I was given the task (by my niece) of coming up with an art project (for my niece) for the bank holiday weekend - I chose these colourful recycled fish, and they went down a treat!

You'll need: cardboard about the thickness of a cereal box (I used empty packaging from work), colourful paper or pages from magazines and junk mail (you can get some cool textures and images from these) a hole punch, scissors, and ribbon or wool. Glue-wise, I used PVA but a glue stick will be just as good (and will be less messy if you're making these with children)




I started a couple of evenings earlier, and prepped by cutting out the fish shapes from a template I made, and then cutting strips from magazines in order to make the scales.

The first step is to glue a larger piece of paper to the tail, and then choosing the right colours for the strips of scales and gluing them on one by one, with a larger piece again, for the face. Now you can add eyes, fins, or any other decorations you'd like.

Once the fish is completely covered with paper, leave it to dry and move on to the next one! Once the glue is all dry, trim off the excess paper, so you get a fish that looks like this:

Now you can add eyes, fins, or any other decorations you'd like.

Make a hole with a hole punch and thread it with ribbon - now you have a gift tag, something decorative to hang up or give as a thank you card! My nieces chose to hang some of theirs up in the garden and others in their bedroom.

I used ribbons cut from clothing

I had lots of scales and little bits of card left over, so I made myself some round tags, which I'll probably use for gifts, or possibly price tags.

Something else I've enjoyed covering in bits of paper is the bottle collection I had stashed in my larder, thinking I'd fill them with oil or booze one day. Now they are purely decorative, and simply made me happy to make! I think the ones with flowers on have a barge-like feel. I glued the lids on, and am now thinking it might have made sense to weight them a bit, but they're big bottles, they're probably weighty enough. I used regular PVA and then did a final coat or two of mod podge to make them more hardwearing. Oh, also I painted the bases black (because I had some black paint), and then covered that with mod podge too. I'd forgotten I'd bought that mod podge, and finding it was what started all this covering things with paper, as it happens. I've now run out.

 My tip (if you wanted one) is to start from one end (ie the top or bottom) and work your way to the other. If you try to go up one side it'll be heavier and roll off to that side, ruining your work. Also you will definitely put your hand on the sticky part by mistake. Just trust me.

Oh and a friend who writes for a knitting magazine got me in there

 here I am with brighter hair

In the meantime, here's a picture of one of the many somethings I covered in little bits of paper! The mannequin had been stood, all forlorn and a little grubby in the corner of my bedroom, not being used for anything as I'm not sure what human it's based on but she ain't the same shape as me. I used paper ripped from magazines and regular PVA glue, then a couple of coats of mod podge on top. Now she's brightening up my living room and will hopefully be good for displaying jewellery and scarfs on if and when I start selling again (I hope it's not too busy...)

I posted three things, just under a year ago, so now I'm back... again? Since my last entry I have: continued with my new job, and split from my husband (but kept my bezzie mate)

I continued posting in the meantime on the Colourfool page on facebook, and haven't sold anything through Big Cartel.

What I have been doing is a lot of things with paper - I shall write up some proper posts and share the pictures here and @colourfooltextiles over the next few days.

How have you been doing? Yes, you, person I do not know who found this accidentally. I hope you're well.

Why this is Important to me (2015)

The world doesn't need any more stuff.

When it comes to clothes, buying anything new always makes me feel uncomfortable. I don't like not knowing for sure that the machine workers aren't being exploited, how much waste and pollution was created, or how far it's traveled. I don't like that, often, the stitching will break or the print will fade long before it should, and that the material is often too flimsy to be used for anything else once holes do start to appear, because the company was trying to churn out a cheap product. These clothes aren't meant to last a long time, and aren't meant to be repaired.

This is why I love buying clothes from charity shops (and am increasingly irked that their rails are filling up with more and more of the aforementioned cheap fashion which is no use to anyone). Older, better made clothes have already stood the test of time. They may have already been mended or altered by their previous owner, and I find these personal touches bring a lot of character to a piece of clothing.

There's also the fact that I feel that it's breaking a chain. By buying from charity shops (or small vintage stores) we're supporting a good cause, and getting good products without giving money to dubious companies.

Something I wrote in 2015 but didn't title

Welcome!

For many years I have been fascinated by charity shops, vintage markets and carboot sales. I blame this on my mum, who as a single parent was always very clever with money when we were growing up. She's also a bit of a hoarder, which I have inherited too (this is ideal as when I was a teenager I got to wear the clothes she'd kept from the '60s and 70's, and now I can pass on my bang-on trend '90s clothes to my stepdaughter).

Not many of the things in my house are new. I love buying secondhand, when something has had a whole life before coming to me, and finding or inheriting other useful pieces.

A lot of my success with living this way is based on luck, for example I was able to furnish one flat entirely using furniture found left in the street. This is a lot easier if you live in a student-y area - where people are moving in and out of buildings and discarding their belongings fairly frequently - and where there is a culture of street furniture. There is also hard work involved, what with actually making the things.

I like working and being busy, but am not really motivated by money. I realised this while knitting a scarf, which took several hours - I wouldn't be able to earn enough (in a "proper" job) in the same amount of time to buy a hand knitted scarf of this quality. Unfortunately the world doesn't really function without a certain amount of cash, so hopefully the things I come up with can help stretch out what you do earn.

In this blog I intend to share some of my projects (where I take things which would otherwise be thrown away and make them useful again) and hope to inspire others to make and mend their own things too. I want to do reviews of charity shops and will post photos of my best/favourite finds, and will also be asking some  friends to write guest posts.
 
While these projects will be thrifty, I am mainly driven by recycling - bringing things right back from the brink of being thrown away.

I realise there are already lots of blogs with this sort of thing in them, so I will try to only post if I think I have something special to share. I will not post content just to have content.

Thank you for reading!