DIY Toddler Swing From Recycled Materials

I have an almost-2-year-old who LOVES to swing.  I have often thought of  how nice it would be to have a swing  for him in our yard but I’ve just never gotten around to getting one for him.

Then I saw this post on Pinterest:

Click the picture to go to their great tutorial for this totally recycled swing.

And, just a day or two later I saw this commercially made swing that costs over $100:

Click the picture to go to the manufacturer’s site.

These two swings morphed inside my brain.

I uttered the words that daily test my husband’s patience.   “I could make that!”

I went rummaging for supplies.

I knew I had an old pair of jeans with a poorly located tear that I’d been saving for just such a moment as this.

I remembered the wooden ladder  in the garage.  Those rungs would be perfect!

I could get a bit of rope at Dollar General for less than $3.

I was off and running.

Below is everything I learned.

Be sure to read all the way through to the end BEFORE you start the actual construction process for yourself.  This is VERY IMPORTANT!

Step one:

Find an old wooden ladder.  If you have a saw, cut 4 rungs out of it.  If you don’t have a saw use the claw end of a hammer, a screw driver, a power drill and the heel of your shoe to break 4 rungs out.  Or just go buy a saw.  The other way can be difficult.  Not that I did it that way.  I’m just guessing.  *ahem*

Step two:

Drill 2 holes in each rung.  Make sure that they line up to the width and length that you want them or else you’ll end up with 2 sticks that have extra holes in them.  Not that I did that either.  I’m just sayin’….

Step three:

Cut the legs off your old jeans.

Step four:

Thread the front and back dowels through the belt loops of the jeans.

Step five:

Lay your side dowels on top of the front and back dowels and thread your rope over, under, round and round the FRONT BAR ONLY.

Pay no attention to the extra hole. Just… you know… measure twice, drill once.

Fling your rope over a tree branch and repeat step five with the back holes of your dowels and VOILA!  You have a new swing for your little toddler that cost less than $3 and kept an old ladder and a pair of jeans out of the landfill.

Step six:

Put the baby in and watch him fall in love with the new toy you hand-crafted with love.

Uhm.

Wait.

Aw, crap.

He doesn’t look very happy at all.  Although, honestly, at this point I was laughing so hard I thought I might wet myself.  I can’t even imagine what my neighbors must have been thinking!

OK… that didn’t work out.

Back up.

Step seven:

Find smaller pants.

Step eight:

Take your swing down and repeat steps 4-6.  With the smaller pants I found I had to cut slits to fit the dowels through because the loops weren’t big enough.  Be strategic about this to be sure the remaining fabric/seams are strong enough to support your little one’s weight.

Step nine:

Chase your now VERY reluctant child through the yard, catch him and jam him, totally unwilling, into the new toy you have lovingly hand-crafted for him. Twice.

Step ten:

Wait for a moment until he realizes that things have improved.

Much better!  I wondered if sitting on the seam of the jeans would be uncomfortable for him but he didn’t seem to mind at all.  He wanted to swing for a very long time.  I did trim the rope and straighten it out after the trial run.  The pictures from “step eight” are actually the finished product.

Enjoy!

Are you, too, seeking to save the earth, promote world peace and raise productive citizens without expending too much effort?

Why not follow LazyHippieMama on WordPress, by email or Facebook to get all the updates.

If we work on our goals together, they may be a little easier to achieve!  

 

Intentional Re-purposing – Part 1

I’m not sure who started it but, some time between my teenage years and today I started hearing that little phrase: “Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.”

I’ve gotten pretty good at recycling.  It doesn’t hurt that, in our town, you pay for garbage pick-up by the bag but recycling is free.

I’m learning about reducing, as those of you who read this blog know.  It’s a work in progress.  I grew up in the 1980′s for goodness sake!  Conspicuous Consumption and all that rot.  But I’m learning.

I almost never reuse.  When I wrote about baby food jars it got me thinking about that and I’m vowing here, before God and you WordPress witnesses, that I’m going to do better.  I figure recycling is better than filling giant holes in the earth with trash.  But it still requires gas for the trucks to move it to the processing plant and energy to process and…. so forth.  Reusing (or re-purposing) seems to be the Holy Grail of good stewardship.  My grandparents, who raised kids around the time of the Great Depression, were MASTERS of the art of re-purposing!  Somewhere along the line we lost our way.  I gave it a shot yesterday and managed, I think, to put several scraps of string and fabric, some clothespins, a cracker box, and a large piece of styrofoam to use.  All together these items may be JUST BARELY enough to fill a garbage bag so it’s not like I single-handedly stopped rain-forest destruction or anything.  But it’s a start. And like I have said before, if we all did just a few small things, wouldn’t it add up to something huge?

First I made myself a new bulletin board.  I’ve been wanting one for a while but the cork boards are ugly and covered ones are expensive.  So this is what I did:

This was left over from last year’s Halloween display. It’s 2 inch foam board.

I took my foam board and laid it on some fabric ALMOST big enough to wrap it the same way I would wrap a present.

Then I hot-glued across the top and bottom.  And folded the ends in – again like wrapping a present.

Add a piece of twine to hang it from.

The twine is kind of hard to see, but I just tied a loop on each end and hung it from a straight pin stuck in the foam.

Flip it over and I embellished it with 2 ribbons.  I simply held them in place on the top back of the board with straight pins pushed into the foam, then stretched them across and pinned again on the bottom back.

And I was all done.  Yippee!

All done!

Project #2 = displaying a few pictures.

We are terrible about throwing pictures in boxes without any sort of order to them.  When we grow old and die our kids are going to have mountains of nameless photos to sift through.  But I wanted to display at least a few of them, so I borrowed an idea I saw freshly pressed a week or two ago.

http://poshlittledesigns.com/2012/03/15/glamorous-glittery-clothespins-diy/

Except I wanted to use up items headed for the landfill (or recycling plant), so I adapted  the idea of glittery clothespins and made bows from little scraps of ribbon that I never really believed I would find a use for.  I tied them in bows and hot-glued them onto the pins.

Cutie little clippies!

Then I cut some scrap paper into rectangles and used it to back my photos.  I used another, longer, piece of ribbon (well, more like fancy string) as a “clothesline” and now my pictures are displayed!

Project #3 – cute fabric boxes

I saw some cute fabric-covered boxes.  But I am so broke right now I can’t afford to change my mind.  So I need to make my own.  Here is attempt #1, which came out pretty good, I think.

I started with a Cheeze-it box with one side cut out and a piece of fabric, again, just slightly smaller than I would use if I were going to wrap it like a present.

Then I wrapped the sides, hot-glueing the fabric to the inside of the box.

And the finished product….

I’d like to make lots more of these! Maybe some with lids or closing flaps.  I have some old t-shirts that I’m thinking might be cool to use because the logos would show.

I also have some ideas for milk jugs, soup cans and old long-sleeved dress shirts.  I’ll keep you posted.  What items do you give new life to?  Do share!

2 Minutes to Save the Planet

Earlier this week I read one of those blogs (not unlike my own) that was all about simple things we can all do to help improve the environment.  This particular writer proposed something very simple that I’d never heard before.  ”Save approximately 5 gallons of water a day by cutting 2 minutes from your shower time.” (Forgive me, but I can’t remember where I read this.)

Huh.  2 minutes?  Well.  That’s not so much.  Especially for someone like me who can languish in a hot shower for the entire length of an episode of Yo! Gabba Gabba!  (This is how I measure uninterrupted time.  Yes, I use ‘the electronic babysitter.’ Judge me if you must.)

So then I started to think about a science lesson from the 5th grade.  Our teacher grossed us all out by informing us that the same water has been on Earth forever. Therefore we routinely drink dinosaur pee.  To a 10-year-old this is a VERY memorable statement!

So, if the water never actually GOES anywhere, why do I need to worry about these extra 2 minutes?  (I know. Some of you are smarter than me and are amazed at my ignorance right now.  But give me some credit.  At least I’m learning and not just languishing in my ignorant bliss.)  I waited for nap time and then turned on my trusty old (OLD) Vaio and asked this very question.  This is what I learned:

Only 1% of the world’s water is fresh (not salt) and unfrozen and in a useable state.  My teacher was right…. the water cycle moves this same water from the earth to the clouds to the earth again over and over.  BUT when we take too much, in an unnatural way it causes the underground aquifers to run dry. In turn this dries up the lakes, rivers, ponds, etc fed by those unseen streams.  This can (and has in many places) wreak havoc on the local ecosystems.  It can also cause those aquifers closest to the oceans to become salty, making them unfit for our use.

FURTHER, those treatment plants that we put so much faith in can only treat limited amounts of water.  So if everyone uses too much, too fast the extra, untreated stuff goes straight back into the ground/river/lake or wherever (depending on your municipality). OK. So, now think about what you washed down the pipes today.  Laundry soap? Nasty food scraps from last night’s dishes? And whatever was flushed?  Now think about that being dumped directly, without treatment into the same lakes and oceans where you take your vacation.  GROSS!!!!!

AND there are a great deal of chemicals involved in cleaning all the above mentioned grossness out of the water so that you can turn your tap on tomorrow and get some clear, clean H2O.   All those chemicals remain in the water, seep into the dirt, leech into the crops and then into us.  Because that’s what we need.  MORE chemicals in our bodies.

As if that’s not enough, there is electricity needed to run the treatment plants and the pumps and all that good stuff.  Electricity that, in most areas, is still made by burning fossil fuels.  Which create pollution.  Which seeps into the water…..

You get the idea.

Back to the 2 minute thing.

I looked up how many showers the average American takes each year.   I am, apparently, grossly dirty compared to my neighbors because I only take 4 or 5 a week.  The average in the USA is EIGHT.  That’s right… more showers than there are days in a week.  Australians take even more!  (A little side note: there are some SERIOUS drought issues in Australia right now.  Coincidence?  Hmmm…) So, if the population of the USA is about 312,000,000 and each person saved 16 minutes per week in the shower that would be nearly 12,480,000,000 gallons of water EACH WEEK!  And that’s JUST in the USA.

THAT’S A LOT OF WATER!

So, thank you, fellow blogger, for opening my eyes!  I will, indeed, strive to take a shorter shower.  I hope you all will do so as well.  And, while you’re in there, being a little quicker than you were yesterday, give thanks that you have the luxury of clean, clear water on tap.  There are many in the world who don’t.  Let us never take this gift for granted!

I’m Going to Attempt to Break a World Record!

What are your plans for the weekend?  Me?  Well…. I’m going to GET INTO THE GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS!  Yup. That’s me. HISTORY MAKER.  I think I’ll add that to my resume.  Maybe. OK.  So it’s not JUST me all by my little ol’ lonesome making history.  They probably won’t put my picture in the museum or anything.  Then again, you never know.  I am freakishly good-looking.  heeheehee.  Plus my crazy adorable little (massively huge) 10 month old baby boy is helping me out.  The two of us, together with 563.4 bajillion other mommies and babies from SIXTEEN countries around the world are going to be taking part in The Great Cloth Diaper Change, 2012 (http://greatclothdiaperchange.com/). It’s all a part of the effort to raise awareness that there are moms using cloth diapers and that it’s really not that hard.  We are all going to change our lil’ pumpkins stinky bums into fresh, clean, cloth diapers at the same time thereby earning our way into the realms of Guinness.  Will my picture be in next year’s book? Probably not.  But I will always know that I was there.

Want to take part?  Check out the link above or go to http://www.thelittleseedling.com/store/ for more information.

From 8:30-9:30 Please Do Nothing

In the words of Simba’s daddy, “It’s the circle of life.”  The Earth gets hot. The Earth gets cold.  The Earth gets hot again. That’s what I believe.  I am pretty sure that someday the world WILL get much warmer, the polar ice caps will melt, sea levels will rise.  This will probably be followed by an ice age.  Because that’s the way it goes.  We, as a species, should probably be preparing for the eventuality instead of trying to stop nature.  I don’t think that people make this happen because I don’t think people were around for the first several million years of this cycle.

HOWEVER!!!!!

I do believe that Earth is precious and delicate and we have been entrusted as stewards of this extraordinary gift.  Burning up fossil fuels, filling landfills as quickly as we can dig them, and cutting down all of our lovely, oxygen-producing trees faster than they can mature would be the opposite of good stewardship.  It’s a big part of why I’m a hippie (wannabe).  I love the convenience of plastic as much as the next guy but…. really… is it SO MUCH more difficult to recycle?

If you are on-board with the idea of NOT destroying Lovely Lady Earth as quickly as possible here is the PERFECT lazy way to help:

TONIGHT, FROM 8:30-9:30 PLEASE DO NOTHING.  Don’t watch tv or play on your Kindle Fire or surf the internet.  Don’t run your vacuum or dry your laundry or make your own baby food.  Tonight, March 31, that one hour is set aside as a special time.  Disconnect.  Turn off the lights, the tv, the radio.  Here’s a novel idea…. spend some time sitting with your loved ones, under the starlit sky, and just TALK.  Light a candle and play a board game.  Take a bubble bath.  Ahhh…. that does sound lovely.  Just for ONE HOUR, enjoy the life on this great planet “off the grid.”  Maybe, just maybe, you’ll have such a nice time you’ll decide to do it again soon.

For more information about earth hour, visit http://www.earthhour.org.