Have you seen those fantasy faux-glass flowers made from recycled pop bottles?

I mean the delicate fragile-looking twisty looking ones, like those the US-based artist Laura Astor) used to make.

Like this.

(Note: these aren’t the Anthropologie-style of flowers that use the ends of the bottles. But there’s a great tutorial from Sonia at Kosmic Chai, if you’re looking for a how-to on making that type.)

These more delicate PET flowers would make gorgeous Christmas-tree decorations, I think, if you coloured the flowers red like a poinsettia — or put together a whole bunch of the clear plastic flowers would make a fun sun-catcher mobile for your garden or a little girl’s bedroom — or tie them into a good thick evergreen wreath to add a little frosty glitter. The possibilities are endless!

Here, Leanne of Luvlee Scrappin gives a little video tutorial to walk you through how she makes her pop bottle flowers. You’ll find a number of YouTube videos that show a similar how-to techniques, but Leanne’s tutorial has the clearest instructions and best quality sound and pictures of any I’ve looked at.

Instructions for Pop Bottle Flowers

Here’s a quick outline of how Leanne shows how to make pop bottle flowers, just to give you an idea of what’s involved, but do watch the video (it runs about 10 minutes) for full instructions:

From the side of a plastic pop bottle, cut:

• 2 squares, 2.25″ x 2.25″ each
• 1 square, 1.75″ x 1.75″

Cut each square into four petals that are joined together at the middle. Leanne likes to cut curves from corner into the center like a windmill, then turn the plastic piece the other up and cut the other direction to complete the petals.

You can draw out the petals with a Sharpie first, if you like, but just be sure to cut all the pen marks off so they don’t show up on the finished flower. (My suggestion, if you’re not confident of your freehand scissor work: draw out a pattern on paper, lay the plastic down on top of the paper, and follow along the lines with a stylus or pencil point, then cut the plastic along the scored lines.)

If you want a coloured flower, use a coloured plastic pop bottle or colour the petals with Sharpie pens or alcohol (not water-based) inks.

Next, you’re going to want to melt the edges of the petals to get a bit of a natural curve or twist look. For this, Leanne suggests a tea light candle. You could use a heat gun can be used, but Leanne says it doesn’t give the nice ripple effect on the edges that you’re looking for here. I suspect that the heat from a heat gun is spread out evenly over too large an area, not as concentrated as a candle flame and not as unpredictable.

So, light you little candle (keep water or a fire extinguisher nearby, as always when working with an open flame) and grab a pair of metal tweezers you don’t mind using for craft projects.

Gently heat the edges of petal (holding it about inch and a half away from the candle flame, Leanne suggests) until the edge of plastic starts to melt and curl. This will happen quite fast, so be careful not to melt it too much! Then give the petal a twist with your tweezers. Try to keep the centre as flat as possible as this is where you’ll glue the layers together to form your flower.

Repeat with other petals.

Cut a couple of leaves from a green pop bottle (or cut from a clear bottle, if that’s all you have, and colour it with a Sharpie or alcohol inks). Use the same heat-and-shape technique to give a little ripple to the leaves.

Assemble — very carefully! — using a hot glue gun, positioning the petals and leaves in whatever way looks good to you. Add a bead, pearl, or other embellishment of your choice to make the centre of the flower.

And there you have it, a faux glass flower made from an old pop bottle!

Visit www.zibbet.com/LuvLeeScrappin and luvleescrappin.blogspot.com to enjoy more of Leanne’s crafty creations.

Today, I dashed into town to stock up on essentials, and while there stopped in at DJ’s mother’s house. Well, I’m ashamed to say that a parcel was waiting for me there since Christmas! (You know how it goes, never enough time in a day – especially when we seem to get a blasted snowstorm every third day…)

More later on one of the other goodies just unwrapped, but I had to show you this amazing vase — one of a pair I’m now delighted to be able to call my own.

Wondervase, they call it.

In a flat cardboard package, you find a flat plastic envelope — the medium size is 6″ x 11″ which seems a very useful size. Fill it with very warm water, right up to the top. The bottom flattens out and the whole thing becomes quite surprisingly stable.

So far, so good — but the real fun starts as the plastic warms up and becomes flexible.

You can bend it, fold it, twist it, and generally shape it into the mad funky vase of your dreams…

I can see getting a fistful of these vases and keeping them on hand for garden season — a quick and unusual way to present a gift of home-grown garden flowers to our visitors!

Truth be told, I’ve been playing with this all afternoon…

Tip: The instructions say to pour out the warm water and replace it with cool water, to make the vase hold its strange new shape, but I found it works better just to let it cool down on its own, less of the vacuum effect to suck in the sides — especially if you make the shape very narrow at the top, like this crazy twisted “bud vase” I shaped up around the handle of a wooden spoon.

All I need now is a long-stemmed rose!

When you’re done with the vase, you rinse it out as you would any vase, because you know it’s bound to get a bit gunky inside after a week or so with flowers in it — then soften it up again with warm water and smooth it out flat.

Besides the enormous amount of fun I found this Wondervase thing, it’s a huge bonus just to be able to pop it into a drawer with my dish towels and such. Because if you ever saw the ungodly mess that’s the inside of my china cabinet, you’d know I couldn’t possibly find the shelf space to store an ordinary vase…

Our evironmentalist blogger with an eye for beauty, Pelf Nyok, has dropped by to introduce her latest find — an American artist who creates huge mandala wall pieces with other people’s throwaway plastic bags. The works are both colourful and green! ~ Jen

Plastic Artworks

A lot of things are being said about China’s recent announcement to ban the manufacture, sale, and use of plastic bags under 0.025 mm thick and to prohibit supermarkets and shops nationwide from handing out the sacks for free from June 1st.

And, apparently, Australia’s government also said recently that it hoped to phase out the use of plastic bags from the nation’s shopping centres by the end of the year.

With all the hoo-haas around the excessive use of plastic bags, it is heartening to learn that there are people who turn these plastic bags into beautiful art pieces!

Virginia Fleck began making artwork when she was a child and she eventually studied at Portland School of Art and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and residencies including a fellowship for a residency and exhibition in Havana, Cuba.

My wall-sized mandalas, created from sections of used plastic shopping bags, analyze the activity of consumerism as a spiritual encounter. This visual experience of repetitive designs, indicative of meditative objects and advertising graphics, stimulates the viewer to yearn for more… Our hunger is insatiable; our fervor can be witnessed… Nirvana / paradise is easily obtained and owned…

- Virginia Fleck

Her work has been exhibited at Art Forum Berlin, Pulse Miami, Pulse New York, and Arte Fiera in Bologna, Italy. And she recently completed The Spin Cycle for Whole Foods World Headquarters and Mandala Constellation for the Dell Children’s Hospital. Her work appears in many prestigious collections including the Marino Golinelli collection in Bologna, Italy. In 2007, she was nominated for the Texas Prize, and won the juror’s award for the 2007 Texas Biennial.

Pelf Nyok, the author of The Giving Hands, is a grad-student who is trying to save the turtles, the environment and humankind. Charity, conservation and volunteerism are things that are very close to her heart.
pelf-ism is contagious!

A colourful wreath hand-sewn from sweater remnants gives an eco-friendly twist to a traditional holiday decoration, in one of the more imaginative recycling ideas of the season.

It reminds me a bit of those wreaths made with tied strips of plastic bags that I’ve mentioned before, but only in the sense of an unconventional material used to fill out the basic wire wreath armature — the sweater fabric makes these wreaths so much more warm and friendly!


And while we’re keeping old sweaters out of the landfill and turning them to a festive purpose, why not go for sweater-sewn Christmas stockings, too?

These stockings each have a tiny outside pocket to hold an extra-special small gift.

Round out the woolly winter decor with ball-shaped ornaments bound with colourful yarn — somewhere between a homemade toy for a very pampered cat, and the layer-wrapped gift balls that the Victorians so enjoyed.

All three style of decorations are found in the Eco Accents section at Viva Terra.

Back in October 2005, I wrote about a remarkable little kids’ playhouse made by recycling plastic milk jugs. At the time, I was so disappointed that I didn’t have any photographs of the playhouse to share.

But all that has changed, with an email that came in this week!

Scott and Andrea McNeill of Cornwall, Prince Edward Island, Canada — the imaginative parents who turned 840 plastic milk jugs into a unique playhouse for 2-year-old Karina — have been kind enough to send me some pictures, and have given permission to post them here for all to admire.

You can see why Karina calls the playhouse her “Milk Jug Castle” — and she looks like a real Princess in it, too!

Home and Garden can suggest 35 uses for plastic milk jugs, but a young family in Cornwall, Prince Edward Island, Canada, has just come up with another way to recycle milk jugs that beats any we’ve seen so far!

With the aid of a hot glue gun, Scott and Andrea McNeill turned 840 plastic milk jugs into a unique playhouse for their 2-year-old daughter, Karina.

The playhouse, constructed between the posts that support a high deck off the family’s house, is built of milk jugs “bricks” and decorated with flowers made from the colourful caps. Karina calls it her “castle” and obviously just loves it.

I only wish that I had a picture to post here — from the news story on television this evening, it looks like the cutest little house!
[update! we've got pictures!]

To make each “brick” takes two empty plastic milk jugs. Leave the cap on one, to help give it strength. Cut the top off the second jug so that it will slide down over the narrower end of the first jug, and what you have is a remarkably sturdy plastic building block. The possibilities are unlimited!

Scott McNeill says he has no idea whether the little playhouse he built can survive the coming Atlantic Canadian winter but, “if it doesn’t,” he says, “we’ll just have to drink more milk and make another one!”