Where Do You Find Eco Arts and Crafts Supplies?

Eco art supplies are becoming easier to find but you have to know where to look.

Most eco-friendly art materials are geared towards children but crafty artists can use them too or keep searching for the exact art supply created with an earth friendly formula. Here are 10 place where you can find eco-friendly art supplies:

1. Eco Kids USA has a variety of eco art supplies geared for kids including paint, dough, rolling pins, ornament kits and more.
2. One of my favorite places to shop for my kids is Stubby Pencil Studio. They are a great shopping place where you can find everything from pencils to crayons to paper and notebooks.
3. Nature of Art is a new site for me but they look to have non-toxic, eco art supplies for kids.
4. I’ve tried Clementine Art supplies and my kids love them. They sell eco crayons, paints, markers, glue and dough for kids.
5. Eco Art Works has a variety of art and craft supplies for kids and adults.
6. Jerr’s Artarama is another site I just stumbled across. They have a nice variety of eco art supplies for the serious artist including easels, lighting and air purifiers.
7. Here’s another new site to me Utrech. They offer a variety of art paper, sketchbooks and paints that are eco-friendly.
8. Eco House has a couple products geared towards painters who wishe to be a little more eco. They have a couple of nature based solvents and thinners for sale.
9. Dick Blick even has a variety of Earth friendly portfolios and artist supplies. If you search the site you can find other green and greenish art supplies too.
10. Michaels stores often have eco-friendly sketchbooks, pencils, paint brushes, and entire kits of eco-artist supplies.

Where do you find your eco-friendly art and craft supplies?

Cosmetic Container Crafts

I’ll admit am a girly girl and wear cosmetics of all different types. I try to be as eco as possible about them but only some companies offer eco products and mainstream companies are only starting to get more eco in their packaging.

Years of cosmetic use can create a lot of waste. Sure it’s easy to recycle the glass jars and plastic bottles but what about the items that have many materials in them like compacts and lipstick tubes? Most of are made of combinations of glass, metal and plastic.

I’ve always found it wasteful to throw away the pretty handheld compacts- the ones with the mirrors. I’ve been brainstorming ways to reuse or upcycle them but have only come up with a few ideas. Even after searching I couldn’t find too many crafty ideas for reuse.

But here’s what I did find:

Wildly woolly creates felted cosmetics to replace the used up ones. It is very cute but not really practical or reusable.

Several sites have simple ideas for reusing or recycling cosmetic containers. They can be found on Recycle This, Beyond Jane, and EcoLife.

But I want more crafty ideas.

One idea that I was thinking of is turning the compacts into photo lockets. You could cut out and glue photos into the area where the makeup used to be. I bet with a little ingenuity I could create an accordion style photo pullout so more than one photo could be put inside.

What are your crafty ideas for reusing or upcycling cosmetic containers?

10 Crafty Green Things to Do With Old Sweaters

Do you have a pile of old sweaters that no longer fit but you just can’t bear to throw them out? How about reusing and upcycling them into something else?

Here are ten crafty ways to reuse old sweaters.

One thing you can do is make a sweater pillow. Pillows are pretty easy to make – just grab a pillow form and turn the sweater into a cover for it.

Here’s one DIY tutorial from The Budget Fashionista.

Another fun project to make from old sweaters is a patchwork quilt pet bed made from an assortment of colorful old sweaters. Here’s a great tutorial found at Apartment Therapy that gives you step by step instructions for making this cute pet bed.

Got kids? Then you can make several kids clothing items out of old adult size sweaters.

How about a pair of leggings? There’s a great tutorial on Crafting a Green World that will teach you how to turn a sweater into a pair of child size leggings.

Another sweater tutorial on CAGW shows you how to transform a sweater into a child size skirt.

Old sweaters also make wonderful stuffed animals. Crafter Caitlin Wicker makes stuffed toys out of old sweaters and sells them on Etsy- and the stuffies are super cute.

Martha Stewart has a few great templates and tutorials for making sweater stuffed animal chickens, lambs and pigs. I really love the pig.

No kids or just want to make something for yourself?

How about turning a couple of man size sweaters into a woman’s dress?

Check out the video tutorial on CAGW.

I also found a tutorial for transforming a sweater into a child size dress at Make It Love It.

Got pets? In addition to the cute pet bed you could make a couple of pet sweaters out of your old sweaters. Here’s a great tutorial on Craft Stylish.

You can craft new mittens from old sweaters – make a whole bunch of them and give them out as holiday gifts this year. Get started now and you’ll have a stack ready by December.

Here’s a how to from Martha Stewart.

One Pearl Button offers a tutorial for making both mittens and a matching hat from a sweater.

Slippers are another cozy option for old sweaters. Sweaters can easily be transformed into a pair of slippers to keep cold tootsies warm all winter long. There’s a post at CAGW with links to great slipper how tos and here’s a slipper sock pattern and tutorial at Instructables.

Eco-Friendly Crafts- Yogurt Cup Creations

My family goes through a lot of yogurt, mainly my little guy- he eats a lot of yogurt.

He’s on this thing where just about all he eats is yogurt and he’s picky about it. Wants it straight from the little containers not in a regular old bowl.

So we end up with a lot of yogurt cups which aren’t accepted for recycling at the local drop off site.

So I have come up with easy and fun ways to use the yogurt cups for crafts with my kids.

So far we have created cats, bats, pumpkins, skeletons and more for Halloween, Christmas bells and penguins for the winter holidays, turtles and frogs for spring and bunnies for Easter. The cast of yogurt cup characters keeps growing. I am thinking butterflies for this weekend.

They are simple to create. I paint them outside with spray paint (I know, probably not the most eco-craft supply but it works) and then we use craft foam for heads, legs, wings or whatever the creation calls for. Sometimes we use google eyes, sometimes we just paint them on. Sometimes we add pipecleaners or whatever else we may find in the craft boxes.

It all started with me just searching through my craft box to see what I could create. I have tons of craft supplies so that was no problem.
Now it’s a regular thing for my daughter and I to add another yogurt cup critter to our menagerie.

It’s a fun and relatively green craft. We save yogurt cups from the landfill and have fun using our creativity to create new creatures.

Review of The Salvage Studio

The Salvage Studio: Sustainable Home Comforts to Organize, Entertain, and Inspire is the perfect book to get you in the mood for Spring cleaning, creative organization and inspiration, and some very inspired eco-craftiness.

This book even made me head out to the local antique mall and resale shops to see if I could find some amazing stuff to get my creativity flowing. Unfortunately my trip was a bust but the book is still a must.

The Salvage Studio: Sustainable Home Comforts to Organize, Entertain, and Inspire has me wishing it was summer now so I could hit yard sales and flea markets with abandon.

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Snowmen Made from Scrap Wood

Do you woodwork? Chances are you have a box of leftover odds and ends of wood that can be turned into something cute for the holidays.

My husband has a huge box of wood pieces that he throws leftovers into after he’s done making a project. These pieces can range from tiny little scraps to half a two by four. But for some reason he had a bunch of pieces that were all about the same size left over from making something and we came up with these cute little snowmen.

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