Upcycle Archives

Super Duper Cheap Back To School Clothes

7 Mins Read

Happy Back To School!

For the first time in eleven long years, all six of my kiddos are in school—five in elementary and one in preschool!

That means that I now have dedicated time to get back to spending some quality time over here at Thrive while my kids have a blast with their friends at school.

It also means that I had to shell out for six kids to go back to school. Thankfully, though, a little planning and creativity paid off big for us. Here’s what we did.

#1 – DIY It: The more you create, the less you spend

Shoes

My girls are still on the glitter kick which means expensive, blinged out shoes for school.

Or does it?

Baby Girl headed straight for some $30 graffiti-glitter-rhinestone-rainbow numbers while I wondered toward something more in our budget … like plain $5 black canvas numbers from the boys’ section at Walmart.

Baby Girl wasn’t excited … like at all … until we wondered over to the sewing section and I let her pick out her own bling to make her custom shoes. And to my surprise, we walked out with some fuchsia $0.57/yd. sequined trim that went on in two seconds flat with a little super glue.

Holy cow. LOVE.

Trendy. Funky. Sparkly. Blessedly less over-the-top than those $30 numbers.

Baby Girl loves them.

I love them.

Mr. Thrive loves the extra $24 we didn’t spend.

And she totally rocked that first day of preschool.

$2-3 School Spirit Shirts

I’ve already seen the PTA fliers for the school spirit shirts in the kids’ backpacks …and they’re cute …and they support school programs … but at $10-$20 each x 5 kids in school, it’s just not happening.

*Sigh*

Thankfully our dollar store has surprisingly nice, basic t-shirts in solid colors right now. So a plain shirt + $1 worth of vinyl = custom school spirit shirt for $3 or less. And while we were at it, we grabbed a few old, stained shirts from the kids’ closets and bleached them, too. Completely original, yet very school-spirit-ish shirts for a bucks worth of vinyl?

Score!

We went the bleach route and simply added a vinyl design, lightly bleached around the design with a spray bottle and then peeled off the vinyl. A quick rinse with cold water and a run through the wash and the kids were set. I used my Silhouette to cut my designs, but rock what ya got! This works great with contact paper or freezer paper + scissors and/or a craft knife. Heck, you could even make designs with painters or duct tape. Go crazy!

And since there are roughly a billion bleach shirt blog posts out there, I’ll skip the tutorial and just pass along a few tips I found in making our shirts:

Use a garbage bag

Slip a large garbage bag over a hanger and then place the shirt over top. This keeps the bleach from bleeding through to the back side and keeps everything neat.

(Shirt with vinyl design applied and ready for bleaching)

Experiment with spray bottle settings

Using a full-sized spray bottle on the SPRAY setting produced a fun, blotchy finish.

Love this one.

Go Tigers!

(Tiger image from 123rf.com; Collegiate Black FLF front can be downloaded free HERE)

In this CTR shirt that I made for my niece, I used that same full-size spray bottle set to STREAM and the bleach beaded up on the shirt and ran down the front. I love the look of the run-off and the slightly blurry finish from the bleach stream soaking in behind the vinyl design.

(CTR design was created using Dymaxion Script which free to download HERE)

For this last shirt, I used a small travel size spray bottle for a fine mist and ended up with this even, faded look.

This time I bleached the front and back of the shirt. The garbage bag kept the bleach from bleeding through.

(Eagle design from 123rf.com; Certificate font can be downloaded for free HERE)

Find cute designs

I made shirts using designs from three places: my kids’ school, the Silhouette store and online images.

School: I asked the secretary at my kids’ school for a digital copy of the school logo/mascot and she happily emailed me a black and white copy. I imported it into my Silhouette and started cutting. My kids were super excited to be able to cut their mascot. Plus I can use this design to make teacher gifts for the holidays and teacher appreciation. (For internet safety, I’m not posting that one, but it turned out great.)

Silhouette Store: For $1 each, their shapes are a cheap and fun way to find thousands of designs. It’s like the iTunes store for crafters. And they just added Batman shapes. Kid #4 is going to be ecstatic. 🙂

Online Graphic Websites: I purchased designs like the tiger and eagle for $1 each from 123rf.com. I wanted to do something a little more grown up for my older kids and decided to design my own logos with their school mascots. While the Silhouette can trace and cut any digital image, I’m a stickler for honoring the copyrights of online images and only use royalty-free or paid designs that I have permission to use. There’s so many websites with free or cheap images that there’s no reason to play dirty.

Create Your Own: For all you crafty/artistic types, make your own designs! You can draw or create your image on the computer and cut it free hand from freezer paper or contact paper.

#2 – Buy Year Round

Rather than buy clothes in big, expensive spurts, I’m on the watch for clothing deals year ‘round. I grab staples like jeans and coats at garage sales, thrift stores and clearance sales as I see them. That way back to school shopping is about a few new items to update, not completely overhaul a wardrobe. Mr. Thrive laughed when I bought the kids’ new school backpacks the week after school got out for the summer, but our local store had the popular $20-$25 backpacks slashed to $9 each. Done and done. And when Kid #2 who is brutal on shoes found his favorite pair for 50% off, I bought one pair in his size and another identical one in a half size bigger. For the price of one pair, I got two and was prepared for that day a mere three months later when Kid #2 was ready for new shoes yet again.

#3 – Budgeting for clothes when you don’t have a clothing budget

Back to school shopping used to stress me out because the reality is that we didn’t have a clothing budget for our family at all. Whenever someone needed new shoes or pants, we’d eek it out of our monthly gas or food budgets. But Mr. Thrive came up with a great idea at the beginning of this year that has allowed us to budget for ongoing clothing, birthday and school expenses on our limited income. He set up a savings account for each of our kids separate from their personal savings accounts. When we did our taxes, we put $50 in each kid’s account. Then every two weeks $5 goes into each one. For us that’s $30 a paycheck and is what we can afford—your family may do more or less. It may not seem like a lot of money, but it adds up.

Now, whenever one of our kids needs clothes or field trip money, I just take it out of their account. No worrying. No stretching gas. No panic when they grow through three shoes sizes in one year and we’re already tight on grocery money. The money is there and my kids are taken care of. So the $6 for Baby Girl’s glitter shoes came straight out of her account and not the gas tank. And $2 came out of each of my older kids’ accounts to cover their spirit shirts. And since the money is constantly being replenished, I don’t have to worry about choosing between new jeans or groceries next month because I know we’ll need both.

So what creative, free and/or cheap things do you do to help your kids get ready for back-to-school?

I’d love to hear your ideas!

See how we save on school lunches HERE.

In Home and DIY Projects

Kids Summer Break Sewing Project: Silly Pillows

4 Mins Read

Well, despite my hours of dedicated research on Pinterest, my kids still arrived at ‘bored’ last weekend. *Sigh* It’s only been a couple of weeks and apparently all the park trips, splash pads and kid crafts just aren’t cutting it anymore. And movies, coloring and playing outside were also nixed. Bummer.

But those stacks and stacks of pictures got me thinking … and I looked over my ginormous ugly-stained-ripped-worn-out t-shirt stash and started thinking.

And suddenly I decided that it might just be time to turn the kids loose and let them design their own silly pillows any way they’d like. It’s stash-busting, sewing-teaching and time-killing all in one.

The end result was pure delicious awesomeness. See?

Crazy robot monster? Sure.

Superhero shield? Bring it.

Random ‘spider head’ pillow? Okay.

I {HEART} Cherries? Yes ma’am.

And these were so ridiculously fun to make.

Me and my dirty half dozen blew off two solid days working on these and they were giggly and excited the whole time. I loved that they were bending over backwards to help with dishes and laundry to give mom time to finish sewing their pillows.

So this isn’t a tutorial so much as it is a list of tips and ideas to get the wheels turning and hopefully save you a few headaches.

1. There are no rules! I’ve been terrified to sew with knits because I don’t have a zig zag on my vintage Featherweight, nor do I own a serger. Who cares—you’re not making clothes! Pillows don’t have to hold up to the wear and tear of being pulled on and off of little bodies. If you’ve got a zig zag or serger, by all means, use it. But if you don’t (or are scared to try), don’t sweat it. Just use lots of pins to keep the fabric from pulling and stretching, GO SLOW, and lengthen your stitches. Our pillows have been beat to death and drug around everywhere in the last two weeks and they’re holding up great. (They came through the wash like champs, too).

2. Give your kids total control over their designs – no mom ‘fixing’ or ‘helping.’ Period. When their design was finished, I just drew a seam allowance for the pillows by simply pinning the pattern to the fabric and tracing a .5”ish line around the edge.

3. Let your kids help with the cutting, pinning, sewing and stuffing as much as possible. It’s going to be messy, imperfect and slow, but totally awesome. You know your kids’ ability levels – help when needed and then get out of the way.

My older kids (including my 6 yr. old) cut out there designs by themselves. It was sloppy and jagged.

I mean really sloppy and jagged.

Who cares?! The rough edges will be covered up by the seam and my kids were so proud of themselves.

4. Keep the pillow shapes simple. If your kid’s design is really small or oddly shaped, apply it to a square, rectangle or circle pillow. The basic shape of the superhero shield and spider head where fine as-is, but the small cherries and alien robot monster would have been impossible to make without attaching them first to an easy-to-sew rectangle base.

5. Sewing applique pieces: I attached large shapes like the cherries and alien body by simply pinning the shape to the pillow top and straight stitching around the edges. Contrasting thread helped little details really pop.

The smaller pieces were ironed on using lite-weight heat’ n ’bond and then top-stitched for extra durability.

But … rock-what-ya-got!

If you want to skip sewing on details, do it! Just use a heavy weight iron-on product. If you only have fusible webbing, that’ll work, too! If you don’t have anything but a sewing machine handy, just sew the whole thing together. See? No rules!

6. Fun extras like handles for shields or pockets for treasures can be attached for extra awesome powers.

7. Scraps make the sweetest dress up gear ever. See?

Best project outfit ever, kid. Well done.

8. Get creative for stuffing ideas. I had a little bit of store-bought stuffing on hand, but not nearly enough for four pillows. The solution? I had the kids pick out stuffed animals from the toys bins that were ready to be tossed and remove the stuffing. The old, dirty fabric from those stuffed animals got a rinse in the washer and then joined my fabric stash. 🙂

Both types of stuffing work great and it saved me a trip to the store. Love that.

So give Silly Pillows a try.

We’re sure liking them at our house. 🙂

A lot.

And if you liked this project, please share it on Pinterest, FB or twitter using the tabs below. Thank you!

In Home and DIY Projects

What Not To Toss Weekend: Busted Calculators and Remotes

2 Mins Read

How many of you have wound up with one of those freakishly large calculators or remotes from the dollar store? Kid #2 proudly came home with the calculator version and it lasted all of a day before it cracked in half on the first drop.

Time to toss that bad boy, huh?

Wait! Don’t toss that!

The outer shell may be toast, but the buttons can live on.

A few left-over peel-n-stick magnet strips and scissors later …

… we wound up with some fun, practically free frig magnets.

And man have the kids had fun doing math problems on the frig this week.

And while petty and childish, I’ll admit that it was fun last night to skunk my snarky nine-year-old who declared that he “pretty much knows everything about math, mom” with a simple problem using negative numbers.

Um, Kid … –25 + 54 does not equal 1, nor is the square root of anything involved.

And so that no one’s left out, anyone without a freakishly large calculator could just buy a new one for $1 and cannibalize it to make their own, cheap magnets. A small screw driver is all you need to open it up to get the numbers out, unless of course you’d like to just drop kick it a few times instead.

Anywho …

Overly Large Gimmicky Calculator or Remote?

It’s What Not To Toss This Weekend!

And hey, what else could you do with calculator, remote or even keyboard keys?

Make push pins? Embellish cards? Art? Let me know.

In Home and DIY Projects

Primitive Valentine’s Hearts Door Hanging

2 Mins Read

Here’s the latest entry in the unofficial please-help-me-figure-out-what-the-heck-to-put-on-my-door quest.

And for the record, I’m really into the simple, fast projects as of late and this was no different.

I think the start to finish was under thirty minutes with minimal mess.

Want to make your own?

For this project you’ll need:

See? I told you this was simple.

And always I hope you Rock What Ya Got and come up with your own version using whatever you have on hand.

Snip off the heavily curved/bent ends of the hanger and shape it into a primitive heart …

… securing the ends with a few pieces of tape.

You’ll need one hanger for each heart you plan on making.

Then wrap heart (or hearts) with either rag ribbon made from old t-shirts or yarn.

(Need help making your own t-shirt yarn? Check out this awesome tutorial here.)

Connect hearts with a little hot glue …

… and hang with some jute, ribbon, yarn, or whatever you have lying around.

There you go: easy, simple, DONE.

And while I don’t mind the simple, un-fussy look of just the hearts, I’m thinking a little vinyl could punch the look up just a bit.

What if I cut out letters that looked like this?

Or this?

Maybe something simple like this?

Or softer like this?

What phrase or word would you use?

One of the above, something better or just leave it plain?

Let me know.

In Home and DIY Projects

BLESSED Thanksgiving Part 2: How To Make A Skirt From A Fitted Sheet in 10 Minutes Flat

4 Mins Read

I wanted to show you what my girls will be wearing for Thanksgiving this year and the funny, awesome way it all came together.

Happiest little accident ever.

And total tender mercy.

I was digging through my stash looking for inspiration when I pulled out this torn, king size fitted sheet. We had this on our bed for years before it finally wore a hole in the center. This sheet was huge (and because it was fitted), never really fit well on my shelf. Since I was drawing a blank on the Thanksgiving outfits, I decided I’d at least clean up the stash a bit and cut the sheet into smaller pieces so that it would store better. I grabbed my scissors, cut the sheet into quarters, and then went to cut off the elastic that ran around the entire thing.

And I stopped dead in my tracks … and just started at the elastic … and wondered if it was a mistake to cut it all off … what if I needed that elastic later ….?

While I was thinking, my daughter the genius picked up one of the ragged pieces and said, “Look Mom! It’s just like a skirt!”

Light bulb.

And from that happy little (divine) accident, I wound up with skirts for my girls in less than ten minutes.

Want to know how?

Seriously … it was that simple.

And if you use bias tape or some type of binding on the bottom, you can skip the hemming part all together – score!

So since I didn’t spend all that time prewashing, trimming, measuring, sewing, adding elastic, etc., I had lots of time to work on the details.

**And quick picture disclaimer — my girls kept bugging me to wear their new skirts so I let them play around while I finished up projects. Consequently, these don’t look freshly pressed anymore. Sorry for the wrinkles. **

You could so do ANYTHING with this basic skirt, but I figured the best thing to add to a happy little accident was a happy little tree … or at least the happy little leaves from the happy little trees.

{Sorry – I can’t stop thinking of these as “The Bob Ross Skirts” and smile every time I see them.}

I grabbed the fat quarter bundle I won a few months ago …

… and cut a bunch of 3.5” x 3.5” blocks with leafs cut out of the centers. I cut my blocks and shapes using my Silhouette, but this is easy-peasy to trace and cut using sewing shears or a craft knife. The blocks were sewn together with a 1/4” seam allowance …

… and the top and bottom edges were pressed under for a clean finish. The whole strip was sewn to the bottom edge of the skirt.

I hand-cranked my sewing machine around each leaf cutout, but you could sew this by hand, too.

I love the creamy flannel poking through the cut-outs. Yummy.

And don’t think the leaf shapes and scraps went to waste. I just made another skirt.

I stitched the scraps together to make a long, 1” wide strip. Then I ironed the strip in half and then in half again to make my own faux bias tape to finish the bottom edge. The leaves were stitched in place with a lot of hand-cranking as well.

Not bad for a fitted sheet and some fabric scraps, huh?

It’s all in the details:

peek-a-boo cut-outs

or sweet appliqué with a simple border.

And how fun would it be to dress up this skirt for Christmas?

Mitten appliqués? Little trees with button ornaments? Ric Rak candy canes? Reindeer?

Or for Valentine’s Day? Or any day?

How much fun could you have with an old fitted sheet?

Thrilled to be featured on:

Linking up to:

Skip To My Lou, Craft-O-Maniac, C.R.A.F.T. * Stories of AtoZ, Tip Junkie, Sugar Bee, Today’s Creative Blog, Sassy Sites, My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia * Someday Crafts, Lil Luna, We Are That Family, Blue Cricket Designs, The Thrifty Home, * House of Hepworths, *Tidy Mom, Whipperberry, Kojo Designs, Chic On A Shoestring, Momma’s Kinda Crafty, *Tatertots & Jello, Be Different Act Normal, Funky Junk Interiors * I Heart Naptime, Under The Table and Dreaming

In Halloween

What Not To Toss: Halloween Treat Bags

1 Min Read

How many of you are stocking up on Halloween candy?

It’s the usual drill of buying bags, emptying treats into a bowl by the front door and then recycling the empty bags, right?

Wait! Don’t Toss That!

Those bags got the candy to your house just fine – why not put them to use to round up candy from the neighbors, too?

Just cut handles from whatever you’ve got on hand — fabric scraps, ribbon, VHS tape, curling ribbon, whatever – and tape them in place with duct or packing tape.