Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Up-cycling Milk Bottle Plastic Into Beautiful Necklaces

What does going "green" really mean? (I'm a poet and I didn't even know it:))

I'm no expert, but in my house it means that we look a little closer at how we dispose of our everyday garbage. For me personally it started in 2010. My sister and her hubby were parents at a children's home at the time, and I was helping them come up with ideas for Christmas decorations for their house. All the houses at the children's home had to be decorated on the outside for the Holiday Season as part of a fundraising effort where in the public was being permitted onto the grounds of the children's home during the whole month of December to view the Christmas lights. It was the responsibility of the parents of every house to find sponsors for or make decorations themselves to decorate the houses with.

My sister and I make a great team when it comes to these kinds of things, but we were stuck. We didn't have a lot of time to prepare for it or to find great sponsors, and personally, money was tight.
So, what do you do in a situation like that? You pray and enquire of God. I heard a whisper on the inside of me saying: What do you have in your hands? (This is the wonderful way God works.) Looking around, what we could see there was a lot of at that house (a house where up to 20 girls at a time were being taken care of)...was garbage. A lot of food donations means a lot of plastic containers, cardboard boxes, egg cartons, etc. The garbage bins were overflowing. But we didn't really know were to begin. Next step...GOOGLE to the rescue!

My eyes were literally opened to a whole new world where words like 'recycle', 'up-cycle', 're-use', 're-purpose', etc. meant seeing the potential for beauty & purpose in things we usually discard and reject. The saying: 'One man's trash is another man's treasure'
came to mind every time I found another great way to turn some seemingly useless piece of junk into something lovely & beautiful. The bonus of it all was that, by doing our part and recycling and up-cycling, we were helping to clean up the earth.

Recycling, up-cycling, re-using and re-purposing has become a way of life for our family. For me it has breathed new life into my art and craft making. More and more I'm doing
'out of the box'-thinking...(or is it 'out of the bin'-thinking?)

To illustrate this...enter my range of
'Milk Bottle Plastic Floral Necklaces'...




Here's hoping I get a lot more customers for these "green" beauties:)

Blessings!
Surita

4 comments:

Bwana Bolenke said...

Dit lyk pragtig sus, wens net die ouens wil begin koop, hou aan hoor! aanhouer wen!

Tina said...

OH MY!! You did it again. These are lovely! I especially love the jewelry in the last image.

Thank you so much for stopping by and leaving such a wonderful comment.

I really can't wait to see the bedside table you are working on.

Have a wonderful day.

Unknown said...

Do you have instructions on how to make these necklaces somewhere. I love them! They could turn out to be a neat craft for my students to make for Mothers day!

clare king said...

I wish you had a patter to cut out the flowers and so how you made them in a vide on you tubeo