Blog Archives

To be honest it’s time, here in my home, to do some big cleaning, rearranging, refurbishing and restoring. You know, lots and lots of plain cleaning and then paint the walls again, replace some carpet, paint the table in a new colour etc.

Don’t see any time at the moment but when I get to this point, I’ll definitely will make a wall with drawers/crates. The two pictures above inspire me the most. Love the different wallpapers that are used and the way the crates are arranged.
The two pictures below are more like an inspiration. An inspiration to use drawers, and to work from the floor up. Don’t you just love this ideas? Simple, cheap and all about recycling and restyling. Love, love, love..

picture sources here

I have no idea how it works with summer and winter time in other countries but here we set our clock back and forth two times a year. One hour back for wintertime and one hour further for summertime. Going back one hour for the winter means shorter days because of way more darkness in the evening and early morning.
This weekend we set the clock back, so our days are shorter.. I always have to adjust myself a little bit around this time. Not because of the clock, but because of winter, of more darkness and cold, and shorter days. I need light!

Going into winter means more use of lamps and lightning. You don’t have to buy. Or buy expensive. All the lamps here are handmade and I love them all. A bundle of vintage lamps together, lamps on a branch, a origami lightning.. find more lovely and cool ideas on my Pinterest (also for resources and tutorials) at the ‘recycle, restyle, reuse’ board.

These are so pretty.
I love this idea from Evie from MiloMade!!
As SOIL, MiloMade is all about reduce, reuse, recycle.
Evie makes beautiful items..
Love her work!
Find this idea on her blog and find a wide range
of perfect products in her shop.

picture belongs to milomade.co.uk

apartment therapy: egg shell roses, jewellery display, art board, stylish maps

family fun: paper flowers, tin robots, carton & paper dollhouse, jug heads

Sometimes someone tells you something or gives you feedback without knowing the power of those words. I guess you know what I mean, don’t you? Today I got such a powerful message that hit me in my heart and will make me smile for the rest of the week.
I got an email from Stephanie, an volunteer librarian in the Seattle area. She wanted to thank me for creating the diy and craft page with lots and lots links to good craft sites. And off course SOIL tries to find lots of recycle craft links. It helped her teaching her class on the importance of recycling.
That gives me such a good feeling. My goal with SOIL isn’t just to sell handmade products, items that are sustainable or made with recycled materials. I want to inspire too, tell the world to think about the things you buy, think about how it’s made, where it’s from, how much we waste, how fun reusing and recycling is, how beautiful it is.. So if someone on the other side of the world finds my site, gets inspired and finds help in learning kids about recycling, I feel very happy!

One of Stephanie’s students, Mary, found a new great resource on recycling. Here’s the link “Recycling and Paper Arts and Crafts for Kids” Mary found. All the recycle crafts in this post are links that come from this site. It’s a very good resource page with lots of information on recycling and ideas for recycling crafts. Thanks so much Mary for finding this page!! And thanks Stephanie for making time to email me and letting me know.

apartment therapy: kids craft with toilet rolls; napkin rings, changing faces dolls, bird feeder, car

Ohh my Goodness, how I LOVE this idea!! (Dad, I know you can’t read English but I will explain it and we will make these together!! So you know!) The idea is very very simple. Just drill a hole in your table or into a shelf and attach a jar underneath. Place a single flower for minimalist perfection. I will make this one! Made from a large slice of old wood (my dad has so much wood) and with two or three jars. Can’t wait to make!
(source pinterest)

vintage plastic beads, still dirty

vintage plastic beads after 18 washes, almost clean

glass beads, almost clean after 12 washes

As you know SOIL is al about recycling, restyling and reusing. So I always try to buy my materials thrifted, from someone second hand, from a leftover stock .. anything that crosses my path and I see potential in. What you never see in my work is how much time and work recycling can be. Washing all the fabrics, ironing them, cleaning all materials and lots of washing by hand. Here’s a little idea of what comes with recycling beads.

I felt very lucky to be able to buy a sport bag full of different beads. These come from a day care centre for the (mentally) disabled. These are old, used a lot and very dirty. Very very dirty. And besides dirty, not sorted. So first it took me two, to three days to sort all the beads. There were large wooden beads and lots of small ones, glass beads and vintage plastic beads. After sorting I started washing. The plastic ones were the dirtiest ones. These took me over 20 washes to get them all clean!!! The glass beads weren’t too dirty, so they were clean after 12 washes (but here I used hot boiled water too, which I couldn’t with the plastic ones).

glass beads, clean and dry

So the plastic and glass beads are done. But now the big work is starting. The wooden beads! One jar of large beads and a box full of little ones.. I guess this will take the whole week. Recycling is good, I do it with love and care but it’s a lot of work.

I’m a magazine collector. Mmmhh, not so true… I collect much more then just magazines.. Anyhow, I have stashes of magazines like 101woonideeen, VTwonen, Buitenleven, Seasons, some Happinez magazines and a lot of Flow Magazines. Stashes up to the ceiling that needed to get shorter.

But especially with Flow Magazines, it hurts to throw them out. Some of the pages are so beautiful, the paper is thick and has such good quality and the prints are just smashing. So I cut the most beautiful pages out, cut a square from it and folded all these little ‘flow boxes’.

I love how they came out! They are about 8 x 8 centimetre and pretty firm. Here, these five boxes came from one Flow Magazine. The one with the eagle is from Seasons. Wanted to show you that one too because I find that one so beautiful too. The eagle came out on the right spot. And below, you can see these are boxes with a lid. Those are the back sides. Pretty too, don’t you think?

I really don’t have any time to do some fabric stamping but if you can’t do it, you can think about it! Ha! Anyway I love the idea of thrifting a piece of nice fabric (okay did that.. already have a beautiful piece of thrifted ecru linen). A good quality sheet or curtain, stamp it myself.. and my idea is to make a cushion from it. But off course all is possible with your own printed fabric!

Some stamping inspirations! Above: Lovely idea of stamping with the back of a pencil, by Colour me There!! And with all these colours it’s so happy and fresh. And imagine how many patterns can be made with just a pencil.

Here is a pattern found on the Print & Pattern blog. Nice and simple to make. Don’t forget to think about all the possibilities you have when you glue something on a piece of wood. Like buttons, cut foam/cork, check the toolbox..

On this Swedish site they made/carved a stamp from a piece of round wood but I can imagine it’s easier to use a piece of pipe, a cut plastic (food) pot or whatever shape you’ll see in something to stamp with!

(credits and pictures from the named websites, linked under the photo)

Found this vintage children’s book in the thriftstore yesterday. It’s a very book big (from 1971) with large pages and the most beautiful drawings. The book falls apart, all the pages are loose and the book only costed 25 ct. Going to use the pages for wrapping.. maybe I’ll make a paper bunting from it or some gift tags..

I found a little, little skein of ‘left over’ grey cotton and I had this necklace I didn’t like any more. So I cut the necklace apart because of the re-use of the closure. Took some little glass stone beads to crochet with, re-used the closure and made myself a colourful spring bracelet.