Recycling with jeans

OK ya'll, I came up with the cutest idea yesterday! I was cleaning out my boys clothing drawer of pants, since they won't be wearing them for a long time now, and pulled out all the pants that Max put holes in the knees. It was quite a stack! I decided to cut them all off for "play in the mud" shorts, or whatever. Anyway, when I got all the legs cut off, I looked at my little stack of legs and picked up a denim leg staring at it when the idea came to me to sew up the cut edge and make a gift bag out of it! I needed a gift wrapping idea for Max's little tins of magnets for his 4 teachers and these turned out to be the PERFECT size! And aren't they cute?! This idea would work great on shirtsleeves too! Since I chose to close up the end that I had cut, I already had a hemmed end for the top of the bag. This project took all of 30 seconds to do! And, since Max ripped all the knees out of his pants at school, I thought it appropriate that his teachers got gift bags made from them! I remember one week he tore knees out of 3 pair of pants! I was happy to have shorts weather come because I was desperate needing to go pants shopping and didn't want to have to buy more so close to the end of the season! We barely squeaked by with me doing laundry really often! I think next fall, I'll put patches in all the knees of his pants ahead of time!

I also sat yesterday and made cards for a total of 15 teachers/workers at the kids school. I simply took black cardstock (my most favorite color stock) and sewed on photos I printed off of some of my favorite pieces of artwork. Because my black envelopes are 6-1/2 in. squares, I jsut cut my cards as one sided 6-1/4 inch squares and wrote notes on the back of them. They all turned out nice. I love the clean look of a card without a bunch of stuff... just a main focal point. It gives the appearance of a framed piece of art with the black cardstock appearing as matting! And they are fairly quick to make. I'm thinking of making some card packets to sell in my Etsy store.... maybe....

My 16-year-old niece, Cassidy, is in town from Florida. She's staying at my mom's most of the time but we are going over to see her after school today and she is staying the night with us on Friday. We'll be picking her up Friday morning so we can have the whole day with her. The boys are beyond excited!