Hurricane crafts - folded paper and jean skirts

This week, mother nature granted me the experience of living through a small hurricane. How exciting! The ocean sends waves of towering rage crashing down onto the beach, trees are whipped about like giant blades of grass, roads become rivers, windows shake, walls creak, and I remain inside, safe and warm, witness to nature's destructive powers. I'm told that we were lucky, the hurricane did not cause too much damage - in my little world at least. In our building, it broke a couple windows in the glass covered passage to the parking lot forcing management to seal it up for our protection and soaked a staircase and a couple flats leaving a foul smell. Poor Petester's car got flooded and we have yet to find out if it will survive this ordeal. Roads were closed and so were schools. Some people lost their houses to the ocean, my heart goes out to them. Nevertheless, once my hubby was safely home, the stormy weather and the discovery of Threadbanger.com put me in a creative DIY frenzy.

As my darling love settled into a comfortable position for chimera destruction (a.k.a Resistance 2, a video game), I transformed the lounge into a magazine recycling factory. You see, I love magazines, I can't settle for the online versions, I must have a tangible copy. Although I have restricted my purchases to the essentials, stock pile them, and then recycle them when the time comes, I wanted to find other uses for the glossy pages.

So far, I have found and tested three.

No. 1 - Zigzag bangles

These are lots of fun to make. (You can also use chip bags but I don't eat much of those.) I've figured out two sizes, the small as seen above, and a larger single bangle. Both are available in various colours at my etsy shop if you wish to have one of your own.

No. 2 - Paper Flowers

 

We got this beautiful gold tipped tulip vase for our wedding, it proudly showcased my birthday flowers while they lasted but without them it seemed lonely. These flowers were made with 3" circles cut from magazine pages based on a tutorial I found here. After making 16 of them, I tried the snowflake technique to allow for light to pass through the flowers and found that allowed me to use pages that had images that I didn't like as much since it removed the emphasis on the paper letting the form shine through. The stems we're supposed to be made from planting wire and plant tape but because of the hurricane, I was unable to raid the local craft store so I used pipe cleaners instead - it's alright but it's not perfect.

No. 3 - Envelopes

Why not? Surprisingly it was harder to design a template than I thought.  I hope the post office will accept them.

One paper cut too many led me to my next project. This was by far the most important project of the day and the one I am most proud of:  my newly recycled Hurricane Jean Skirt. I started with an old pair of bermuda jean shorts that I hadn't worn all summer.

 

And with the help of a Thread Banger tutorial (that you can find here), I turned it into a wonderful jean skirt. The project took me about 4-5 hours to complete from seam ripping to the finishing details. I will definetly be modifying more jeans, it wasn't that hard and the result is a fantastic skirt.

 That evening, hubby, my new skirt and I curled up on the couch and watched Jaws thankful to still have electricity. What an amazing day.


Take care!