Simply "Cycle" Saturday

Welcome to another week of Simply "Cycle" Saturday. Here are the highlights from the previous weeks. We discussed great second day ways to eat your Turkey Dinner, how to reuse cards you have received, what to do with your old flat pillows, uses for your empty shoe boxes, how to make good use of your old t-shirts, what to do with the newspaper when you are done reading it, and what to do with all those millions of phone books you get at your door.

This week lets talk about what we can do with our old curtains when we decide to change the look in our home. Most of the time when we women decide we want a new look in our homes, the curtains are still in great condition. Here are some uses for them rather than just tossing them out.

• You could use the material to make clothing. Did you ever see the movie Sound of Music? Great idea right? Need a new shirt, wallah!
• You could make table placemats out of them. These are very easy to make. You just cut the fabric into squares (about 1" in diameter larger than you want the final product) and sew around the edges. You can sew by hand or a sewing machine. If you want to spruce them up a bit, add a ribbon edging. They will be beautiful.
• Make tie blankets out of it. You could get a solid colored material for $1 a yard at Walmart, if your curtains are designed, some old pillow batting, and some yarn. You sew three sides of the two materials together, stuff it with the batting, and sew the fourth side shut. Now the yarn is used to hold the batting in place once you have it setting where you would like it to be in the blanket. You can either sew smaller squares with your sewing machine and tie the yarn through at the corners for decoration or you could just use the yarn to hold the batting down about every 16 square inches. My example blanket is in my little guy's room and he is asleep so I will post it later.
• Decorate headbands with it. You know how you can buy those plastic headbands for a few cents a piece? Well this is a great way to fancy them up a bit! You just cut a piece of material, get out your hot glue gun (or purchase one at the dollar store), glue one side of the material down to the underside of the headband, fold the rest of the material tightly around it, glue the part that meets the material you already glued down, and cut off the excess. There you have it, a beautifully decorated headband!

Now it is your turn. Tell me what you have used your old curtains for. Just leave a comment with your way to re"cycle".