Make an Upcycled Aluminum Can and Silverware Wind Chime

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

One of my favorite parts of windy weather is enjoying the sound of the wind chimes singing from my front porch and back deck. I love them even more because they're handmade!

Do you need some handmade singing in your life, too? Here's how to make your own wind chimes. Mine are upcycled from aluminum cans, silverware, old keys, bottle caps, and metal lids, but feel free to substitute your own stuff needing to be upcycled. I also really like glass bottle wind chimes!

Supplies & Tools Needed

Here's what you'll need:

• Aluminum can (empty, no label, clean, and dry)
• Embellishments (silverware, old keys, metal lids, stash beads, bottle caps, etc.)
• Keyring or paperclip
• Twine
• Cordless drill with a drill bit
• Scissors

Directions

1. Drill Holes In The Can

Use a drill bit that's slightly wider than the width of your twine, and drill a hole through the bottom center of your aluminum can.

Next, drill holes around the rim of the can. I prepped these cans for my Girl Scout troop, and drilled eight holes around the rim of each.

At this time, you can also drill holes through any of the hanging objects that CAN be drilled. The stainless steel silverware that I purchased from Goodwill for ten cents a piece can't be drilled by my cordless drill (you'll see soon how we'll attach those to the wind chime!), but the metal lids and bottle caps can.

2. Prime The Cans

Priming the cans will allow the paint to stick when you embellish them later. Paint-on primer is far more eco-friendly than the spray primer that I used here, but spray primer is a LOT faster when you're priming enough cans for seven kids!

While you've got the primer out, prime anything else that needs it. If you'd prefer a different base color, you can also use a spray paint + primer.

3. Embellish The Can And Silverware

Use acrylic paint or paint pens to embellish any of the hanging elements. You can even decoupage if you seal it VERY well afterwards, or super glue on three-dimensional embellishments.

My Girl Scouts especially enjoyed painting the silverware, although next time I do this project with a group of children, I WILL take my own advice and give some of the pieces a different base color. Some kids create better when they're not faced with all that empty, white space waiting to be filled!

4. Knot The Hanging Cord

To attach a hanging cord, cut a piece of twine, tie a knot to a key ring or even paper clip and pull the twine through the bottom of the can. The keyring will hold the can, and you can hang more wind chime elements from it.

To attach the hanging pieces that have holes, just knot twine around them and tie them to the can using the holes that you drilled around the rim.

5. Lash All Of The Hanging Piece To The Can

To attach the silverware, however, you get to act like a good Girl Scout and learn how to tie a lashing knot! Use this animated tutorial to walk you through the process, and then go forth with your life, knowing how to tie anything to anything else!

Seriously, the lashing knot is dead useful. You're going to be thrilled that you now know how to do it.

6. Seal Your Embellishments

Even if your wind chime will be hanging under a protected eave, you still want to seal anything that you painted or decoupaged. A clear sealant does the trick!

If you're feeling uncertain about any of your knots, you can also hit them with a little dab of super glue.

Pro tip: Noise can also be pollution, and wind chimes should only be mounted where they can enhance nature, not disturb it, so be a good Girl Scout and don't hang your wind chime anywhere that it can annoy someone else.

We've got acres of land and only ourselves to annoy on it, but we still wouldn't put a wind chime anywhere near our bedroom windows. If you've got other people's bedroom windows nearby, be similarly considerate of them!

We Made Terrariums... and I LOVE Them!

We didn't exactly make the self-contained ecosystems that was my intended hands-on project for the Principles of Ecology chapter in CK-12 Biology. 

Honestly, adding any animals into our lives, however tiny and shrimp- or snail-like, is just a recipe for me fretting endlessly about their health, safety, and emotional well-being. The years that the kids had pet fish encompassed some of the most miserable day-to-day experiences of my life. I'm stressed out enough in general, and if Will wants to incubate chickens this summer I'll be stressed out even more, and I just don't have it in me to experiment with the lives of tiny critters in a sealed plant world.

Maybe later this summer we'll collect some jars of pond water and watch them for a few weeks. 

Terrariums are MUCH more my speed, and the kids were super into the idea, as well, so that's what we did!

Happily, we were able to make our terrariums entirely from supplies we already own, although that's mostly because I'm a supplies hoarder. Here's what we used:

• glass container with a loose-fitting lid. This keeps most of the moisture inside, while still allowing some air flow. We used some old solar-powered lanterns that were on our property, not working, when we moved here... yeah, I've had them kicking around until 2012. And I'm STILL hoarding the flat-backed glass marbles that were inside them!
• rocks. I need to stop using the rocks that I bought for landscaping for craft projects, instead. Also, I need to buy more rocks for landscaping.
• activated charcoal. I bought this a few Halloweens ago to make black food. It's just occurred to me that I bet I could dye play dough with it! It's also good for soapmaking and bath bombs.
• peat moss. I HATE that I bought this once upon a time, because peat is SO unsustainably sourced. I am never, never, never going to buy it again, although I guess that means I'll have to research what to use for terrariums instead!
• potting soil. This is basic potting soil, with no fertilizers or moisture-retaining polymer beads.
• plants. Mosses and ferns and other shade-loving woodsy botanicals do great in terrariums like this.

When the kids were so busy with extracurriculars (if we were homeschoolers, why were we never home?!?), we'd probably have split this project up into two or even three days, so it is true, I guess, that one of our pandemic silver linings is that we're lucky enough to all be quarantined together, with time to do big projects all in one day and space on our own property in which to do them.

I'd still rather my kids had their ballet classes and summer camp internships and our big Girl Scout troop trip, though!

We're lucky enough to be together at home, though, and so together we spent one morning making our terrariums!

We put a layer of rocks at the bottom, added two-ish scoops of charcoal to cover, then an inch or so of peat moss, then a couple of inches of potting soil:

And then we went for a hike in our woods:

Can you see the elusive Spots? Torties are pretty well camouflaged in the spring woods!

Among the mayapples and Jack in the Pulpit, we collected little mosses and ferns, trying to include as much of their matrices as we could along with them, and trying for at least a couple of different kinds of plants, in case some didn't take:

Syd found a lovely horn corral fossil that she gave to me for my terrarium, and in our little creek I found a well-worn vintage green glass marble that also went in.

The lids of our old solar lanterns were an ugly chipped black, so I asked the kids if they would like to repaint them:

Indeed, they would!

We've had our terrariums for almost two months now, long enough for the plants to see if they like it and settle in if they do.

Syd says that she forgot she owned her terrarium (sigh), and it definitely needed a few caps of water when I went off to investigate it--

--but look how it's thriving!

Will's plants were so thrilled to be there that we had to remove the lid to give them some more space to blissfully spread out!

Matt's might be the most successful, since it's not clear if he ever even knew that Syd made him this terrarium:

You guys, it's got a wee little MUSHROOM!!!

My terrarium, which I dote on far more than the children dote on theirs, is the least vigorous, but it's happy, as well.

Even if it wasn't part of our biology study, this was the perfect spring project. Now I just have to go put mine on a shelf somewhere where I can forget it for a couple of months, so it can grow as happy as the rest of the family's terrariums!

Easter at Home, during a Pandemic

It was surprisingly pleasant! Who knew that dyeing eggs bright colors and eating a lot of ham could temporarily put a lid on that bottomless well of aching horror?

Even though we still have full days of school (it's a small comfort to know that my children's schooling is the one thing that hasn't been completely disrupted by the pandemic, considering how  most other children are struggling right now with the annihilation of their school routine on top of all their other stressors), much of that time that the kids used to spend being shuttled to and from extracurriculars, as well as the extracurriculars, themselves, is now free.

Instead of spending that free time sitting on the couch and staring with dead eyes at the wall, for the past week, at least, we've been spending it making ALL THE EASTER CRAFTS.

We spray painted wooden eggs out on the driveway, then decorated them with paint pens and acrylic paint. They turned out amazing, and we loved them.

I taught Matt to blow out eggs, then went a little crazy and ended up blowing out about a dozen on my own (head rush!!!), and then went even crazier and tried filling some of the eggshells with cement and some with plaster.

The cement did not work for me AT ALL... almost as if the random cement that I just happened to have in my garage isn't the exact right kind of cement for making Easter egg molds. Imagine that!

The plaster of Paris worked perfectly, I guess. I mean, it technically worked. Tape off the small hole:

Enlarge the larger hole and then fill it with plaster of Paris:

After about an hour or so, spend WAY longer than you ever wanted to spend in your entire life peeling eggshell off of plaster--

--and then marvel at this. Completely. Typical. Egg:



I guess that if you 1) wanted a reusable Easter egg, 2) did not have any wood or papier mache eggs to use, and 3) DID have plaster of Paris, this would be a good way to DIY some non-egg Easter eggs to paint, but eh. My plaster egg looked identical to every other egg in the world but was a billion times more annoying to make. I am definitely a wooden egg person all the way!

The kids and I made embroidered felt Easter eggs while listening to podcasts and then the first hour of our new Dracula audiobook (only fourteen more hours to go!). These were awesome, too, and were super useful during the kids' Easter morning clue hunt, on account of these eggs can be hidden in very obnoxious places that three-dimensional eggs can't:

Also awesome? I dragged out my under-utilized set of silk dyes for the kids to use to dye our chicken eggs:

These resulted in epic Easter eggs, you guys. EPIC!!!

Check out those saturated colors, those deep jewel tones! And I don't even understand how some of the eggs came out of the dye bath with that metallic sheen?!?

I was actually sad yesterday when we peeled them all and made them into deviled eggs. They really were almost too pretty to eat!

Alas, Syd found the process of hand-molding crushed shredded wheat mixed with melted butter and marshmallow to be so disgusting that it quite spoiled the fun of eating the resultant shredded wheat bird nests:

It didn't spoil the fun for me, though! They were delicious!

Matt had his own DIY build: a drill-powered LEGO egg decorating machine!

Will, especially, LOVED this drill-powered egg machine. She used Sharpies and Prismacolor markers with it, and the eggs came out really pretty! 

The Easter Bunny traditionally leads the children on an Easter morning clue hunt to find their baskets--I swear that our Easter Bunny was doing this years before the Easter Bunnies of all the Instagram influencers! Matt and I generally linger in bed and listen to doors and cabinets slamming, stuff getting kerfuffled during frantic searching, kids loudly bickering as they run around the yard at too early o'clock on a Sunday morning, etc., and only come out when there's a silence that means that each clue hunter's mouth is too full of candy to gripe at her sister.

I don't know what everybody else's Easter Bunny does, but our family Easter Bunny pretty reliably gives the kids too much candy plus a couple of presents that I'm confident they're supposed to share, but instead they always want to divvy ownership of. Later, I will have to talk Will into sharing this wood carving kit with Syd--

--and Syd this sticker mosaic kit with Will:

Our weather forecast was dire, so I was worried we wouldn't be able to have our insanely competitive Easter egg hunt outdoors this year, but fortunately, the rain held off long enough for me to madden the children by hiding 100+ Easter eggs really, really, REALLY WELL!

I don't know why the kids get so competitive over this, as it's literally just our stash of reusable Easter eggs with zero prizes to gain, but at one point Syd found an egg right where Will had just stepped, and in retaliation Will lost her ever-loving mind and just started crawling through the grass to hunt. And then Syd tried to swoop down on the entire basket of eggs that Will had abandoned when she started crawling, and Will got to her feet, ran at her, and chased her off with a stick!

We more successfully divvied up responsibility for Easter dinner, even though we didn't get to eat it until after 9:00 because for some reason Will's math class still met on Easter. Yawn!

Matt made the ham, the mashed potatoes, and the Cadbury Egg martinis for the adults, Will made roasted carrots, Syd made roasted asparagus, I made deviled eggs, and Syd and I made an absolutely epic garden cake.

I had wanted to make something exactly like this Betty Crocker garden cake, and was more than a little worried when my best efforts were making it look exactly like trash, instead, but hallelujah, Syd stepped in with a grass tip and good design skills--

--and our final cake was the cutest thing that I ever did see:

Alas, we didn't have enough room in our bellies to even taste it after our 9 pm Easter dinner! Ah, well... garden cake is also delicious for breakfast.

Easter isn't such a big deal to us (over dinner last night, Will was all, "So, today is Jesus'... birthday?"), and honestly, I think this is by far the biggest fuss we have ever made over it, even counting when the kids were small and wanted to dye eggs every day for a month!

It was vastly more of a sugar fest than my body needed right now, but it turns out that it was exactly what my heart needed.

I'll remember this Easter fondly even when the lawnmower is still hitting random eggs in August...

How to Make Embroidered Felt Easter Eggs--with a Secret Pocket for Surprises!

I HATE this pandemic staycation, but it's no lie that it's given me more time to work on Easter crafts, so there's that, I guess...

Also, handwork soothes my anxiety, gives me and the kids something constructive to focus on, and is something fun that we can do together to make some happy memories. So there's that, I guess!

This particular project also fills an actual Easter need that we have. At our house, the Easter Bunny leads the kids on a giant, far-ranging, whole-morning clue hunt that they have to follow in order to finally find their Easter baskets full of treats. To do that, the Easter Bunny likes to use our family stash of container eggs, but the thing is that I do NOT purchase plastic Easter eggs. Instead, I hoard whatever plastic Easter eggs the kids have happened to receive from other sources over the years. But somehow, some of those plastic Easter eggs walk away every year.

This is such a problem, you guys! A few days ago, we got out our Easter decorations and the younger kid helped me sort them. You want to know how many plastic Easter eggs we found?

Five. You guys, five plastic Easter eggs will not keep my kids busy running around on a clue hunt while my partner and I spend the entire morning in bed.

Obviously, we need more container eggs, and we need to DIY them, and they can't take a ton of time to make (I'd make these papier mache Easter eggs again in a heartbeat, because they were so cute, worked awesomely, and lasted for about five years before I finally composted them, but... they ain't quick to craft!).

It took just a few minutes to think up the idea for these little embroidered felt Easter eggs, and not much longer than that to make them!

The vast majority of the time spent on crafting these eggs is in the embroidering, which you don't even have to do if you don't want to. But this is just about the easiest embroidery project you can think of, so if you've got time to listen to an audiobook and hang out with your kids, I highly recommend doing your Easter eggs up all fancy.

Even better, there's an envelope closure on the back that's also quick and easy to hand-sew with your embroidery floss, and it's secure enough to hold a miniature candy bar, a Hot Wheels car... or a piece of paper with a Very Important Clue written on it!

Here's what you'll need to craft these Easter eggs:

• felt. Normally, I use Eco-fi felt, which is made from recycled plastic bottles. For special little handicrafts like this, though, I dip into my very small stash of wool felt that I buy here. 
• Easter egg template. You can draw your own, of course, but I use the four-to-a-page Easter egg template from Skip to My Lou. 
• embroidery floss, needle, and scissors.

1. Cut out one full egg template, and decorate! You seriously do NOT have to have any sewing or embroidery skills to do this. Just knot one end of the embroidery floss, start it from the back, and get to stitching!

If you think your work looks ugly, the trick is to keep embellishing it! Nothing--I promise you, NOTHING!--can look ugly when it's covered in enough pretty embroidery floss.

I did discover that the kids and I had an easier time thinking of cute embellishments when we lightly chalked some curved lines for our stitching to follow. Chalk will rinse right off of felt with a little running water, so it's a good choice for drawing any kind of pattern or template directly onto the felt egg front.

2. Make two more partial egg templates. In the photo below, you can see that I've got one full egg front, and two different egg backs that overlap each other by a couple of inches in the middle:

That overlap is important, because it's your envelope closure. To make it, first pin the bottom egg piece lined up with the bottom of your egg front, then pin the top egg piece lined up with the top of the egg front. Blanket stitch all the way around the egg to make it look like this:

If you wanted to hang this egg, you'd just have to stitch embroidery floss through the top and tie it into a loop.

If you wanted to stuff the egg, you'd just have to cut out one complete egg back (perhaps you could embellish that, too!), blanket stitch the two together, and stuff it before you'd quite finished stitching it completely closed.

The kids and I have a few more of these in progress, and plans to embroider some more together later today while we listen to Dracula (we finished Pride and Prejudice a couple of days ago, and now we get to watch the Colin Firth miniseries together!!!).

I hope the Easter Bunny finds them useful, and that none of them wander away...

Six Months Ago: The Scented Candle Workshop
One Year Ago: Homeschool Science: The Gummy Bear Osmosis Experiment
Two Years Ago: Nashville is Country Music
Three Years Ago: The Three-Day School Week
Four Years Ago: Earth Hour 2016 and 1980s Trivial Pursuit
Five Years Ago: Civil Rights for Kids
Six Years Ago: Geocaching on the B-Line Trail
Seven Years Ago: Finally, the Sun!
Eight Years Ago: On the Knitting Spool
Nine Years Ago: The Roller Derby Highlights Reel
Ten Years Ago: Dandelion Stir-Fry
Eleven Years Ago: ATC Swapped
Twelve Years Ago: Felt Food for Fun

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

20+ Things to Do with Apples

Did you, as well, just get home from the orchard with two bushels of apples?

Did you look at them, taking over all of your counter space, and wonder if maybe you bought too many?

You did not buy too many. Instead, you just blessed yourself with a month-long adventure in making ALL THE APPLE THINGS!

Here are all of OUR favorite apple things:

1. apple cake. I apparently made this a decade ago and then promptly forgot about it (good thing that I blogged about it, though!), and then made it for only the second time this year. It's DELICIOUS and I'm never going to forget about it ever again.
2. apple cider doughnuts. Syd is still super into doughnuts. I've never been able to bring myself to deep-fry anything, but we'll try any baked doughnut recipe that we encounter. If deep-frying didn't horrify me, though, I'd also be making these apple fritters, because those are MY favorites!
3. apple peel jelly. Our apple peels are the rightful property of our chickens, but maybe your apple peels want to be jelly!
4. apple pie. I don't actually like pie crust, so apple pie with a crumble topping is my favorite!
5. apple print bunting. I really like the simple materials used in this project. Another good option is fabric paint on canvas buntings.
6. applesauce. This is how we make our applesauce, except we don't even put in water--we just peel and core apples, put them in a pot, put the lid on, turn it on low, and show up every now and then to stir. Fruit blends are fun to make from whatever other fruit you've got kicking around the freezer.
7. baked apples with oatmeal. Will, especially, loves these baked apples. I can get leftover oatmeal eaten by baking an apple, warming the leftover oatmeal, and then spooning into the hot apple's core. Don't tell Will she's eating leftovers!
8. bird feeders. We like hanging these bird feeders in front of the playroom window in the autumn and winter. 
9. candy apples. Candy apples are my FAVORITE (or at least they used to be, since I probably haven't had one since I was Syd's age!). This is one of those recipes that I've always wanted to try, but I'm afraid of candy making. As soon as I get brave enough to figure it out, though, the next thing that I'm making is galaxy candy apples!
10. caramel apples. Syd has long been obsessed with caramel apples, and I swear that we've made them a zillion different ways. Decorating them with melted chocolate and candy is the best part!
11. caramel apple monsters. Here's a fun pre-Halloween way to eat caramel apples in a more manageable serving size. Candy eyes are always a bonus!
12. cast iron apple crisp. EVERYTHING tastes better when made in a cast iron pan.
13. cinnamon applesauce quick bread. It's really good!
14. cinnamon dough. Who wouldn't love a delicious-smelling oven-dry clay? This dough uses a ton of cinnamon and applesauce, and makes a sturdy, sweet-smelling clay that we like to use for Christmas ornaments.
15. cinnamon sugar apple blondies. I generally prefer my sweet things to be chocolatey. Unfortunately, Syd doesn't like chocolate--the horror! So apple season is my time to indulge her with all the apple treats that we both like.
16. clove apple pomander. This is a sweet nature craft that goes well with a read-aloud of Little House in the Big Woods. 
17. DIY apple cider vinegar. Think about all the crazy projects we could get into if we only had our own apple orchard!
18. fruit leather. I actually make this with only fruit and spices--you don't need sweetener when you're eating applesauce! You can use homemade applesauce, blended with whatever other fruit purees and spices you prefer.
19. Mummify an apple. Experiment with the Ancient Egyptian method of mummification to figure out how best to preserve your apple for the afterlife.
20. shrunken apple heads. Here's a good beginner carving project for young ones. Dry them or, if you're having a Halloween party, pop them straight in with your punch.

Do YOU have a favorite thing to do with apples? Tell me about it and I'll probably do it--I've still got half a bushel on the kitchen table!

How to Make a Clove Apple Pomander

This is a repost of my original article, which I wrote for Crafting a Green World in 2010. Time flies, and yet Syd still wears leotards more often than not, we still have that same cup and water bottle from the second picture, and we still have a zillion and a half apples hanging out on the kitchen table.

And we might still make clove apples out of some of them!

(Psst! The Amazon links are affiliate ones! If you buy something from Amazon after clicking through an affiliate link it doesn't affect you, but Amazon might pay me half a penny in two months!)

Get your Little House on and make an apple pomander - aka a clove apple - this fall. It smells amazing, and Ma Ingalls will be so proud!

In Little House in the Big Woods, Ma receives an apple pomander from her sister-in-law for Christmas. Laura writes, "Aunt Eliza had brought Ma a large red apple stuck full of cloves. How good it smelled! And it would not spoil, for so many cloves would keep it sound and sweet."

An apple pomander - aka a clove apple - is a wonderful present, because it works exactly the way that Laura Ingalls Wilder describes it: it smells wonderful, it won't rot, and the stem provides the perfect place to tie a serviceable piece of twine or a fancy ribbon to hang your clove apple in a closet or hallway.

To make a clove apple of your own, you will need:

• An apple, free of bruises or cuts, with the stem attached.
• Plenty of whole cloves. I buy my cloves in bulk from a restaurant supply store, but your local co-op natural grocery also stocks them in smaller quantities.
• Bamboo skewer
• Twine or ribbon
• Strong glue

For the clove apple to keep, the cloves must be stuck all over the apple, quite close together. They don't need to be touching each other, but you can't make pretty designs or otherwise leave blank spots on your apple and expect it to last. However, you can make pretty designs with the cloves if you only want the apple for the season- through your spectacular Thanksgiving dinner, perhaps, to then be composted with the other leftovers.

While it's possible to stick the cloves straight into the apple, this can be tiresome and it'll cramp your fingers after a while. Additionally, small children lack the strength in their little finger muscles to pull off this part of what is otherwise an accessible activity for them. Instead, use a bamboo skewer to poke several holes at a time in your apple, then stick the cloves stem-first into those holes. It's easier on your fingers and I think that it makes the work go faster.

If you are creating a design on your apple with cloves, you can first draw the design right onto the apple using a fine-point Sharpie in a light color; as you place the cloves, place them end-to-end to completely obscure the pen marks.

 As soon as you're finished, go ahead and tie your twine or ribbon to the apple's stem. I reinforced my knot with glue, because I don't really need the trouble of a clove apple suddenly bonking itself down onto my head someday.

In opposition to popular usage, we didn't hang our clove apples in our closets; I didn't really want ALL of our clothes to smell like we'd been smoking clove cigarettes. Instead, I hung them in cool, dry nooks all around the house, so that as you walk down the hallway, say, or snuggle on the couch to read bedtime stories, you can suddenly get a whiff of that sweet, comforting, handmade clove perfume.