Homemade Dream Catchers and Recycled T-Shirts

Just a couple of fun projects to share today!

One of Zoe's favorite shows is called "Noodle and Doodle" on Sprout.  It's a cute little show...it's very short and always has very doable crafts and recipes you can do with your kids so I like it too.  For some reason, although I often find myself saying "Ooo, we should totally do that", I forget to actually do them.  I think it's because I don't have a good system for reminding myself of the projects I see on TV...once we switch it off, we're on to the next thing and I forget to write it down or something....the craft we saw yesterday, though stuck with both of us and since we had all the components already physically in the apartment it was easy to do...

Here is Zoe's homemade dream catcher!  We only had a few feathers but a bunch of wool roving, so it's a little thick and she didn't want to trim the edges when it was done but hey--she loves it!  She also loved talking about how it "works" and informed me this morning that she had a bad dream so....I suggested turning it around tonight since it appeared to me to be hanging up backwards. ;-)

First we stapled the netting (a clementine bag) to one paper plate...

....then weaved in whatever she felt like weaving in...

...done with weaving, before gluing the other plate on...

....and done and hanging by her bed!  I had visions of painting the plate and using a better string to hang it, but when doing such things with 4 year olds, sometimes you have to settle with where they are when they get tired and/or bored.  ;-)

Then, after a day of purging the entire house of things we don't use anymore, I finally got up the nerve to get rid of a bunch of ill-fitting-pit-stained shirts that I've hung onto for years for sentimental reasons.  I filled a big bag with old (stain-free) race shirts (*snif*) and sent them along to the Salvation Army, but there were a few that I just couldn't bring myself to throw in a bag and never lay eyes on again...I found this t-shirt quilt on Pinterest a while ago and knew that I'd want to make a modified version of it one day, and I finally feel like I'm ready to.  I haven't tackled the quilt yet (although I DO have all of the shirts in a bag and actually out of my closet...one baby step at a time, people!), but I made this cute little skirt for Zoe out of a few of (the backs of) the shirts.  It's pretty uneven and crazy, but that's kind of what I was going for anyway (certainly not because I'm a terrible seamstress).  Also, you'll have to forgive me because I meant to take more pictures so I could better explain how I did it but I really just blindly fumbled my way through most of the time so...if anyone wants me to try to be more specific just let me know and I'll do my best!

Before...

The colors/patterns I finally settled on...these are just the backs of the shirts cut out...

I ended up cutting each piece into 2 rectangles, each about 13" long and 8-10" wide.  Then I cut into the middle of the tops of each rectangle, making them 2 1/4" wide at that end, cut down into the fabric about 3" and then diagonally down to the bottom corners...(make sense??  They ended up being shaped kind of like an upside-down funnel)...I made small hems on the top tab and then sewed all the pieces together in the order I wanted, leaving the last two unattached so I could work with it flat until I put the elastic in.  I hemmed the entire bottom of the skirt and then folded the top tab over the elastic (about 22" long) and sewed it in, being careful not to sew into the elastic so the fabric could bunch if it had to.  Then I sewed the ends of the elastic together and the last pieces of the skirt together (proving to be the trickiest/messiest part for me because of the thickness of the elastic and fabric together, but I didn't really care at that point)

After!  Made my little Punky Brewster a little more Punky...not only am I happy with it, but she liked it enough to wear it to school today!  Yay!