Sustainable materials: a good idea or not really?

Dear community,
What are your thoughts on sustainable materials? Scraps / leftover yarn / fabric scraps / cardboard scraps / paper scraps  are probably the best-known option, but there is also recycled wool. Is it easy to work with? Do you have any other ideas for sustainable materials?

Dear Josefa,
No material is safe from creative people. You can always make something out of anything.
Since we’re in a crafts forum here, when we think of sustainable materials, we all naturally think of wool and fabrics right away. Everything can be taken apart and unraveled to create something new.

But you can also use everyday items you come across: stones, sand, wood, paper, discarded furniture, etc.

For example, I use sand as filling for my sewing weights:



My doorstops get their stability from pebbles used as filling; they’re everywhere and cost nothing:



You can make fragrant bath salts from the peel of organic oranges:



You don’t have to throw away old calendar pages. You can fold them into envelopes and give out gift certificates inside:



Old wooden boxes (from chocolate, cigars, or tools) can be sanded down, painted, and decorated with motifs from napkins, for example. I used this wooden box here to give seeds as a gift to a friend:



These are painted, ordinary stones that I then decorated with a matching design (using the napkin decoupage technique). I brought them along as a gift to a barbecue party. They go on top of the napkin stacks so nothing blows away.



An old mirror was spruced up as a birthday gift for a little girl. I glued it onto a white-painted plywood board and decorated it like a little window with a curtain. On the front, there are three compartments for hair clips and the like. A truly unique gift, isn’t it? The mirror would otherwise have ended up in the trash, but this way it has brought joy for years.



Okay, I can tell this is getting out of hand. So I’ll wrap it up here. In any case, creative people can use anything—sooner or later, it turns into something new and unique. It doesn’t get any more sustainable than that.

Best regards, Ina

Ina, all your projects look great.
I can’t bring myself to throw anything away either, because I work and do crafts a lot with kids—they can put everything to good use.
Even if nothing great comes of it, it doesn’t matter—it didn’t cost anything anyway.
My little granddaughter is three years old; she takes after me—we’re always doing crafts.