try. Have you tried this?
And I put some info on the tags about refilling the teacup candles, so they can be used and loved into the future.
I’ll also have a few other bags and earrings and things for sale, so hopefully I will see you at 19 Harding Street Coburg, this Sunday 4 May, 2025 for the Merri Community Market.
Check out this great tutorial from Kim’s Sewing which has sent me into a frenzy of bathroom bag making using outdoor advertising banners and fabric sample books. The advertising banners provide a good stiffness and are water-resistant, so great for lining and the outer. Or just the lining with a bit of fancy gorgeous upholstery fabric for the outer. So many possibilities!
I’m looking forward to sharing this technique during a workshop about upcycling with some students next week!
advertising banner with leather sample tasselupholstery sample book fabric becomes bag
remaki 
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