Easy-Peazy Eco Project: Spider Legs

Today, in a bout of creativity-meets-insanty, I made Mia a pair of spider legs. They were so easy, I whipped out another one for Bram!

They love them. And they are so quick and easy to make - and 100% upcycled!
Here's what you'll need:
two pairs of old tights
baby blanket
scissors
sewing machine

 Find two pairs of funky tights that are about the same size - stripes work great.

 Cut off the legs of the tights, so you have four long 'socks'. Make sure they're all the same length.

Cut off the top of one of the pairs of tights, above the crotch. This will be the waistband for the spider legs.

 If you have kids, you probably have some old baby blankets lying around. The think fleece kind work best - they're thick and light-weight.

Cut the blanket in quarters and roll each quarter up into a long tube.

Stuff each 'sock' with a tube...

 Now, you have four 'spider legs' and a waistband!

Lay each 'spider leg' on the waistband, with the openings together.

Stitch the four 'spider legs' onto the waistband using a wide zig-zag stitch.







  

Add shoes...













...and let the twirling commence!

And if you want to look especially fashionable and awesome...by all means, do not wear 'spider legs' on your head as I've done here.

Multi-taskin' Mama

If there's one thing I learned being a Mom, it's that you can't survive without the ability to multi-task. That is what I do, although I am admittedly not very good at it.

You see, next to being a mamapreneur, trying to educate the world the benefits of upcycling clothing, I am trying to be a rock star too. But when I am doing one creative thing, it's tough to do another creative thing simultaneously without causing some kind of injury to myself. I have been working on another blog to illustrate the challenge of raising kids while trying to make it in the music industry here but have sadly been neglecting my everyday diva blog, which I mean to rectify at this moment!

Being back in the US, where my upcycled kidswear is understood and sought after has done me good. Instead of doing the market this year, I'm working together with the coolest consignment shop ever, Cherry T's. We decided to do live upcycling right outside the shop, where I will magically transform clothes from the shop into completely new and unique mialeentje garments, right before your very eyes!

I'm also offering the new and incredibly awesome 'funky alteration' service for everybody who has something in their closet they just don't wear anymore. Poor lonely clothing, hanging in the wardrobe for no one to see just breaks my heart, so this is their chance to be pulled out and revamped into something...well, for lack of a better word: awesome.

So rock 'n' roll is being put on hold till after tomorrow, when it's all about fabrics and imagination. I have now officially admitted, I suck at multi-tasking, so I will stop trying as of now.

I've Got Designer Genes.

When I was eleven or so, my dad and I were having one of those talks about what I was going to be when I grew up. I don't remember exactly what I said to him, but I remember at one point he told me I had 'designer genes'. I remember being shocked, since I was sure I didn't own a pair of designer jeans at all! Much later, it became clear to me what he meant, and that it was true.

My parents are both designers - my dad is an industrial designer and my mom is a photographer. My brothers are also both designers. In my early teens, I tried to rebel against design. You see, I wanted to be an artist, like my grandfather. I wanted to use pure mediums like charcoal and wear oil paint stains on my clothes and go around smelling of terpentine, like a real artist should! I wanted to roll up my sleeves and mix my own sweat and tears into my work; only then could I consider myself a true artist.

After art school, what did I end up doing? I became a graphic designer. And after that? A fashion designer. My dad was right - I really do have designer genes. It's undeniably genetic.

Now that I'm a mom, I am curious as anything about what my kids will grow up to be. They have such an interesting mix of creative genes in them! Next to all the artsy folk in my own family, my husband is the result of an artistic gene-pool as well (which is incidentally probably why we accept one another's eccentric behavior; we're just used to it). He is a professional musician and his parents were both artists.

Both of us can't help but assume our children will be artistic in one way or another when they grow up. Heck, they already are! My daughter Mia was able to draw with a crayon before she could even feed herself, and my son Bram can beat out a rhythm with his bottle that would make Steve Gadd green with envy.

When Bram plays a tune on the keyboard, Mia starts doing arabesques. And when they're finished, they applaud for themselves. They're natural-born performers.

When Mia wants a new dress, she will skip into my studio and point out exactly which fabrics she wants, how many pleats she wants and which trimmings she wants it to be trimmed with. Her gift for styling at three-and-a-half just blows me away.

When Bram empties out his box of blocks, he immediately begins constructing the world's most inconceivably high tower. He's two years old, and he has a dream.

When Mia sees anything that even remotely resembles a flower, she goes ape. She cannot resist the temptation to pluck even the teeniest weed or dead bit of grass if she thinks it would look nice in a bouquet. Her eye for composition is astounding.

But there are also times when my kids are about as artistic as a sack of potatoes. When Bram tries to paint, he seems to think the object of the activity is to throw as many paintbrushes as he can on the ground and then run all over the paper while giggling madly. And when Mia was recently introduced to the concept of painting Easter Eggs, she was much more interested in how quickly she could make them spin them around till they rolled off the table and broke. (Needless to say, we had a lot of egg salad sandwiches that day.)

I have to remind myself, they are still kids. They are doing what all kids are doing at the same age, so before I go and declare how amazingly artistically-inclined they are, I should probably take a step back and just let them do what they think they're doing, namely, making a mess and having a really good time in the process.

And at the end of the day, who knows, they might just both grow up to be accountants. Which is absolutely fine with me...as long as they're accountants with a passion for music and flower-arranging, that is.

What To Do With Big Little Men...

My son Bram is not only a handful physically, he is an entire armful emotionally these days. That makes sense, since the big little man just turned two.

Suddenly a day in Bram's life has become busy and mentally challenging when it used to be a matter of simply waking up, eating food, napping, eating food, playing, eating food and going to bed. Now he's dealing with big emotions, growing pains, pre-school, other kids... it's a lot for any man to handle, especially a two-year-old one. He's neither familiar with nor capable of multi-tasking yet! He has officially graduated from babyhood into the era of toughness and now needs to dress accordingly.

As Bram deals with these developmental leaps into big-boyhood, I am experiencing parallels with the mialeentje boys' collection I lovingly named after him, bramboy. Apart from the 'everlasting pants - for kids who won't stop growing', I am finding it difficult to come up with new and exciting boyswear that I can put the same amount of passion into as I do the girlswear. A girls' garment has endless possibilities when it comes to ruffles, ribbons and gathering... A boys' garment just doesn't - and shouldn't - require the same approach, but what approach it does require has quite honestly got me stumped.

When I look at Bram, I see that he needs to be able to run, jump, climb, fall, trike, roll over and fall some more and he needs the proper attire to do all that in. When it comes to making clothes, I tend to lean towards cute, not tough. In fact, my inspiration for boyswear tends to fizzle out after size 74 (18mo), and after that, it's just no longer okay to be cute. A little boy who can slosh through a knee-deep puddle, get stuck haflway up a tree or carry a log half his own size simply can't be seen wearing powder blue or anything with a teddy bear motief on it. No, now it's got to be made of heavy denim, camoflauge and canvas. It's got to have cargo pockets everywhere, big enough to hold a frog, two worms and at least half a cup of sand.

My affinity for girlswear comes not only from the fact that I worked as a professional girlswear stylist for years, but also stems from the fact that I am, in fact, a girl. I recognize what a girl needs, what a girl wants, what a girl simply can't live without. The fact is that boys don't really care what they're wearing, as long as it doesn't get in their way while they're trying to ride a trike over a pile of branches. I seriously doubt Bram will develop the same desire to pick out his own outfit every morning as Mia did when she turned two. I get the distinct impression he has more important things to think about, namely how fast he can get his hands on his HotWheels.

So, what to do about big little men? I don't think I'm prepared to give up on bramboy completely - there are simply too many green-minded parents out there who are interested in my eco-friendly upcycled clothes for boys. But perhaps the line needs to be exclusively for the littlest of little men. The ones who can still get away with teddy bear motiefs and powder blue. The big little men who are still little enough to be cute.

And as for the bigger big little men - I'll keep my eyes on Bram and keep you posted...

What's Up with Upcycling?

The term 'upcycling' originates from the book 'Cradle to Cradle - re-inventing the way we use things' that came out in 2002. Since then it's been a sort of guidebook for folks like me, who believe strongly in recycling and re-using all the stuff we already have. To my knowledge, there is no term for 'upcycling' in Dutch, which makes me wonder: what's up with that? Does 'upcycling' even exist in Holland?

I had the advantage growing up that my parents had a very nomadic way of thinking, and our furniture represented that mentality. We moved around, so our belongings had to be easy to take apart and put back together again. We were sort of like our own personal Ikea. We slept on beds made out of old doors, read by lamps made out of styrofoam cups and played on jungle gyms constructed from huge plastic sewage piping, to name but a few examples. So I was raised how to think creatively about building something I wanted or needed out of existing materials. It's no mystery why I am passionate about my business, mialeentje, which is completely based on re-using.

Now that I have been running a business in 'upcycled' kidswear for over six months, I am beginning to understand how Europeans - the Dutch in particular - think about re-using existing materials. I could be wrong, but I get the impression Dutch people just don't like the idea of re-using anything that's already been used. The secondhand stores I frequent are usually empty, the kids in my son and daughter's pre-school class are all wearing the very latest in new kids' fashion, even the houses people want to live in and the cars they want to drive are most preferrably new and very definitely un-used. There seems to be a very prominent desire (in a large percentage of Dutch people anyway) to maintain a certain status, a status that does not include using secondhand anything.

When I spent a month in America last year, I saw a very different mentality. There, upcycling was not only a known phenomenon, it was accepted, it was practised and it was considered an all-round good thing! Maybe the book 'Cradle to Cradle' had more of an impact om Americans than it did on Europeans, but I was thrilled to see how many people were busy creating their own things out of used materials like it was just a normal thing to do. I should probably mention, however, that I am talking about an extremely small slice of America where a community of exceptionally creative people live, so my preconception that all Americans are pro-upcycling might not be completely realistic... In any case, the term is certainly known and accepted by Americans, whether or not they actually read the book.

I ask myself on a regular basis why my products seem to be more popular with Americans than with the Dutch, and the only conclusion I can come up with is that 'upcycling' is simply 'not done' in Holland. The mentality here seems to be that the value of a new garment goes downhill as soon as its purchased, and after it's been worn a few times, it might as well be thrown away. I am lucky to have a few friends and family who still believe in handing down clothing - without them my kids would be forced to go around naked! Sure, I could buy new things for them, but I can't seem to shake the idea that 'upcyling' is better - it doesn't require any production in the far east for starters.

'Upcycling' is also very simply the way to go when it comes to giving our environment a break, which is struggling as it is. By using what we've got right in our own backyards, attics or basements, we won't have to create any extra co2 in the production, importing and exporting of new stuff. And besides all this, 'upcycling' demands creativity. It forces you to come up with a creative solution, challenges you re-invent, rethink and re-use.

So I guess I 'upcycle', therefore I am.