The best price is free! That’s the approach of the Thanks Neighbour! community market , on Friday 8 May 2026 from 4- 6:30pm at Keon Park Children’s Hub, 1-7 Dole Avenue, Reservoir, 3073, View Map
A market like no other, you can pick up FREE clothes, toys, books and kitchenware, that have been kindly donated by your neighbours. The event offers more than just free stuff, you can also donate your own Still Useful Stuff, enjoy a free bbq, live music and craft activities for kids.
That’s where Remaki comes in! I’ll be running a little table for kids and families to make ‘thank you cards’ for their neighbours (or any kind of card they want to really!). The cards and materials have all been donated for repurposing.
This is the second year Remaki has attended the market. Check out some of these gems from last time:
I’ll be selling bathroom bags, forever flowers, doily bunting, pencil coasters, soy fish coasters, and other assorted goodies made from upcycled materials. I don’t know about you but I think it would be fun to take your mum (or mum-adjacent legend) to this market to pick out her own gift.
I’m really looking forward to teaching this workshop, this is such an easy and useful upcycle, and there’s so much scope to get as creative as you like.
If you can’t make the workshop, you can always follow my tutorial!
It’s always a pleasure to hang out with the creative and clever young people studying fashion and textiles at the Northern College of Arts and Technology, and this incursion was no exception.
I took two classes through the magical process of making an envelope cushion cover using lapped seams to create a decorative front panel.
This method for creating seams is less bulky and makes it easy to piece together lots of strips of fabric, so good for using up all those bits you are saving.
Here are a few I’ve made:
And check out the students’ handiwork, all in about 2 hours including time for me going on about textile waste!. Images courtesy of @ncat_fashionandtextiles
If you are interested in learning how to do this, I offer private tutoring in addition to running workshops – just get in touch Kerin[at]remaki.com
The competition aims to promote the creative possibilities of second-hand shopping as a means of tackling overconsumption and fast fashion.
Australia has become the world’s highest consumer of textiles per capita, surpassing the United States of America in 2024. Australians purchase an average of 56 new clothing items annually, with other 200,000 tonnes of clothing sent to landfill ANNUALLY. (Sorry for the caps, sometimes it gets too much and I need to type-shout.)
Just for reference, the Hot or Cool Institute recommends five new items per year as the maximum we should be sticking to, if we want to live sustainably.
I hope the content of these windows sparks inspiration, ignites a train of thought, or piques the curiosity of passers-by and how we can harness creativity to reduce waste.
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 🙂
remaki 
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