What is in your closet?
It's Week 2 for Pickles CREATE! Craft Camp where you check in to Feeding Pickle Ltd for some crafting prompts to feed your own creative ideas, at your own pace, in your own home!
This week we took our inspiration from laundry! If there is one thing that is always found in a houseful if Pickles, it is laundry!
For the younger Pickles, sock snakes were an instant and ongoing friend. Use the mismatched Lone Ranger socks and give them purpose again. Super simple finger knitting techniques and a few googly eyes later, you'll have a new creative adventure friend!
To make: Cut off the heel, toe, and top cuff of a sock. You'll be left with the most tubular parts of the sock, which you'll cut across to make rounds.
Hold your four fingers vertical and loop the sock round onto your index finger.
Twist the round once, and bring it down by your middle finger.
Twist the round on the other side of your middle finger.
Continue across four fingers, creating individual loops around each finger.
Above that first row of loops on your fingers, repeat above steps with a second sock round.
Now lift the bottom loop up and over the second row of loops. The loops will fall behind your finger.
Repeat across all fingers. You now have just one row again of loops on your fingers.
Use a third round to twist loops again onto all fingers.
Lift lower loops up and over upper loops across all fingers again.
Repeat the steps of adding a new row of loops and lifting the lower row of loops over until you have just one extra sock round remaining. Remove loops from fingers and pull the last round straight through all loops and knot to secure. Either tuck this part under the end of the sock snake, or let it create his forked tongue.
Add googly eyes or any other accessories to make your new pet's personality unique!
The second project inspired by the closet started with a handful of lint from the dryer. What could be made from the fuzz collected in the lint trap?
Paper! Soaking a cupful of lint in a bowl of warm water until it was well saturated (a few hours) and then blending with a few more cups of water yielded a very unappetizing slurry gloop of sorts. (Honestly, we were completely grossed out by it, but in the name of creative experimentation, we didn't stop until we'd given it a full trial. Also, we added fine glitter. Because if anything can redeem a project, it’s glitter, right?)
We poured the slurry onto a wire mesh splatter shield and attempted to make sure there were no thin spots while spreading the slurry-lint-gloop to an even consistency. We then pressed between a second splatter shield and some thick towels to extract the extra moisture. Press, adjust towel to a dry spot, press again. Once we'd removed as much as we could manually, we allowed our paper to dry between the splatter screens in the towel over night. Sure enough, that gloop redeemed itself as a funky piece of fiber paper.
Flat splatter screens were fun enough, but what about creating a different shape? Two mesh colanders, using the same method as above, yielded a fiber bowl. What would you put in a lint fiber bowl? Paper clips? Wrapped candies on a desk? Bracelets on the nightstand?
One creative idea leads to another thought of inspiration. What will you find in your closet to make into a fresh concept or design? Share below and tag us in Instagram with your laundry inspired creativity by using the hashtag #picklescreate and tag us @feedingpickle !
Always be creative,
Marie Winfield