recycling and embroidery...

So during the day, Kinsey and I are bookstore managers/baristas.  The cafe we work in uses all organic and fair trade coffees and teas, as well as gets our milk delivered in glass bottles.  Of course, we're the type of people who think the milk from glass bottles just has a better taste to it (which is very true!).  We're also the type of people who try to find ways to reuse things.  Old flyers for a past event?  We cut them in quarters and make scrap paper tablets out of them.  Old books with falling out/destroyed pages?  We cut them up and use them for color and design on signs we make for our coffee and other items for sale.  So we were eager to find a way to re-use one item that seemed to pile up fast....milk caps.  

I've been occasionally saving a few for a number of months, but didn't know what to do with them.  Magnets seemed easy enough, but it wasn't something I'd like to make tons of.  Then one day, after looking at a towering stack of them, I thought about embroidery.  Maybe pendants for necklaces?  

Start with a milk cap.  Something I love about these is how sturdy they are.  Not your typically thin, plastic, supermarket milk jug caps.  These have a little girth and hardness to them.  The color scheme is limited to bright green, red, blue, and clear, however because of the nature colors I tend to use to stitch, the cap colors are a perfect fit!

I cut the tall edges away and smooth down the sides.  This leaves me with something that looks like this:

After hand embroidering a scene onto some fabric scraps, I'm left with some great, one of a kind pendants.  To make a necklace, I just string the recycled cap on to a piece of brown cord.  

Small,  embroidered art that's wearable.  


Both of these examples can be found in our shop.