UPcycling

Upcycling is the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value.

This is the symbol for upcyling.  Upcyling is the opposite of downcycling and all apart of recycling. Now that is enough of that!

That's my brother, Ron. No, he wasn't upcycled or down cycled,  he's just retired now, living the life of leisure in sunny Florida. But our upcycle story begins with him. He use to sell upolstery products to furniture stores. When he retired, he gave me hundreds of fabric samples. Now begins our upcycle projects! Most of the fabric samples were from the late 80's,  you remember back when those jeweled colors were popular, forest green and burgundy! So I suppose you could call upcyling  a bit  retro as well.

The samples were all about 18" x 24" with large grommets at the top, We removed most of the grommets ( now what to do with those babies????) and added coordinating fabrics and ribbons.

We Cut and  ....

       Then we sew. And then  on some we even add embroidery. Something Maxine, the sewing machine, could do very nicely. see!  Poor Maxine, however, met her demise right in the middle of this upcycling project.  Which was a very sad day. 

We still had "Plain Jane" a very nice Janome machine. But alas she was no Maxine, and she could not do much more than sew a nice stitch or two.

To finish off the bags, we designed a little label to put in the

back of the bag. It says " Made with Love, especially for you by Present Grace",

And Voila here is the finished product! This made a special gift for  one of Gabriel's sweet teachers at the library, named Anne.

 

And this one was for his other teacher, Annie!

Here it is all wrapped  up for  her.

It was a very sad day when Maxine expired, but I am happy to report that there is a new Machine, named Irene! And here she is!

With the new machine we will once again be  embroidering , making more bags and more pillows,  spending many happy hours sewing.

S

Present Grace   is  having its first Craft party on June 18th. If you live in the  houston area, come join us for fun and fellowship.

Present Grace is a product of Carmen Viljoen

 seen here with Anya and Gabriel and Patti,  that's me.

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