Yes you "can" upcycle your paint cans!

Give a splash of color to your kitchen with fun paint cans turned planters. Simply use any leftover paint to paint the outside of the can and plant your favorite seedling inside. The complete how-to for this project is over at DIY Network.

Tea Thyme!

Here's a great way to dish up your plants this summer - transform mismatched teacups into pretty planters. It's a great way to display herbs and flowers in your window or as a table centerpiece. The complete how to is over at DIY Network.

go green in the garden!

Enjoy the last of the summer weather with some upcycling projects for your garden! These crafty ideas will make you think twice about those discarded items in the garage or attic.

Glass Totem

see a tutorial by Gardens & Crafts here!

Wren House with License Plate Roof

D&G Gardens and Crafts

Plastic Container Planters

instructions can be found in the ReMake It book!

The grass is always greener on the upcycled side!

My super duper dad

Hi there RePlayGround blog readers. I’m dedicating this blog post to my awesome dad. He recently passed away due to a heart attack and he was a super duper awesome guy. He greatly influenced the person I am and especially influenced my career. I’ll really really really miss him (there’s not enough space to add the number of really’s I’d like to list), but I’m finding comfort in knowing just how many lives he’s touched in his life, including my own.



As a kid I grew up creating 4-H projects for my county fair in mid-Michigan. My dad was the 4-H agent of my county, so my brother and I always joked that 4-H was a requirement if you lived in our house. In 4-H I learned everything from basket weaving to sewing to baking to a whole lot more. I attribute a lot of the design skills I frequently use today to my 4-H days.

Even as I flip through my new book, I can see that a lot of the projects were inspired by 4-H projects that I did as a kid with a new, upcycled spin – weaving baskets now with plastic bags, sewing a new skirt from old t-shirts, an origami folded picture frame made from old maps. I’m happy that I was able to send my parents a finished copy of my new book just the week before my father passed away. My mom said that when they got it, my dad sat down and looked through every single page of the book and he was really really proud.



My dad also taught me a great deal about gardening and locally grown food. My dad always planted way too many vegetables in our summer garden. Little did we know that that excess would someday become my parents’ career. When I was about 8 years old my family started taking our excess produce to the farmers market and selling it on the weekends. With the money made from those first few weeks, my brother and I bought an Intellivision (kinda like an Atari if you’re from that era) game system. This not only taught me about appreciating good food, it also taught me about entrepreneurship and growing a business. About 15 years after that Intellivision purchase, my parents both retired from their day jobs and grew their farm into quite the business. I would never call them retired since the farm required more than full-time work in the summer. It was something they really enjoyed doing together and just one more way that they added to their community.

I know my dad especially liked talking to people at the market and give them tips on how to keep their veggies fresh, how to keep fend off garden critters, and just general plant-based knowledge.



I’m already missing him an unmeasurable amount, but recognizing his influence on my life and others helps me to see the impact he had during his 67 years here. And while there will never be beans or tomatoes that will quite measure up to the ones he grew, I'll still remember those bean-picking days where he would be sharing his words of wisdom as we plucked green and yellow varieties off of the plants. I may not be taking over the garden business, but I've certainly taken parts of what he taught me and reinvented it into my own business of reuse and remaking. And those are the best parts.

Home grown!

Locally grown, fresh produce runs in my blood. When I was a kid my dad was notorious for overplanting tomatoes, zucchini, and pretty much all vegetables. And in theme with recycling, my family doesn't like to waste anything, so we turned those surplus veggies into a small business. As a part time project, my parents, brother and I would harvest the excess vegetables and sell them at the local farmers market on the weekends. My parents still run their Threadgould Gardens biz in mid-Michigan and during the summer and fall you can find them at the Meridian Farmers' Market every Saturday. True to my farm-rasied roots, I still buy a lot of my fruit and veggies there at the Greenmarkets around New York City.

My good friend Janie, who has also worked at that same farmers' market, shared a great video where you can see my dad, Janie, and a lot of the other Meridian Market locally grown crew. Click on this page and play the video. And visit your own farmers market! It's always tastier when it's homegrown!

From table to table (with a few stops in between)

If you've been reading the blog for a while, you know that I kind of like to compost.
On a recent sunny Saturday, I worked on my compost pile sifting through decayed veggie peels and other food matter. That's the payment - one afternoon's worth of work once a year in exchange for being able to use drop off compost on Wednesday or Saturdays. And not only did I walk away with a large (recycled) yogurt container filled with what is considered "black gold", but also a better understanding of how food breaks down.

Seeing the compost get dumped from "cooking" for a few weeks and transferring it to a larger bin, you see the recognizable pieces in the mix. Corn cobs are still pretty much corn cobs and coconut shells are of the more determined to stay coconuts, but it's pretty amazing how most of the rest of it - orange peels, carrot tops, egg shells - all break down and start looking like dirt again.

I do work at a company that got its start in compost. In worm poop to be exact. But I'm in the design department and don't experiment much over with the lawn and garden crew other than eat lunch once in a while with them and use the fertilizer myself. So seeing the whole compost process was really helpful. And will make me way more diligent in removing stickers, rubberbands, and other foreign objects before piling it in my compost. I'm usually pretty good, but when sifting at the pile they're all still there, so better to remove 'em beforehand.

Post-compost on that sunny afternoon, I took my newly sifted black gold and planted a few containers of herbs (In upcycled containers of course! You can read the how-to in my upcoming book called ReMake It! In stores March 2011). The basil, pictured above, is sprouting already and I can't wait until it grows large enough to use it on the last of the season's tomatoes. Who knows what that dirt used to be - maybe at one time it was tomatoes and basil? I think the new plant feels right at home.

New Life for Shredded Paper

On a lunchtime stroll the other day I noticed that someone was putting shredded paper to good use in a tree pit.

We covered something similar in our Rethink/Reuse series last year, and it's always nice to see "trash" being used for noble purposes, like keeping our hard-working street trees* a little bit healthier. (*Did you know that each year, 272 tons of air pollution are intercepted or absorbed by trees in NYC? And that street trees raise surrounding property values? Learn more here.)