I never had an engagement ring. That was entirely my choice, and I won't go into the myraid reasons for that choice here, so let's just simplify that a bit and say (1) I am incredibly fussy about my jewelry, and (2) I am incredibly fussy about spending large amounts of money. But when a friend sent me this link from a jeweler who will teach you to make your own engagement ring, a little bit of me was wishing the article had come my way about two years ago.

At New York Wedding Ring, you can sign up for an 8- to 10-hour class with a jeweler in which you will fabricate a four-prong solitaire ring and set it with the stone of your choice. Or, you can sign up for a longer course and design and fabricate the ring of your dreams. Even better? Most of the metals offered for use are recycled. Hooray for that.

This seems like such an awesome option when shopping for a ring. I know I would have loved it if I had the skill set to fabricate rings for the both of us, so a class like this would have really appealed to me. Of course, I would have wanted to be right there designing the ring, not waiting for a surprise! I wonder how many couples go in together. Engagement rings are big purchases, so why not spend the money on the experience as well as the ring itself? You walk out with a beautiful, personalized ring that's just what you wanted, and the memories of the class will last just as long as that ring.

Text by Mary Ellen Coumerilh of Mary Zoom

Water is a most precious natural resource, necessary to sustain life. There seems to be a limitless amount of fresh water—all we need to do is turn on our water faucet. Yet, the ability to enjoy fresh water on demand in some areas has led to the lowering of the water table. Out here in Western Kansas where agriculture is our livelihood and drought often a reality, responsible water use is of utmost importance. With summer quickly coming and gardening season upon us, I would like to share my top ten ways to conserve water in the home garden. I think you will find that a few simple and strategic changes in the way you use water to irrigate your garden will reap many benefits for water conservation.

Top Ten Ways to Improve Water Use in the Garden

1. Water deeply but no more deeply than the root zone of the plant. More than that is unnecessary.

2. Water slowly—turn down the flow. Too heavy of a flow of water will result in run-off and wasted water.

3. Water infrequently but thoroughly. Adjust the droplets to a larger size to minimize evaporation. Frequent shallow watering causes plants to concentrate their root system close to the surface resulting in plants that are more sensitive to water fluctuations.

4. Loosen the soil. Compacted soil results in water wasted by run-off.

5. Mulch, mulch, mulch! Adequate mulching conserves water by helping keep the soil loose and reducing evaporation. Coarse mulches need to be applied in a thicker layer (3-4 inches) for maximum effectiveness while finer mulches can be applied 1-2 inches deep.

6. Make sure to keep your garden well-weeded to reduce competition for precious moisture. Also consider removing surplus plants for the same reason. This will give you plants to share!

7. In the vegetable garden, use wide rows and plant crops closer together. This strategy will allow your plants to have plenty of needed sun for growth and fruitfulness but still provide extra shade by the base to help reduce evaporation.

8. Avoid watering during windy weather! Wind is a huge moisture stealer.

9. Water early in the morning when humidity is the highest to reduce evaporation.

10. Consider using soaker hoses and timers rather than sprinklers. This way you can strategically concentrate the exact right amount of precious water at the base of the plants in order to use less water but still achieve good deep irrigation. Also, consider collecting rainwater using rain barrels (a fancy name for a covered trash can) under your downspouts. Just make sure they are covered keep curious kids and animals from falling in and drowning.

As you can see, small investments in time and planning when watering the garden can reap large benefits in water conservation.

Mary Ellen Coumerilh (Mary Zoom) has dual passions—gardening and crafting. She is a Master Gardener for the Kansas State University Cooperative Extension Center in Sherman County, Kansas, and shares her love of gardening through teaching classes to whomever will listen. To Mary Ellen, gardening and eco-crafting go hand in hand. Both require wise and responsible use and reuse of resources, and both are loads of fun!

(image from Per Ola Wiberg ~ Powi on Flickr)

Smq Organics specializes in handmade organic and eco-friendly Crib Sheets and Accessories. Two of our most popular products are Organic Bummy Wipes & Organic Soy Baby Wash Cloths (which can also be used as a Bummy Wipe).

These cloths are a great way to keep your baby chemical free while reducing the impact of disposable wipes on our environment. They are also non-allergenic and will not irritate baby’s delicate skin. The wipes can be used with clean warm water or use the recipe below.

Homemade Baby Wipes Recipe

You will need:
Reusable cloth Squares or Wash Cloths
1 TbsP unscented all natural liquid soap
a couple of drops of Tea Tree Oil
a couple of drops of Lavender Oil
3/4 cups water
a suitable container with lid
 
Put the cloths in the container, then mix the remaining ingredients and pour the solution into the container.
 
Or make them the same way with the following household ingredients:
 
1 Tbsp unscented all natural baby shampoo, body wash or bubble bath liquid
1 Tbsp Olive Oil
3/4 cups camomile tea

Get creative, but please don’t keep your solution for more than a couple of days. There are no preservatives, so it will spoil eventually.

tutorial and recipe by Jennifer Ois, Smq Organics – The Finest Crib Sheets in the World

I spent the weekend doing some "spring cleaning", which got me to thinking about how we dispose of things. Every time I clean house, I pack up bags with anything anybody could possibly still want or use, and cart them over to Goodwill. And I try to ignore the proximity of the donation door to the giant dumpster in their lot.

Because, here's the thing: I am an artist, and not just an artist, but a found-objects-mixed-media kind of artist. I see value in everything. I save everything. And when it is time for me to clean house, I find I'm looking a pile of fabric scraps, or 3/4-full bottles of paint, and where I see a potential creative goldmine, methinks those Goodwill workers might be too quick to see trash.

That's where resources like Scrap come in. Unfortunately for me, there are 3,000 miles between me and their San Francisco headquarters, but it is good to know they are out there anyway.

Founded in 1976 to help provide art supplies to school teachers during America's last financial crisis, the Scrap Center for Creative Reuse has evolved into a 5,000-square-foot warehouse of high quality donated arts materials. Local businesses, artists and individuals donate materials, which are sorted by the scrap team and sold at very low cost to anyone who'd like to venture in their doors. According to their website, Scrap diverts 200 tons of reusable material "too good to throw away" a year from local landfills.

Looking at the photos from their website, the scrounger in me is dying to see the place for myself. It looks like a treasure trove of raw material. But even better than being just a resource for low-cost, salvaged materials, Scrap aslo works in education, supplying materials for classroons and hosting field trips and workshops teaching the art of creative reuse. I think any one, walking into a space like Scrap, can immediately understand the value of reuse in the "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" triad. Not only is that a LOT of material that's not filling up a landfill, it is a way to see the quality of things that sometimes get tossed just because people don't know what else to do with them... like a bag of fabric scraps or some 1/2-filled paint bottles.

What do you think? Are there resources like Scrap in your community?

Yesterday I wrote about some of the awesome ways crafters are reusing plastic grocery bags as raw material for their creations, so I thought today I would share this old video tutorial from Makezine on how to make a messenger bag out of fused plastic bags.

I'm sure by now you've all seen the gorgeous jewelry and bowls that Gülnur Özdağlar makes from recycled PET plastic. If you haven't, you need to go visit her website. Now. It will give you a good Monday kick in the creative pants...her work is that inspiring.

I have always wondered how she gets such delicate forms from our everyday ugly plastic waste... so imagine my excitement when I discovered theat she has a tutorial on Instructables to make your own plastic bottle bowl!

I'm not sure that I'm up to attempting these myself (I'm nervous about plastic fumes after we spent some time trying to replicate these with our kitchen oven. It worked well, but stank!) so this is getting filed away in my "maybe someday" file. If you attempt it, please let me know how it goes!

Before I end this post, though, I want to share this quote from Gülnur Özdağlar's bio, which I find as inspiring as her work itself, and great to have on your mind as we start this week:

"Her aim is also to obtain objects from things that have been discarded that are so beautiful, that we would want to wear or exhibit them, thus underlining the importance of “recycling” and encouraging it. In this way she provides her own personal answer to the problem of recycling.She believes that in the future there will be a plastic material that will not proceed from the cradle to the grave, but that will return to the cradle with no loss, thus giving rise to a new plastic material, that this will “determine the way shapes are created” and that the real problem will not be recycling, and not even upcycling, but “karmic compensation”. In other words she believes that there will be a better world."

We're taking a short break from weekly tutorials, but that doesn't mean that you can't try something new this week!

How about one of these awesome Sew-it-Yourself Kits from Loglike (available in their Folksy shop)?

Each kit includes an animal design (and all the cutting lines you'll need silkscreened with eco-friendly ink onto a sheet of awesome vintage fabric. I'm pretty taken with the fabric selection, myself—great choices! The kit includes and illustrated instruction sheet, and the designs are touted as easy and quick to make by hand or on a machine. Stuff it with some eco-fill or organic lavender, and you've crafted a great little new friend!

I am partial to the alligator. How about you?

Now, I know we've all heard a million times that the best way to get great pictures of your work is to shoot in natural light. But let's face it: that's not always possible. Many of us have day jobs, and can't start our crafty work until after the sun goes down.

So what do you do to get great color in your pictures if you have to shoot in artificial light? This is a suuuuuuuuuper simplified tutorial on how to tweak the colors in your photos in Photoshop or Picasa to take out some of the yellow that comes from shooting under a regular household lightbulb.

Before you even start: check the white balance on your camera. If you can adjust it for indoor shooting, do. It will make a world of difference.

To start: I took this picture one night of a necklace I made. I like the image, but it is just a bit too yellow.

First thing I tried was using the "Auto Color" feature in Photoshop. Sometimes Auto Color is a lifesaver, and with one click your photos look perfect. This time, not so much. This photo lost a lot of its contrast, and turned kind of greenish.

Instead, to pull back the yellows but keep the deep contrast of the original shot, I used Photoshop to adjust the Levels of the image.

Often times I will play with the Levels of an image to adjust its brightness or contrast, as I feel it gives me more control than some of the other adjustment tools. I do that by leaving the Channel on its default: RGB, and sliding the three triangular sliders back and forth until I'm happy with how the image looks. (Real technical, right?) But with this image I was already happy with the contrast, I just wanted to tweak color.

So, on opening the levels task box, I change the Channel to Blue. (Blue tends to be the opposite of Yellow on screen.)

I slid the midtone (middle) slider to the left to increase the blues in the mid tones of my photo, until I was happy with the way it looked. Often, just adding a little bit of blue like this is all you need to do to get rid of that pesky yellow. On this picture, I adjusted the reds a little bit as well, by changing the Channel to Red and moving the same slider just a tiny bit to the right to remove a little red.

If you have Photoshop, I encourage you to go in and play with the levels box and get to know it. You'll get a feel for it and your photos will thank you for it!

Picasa is also great for editing your photos, and has the added benefits of being (a) Free and (b) less complex than Photoshop. Photoshop is an amazing tool, but most people don't need everything it has to offer. In my life as a graphic designer I use Photoshop every day, and I'd say I'm proficient at it, but I'll be the first to admit that I don't know how to do at least half of what it can do.

In Picasa, same as in Photoshop, it's always best to first try to let the program do the work for you. Picasa has its own Auto Color funtion, and on this photo I think it did a really great job.

If, however, you want more control in Picasa, you can play with the "Color Temperature" slider in the "Tuning" tab. I don't think this gives quite the same level of control as the Levels in Photoshop, but it does work well at cooling down an image that is too warm, or vice versa.

The best thing you can do for your photos is to get familiar with the programs you have... go play! Experiment! There have been so many times that I've taken a photo that I thought was pretty great and then tweeked it in Photoshop and suddenly realized that the original I was so pround of... really wasn't so great to begin with. The more you know about the programs at your disposal, the more you'll know what to do with those mediocre shots to make them fabulous.