Gone Fishin'

Inspired by this post from my friend Christianne (Little Page Turners), who was inspired by this post that was inspired by this post (I want to make sure I give credit where credit is due), I decided to throw my hat "into the fishing bucket" and make some fish.

A green fish project as a birthday gift. 

According to this resource about textile recycling, approximately 12 million tons of textile waste is generated each year in North America (amounting to approximately 68 lbs of waste per household per year), and 5% of all landfill production is textile waste.  Another article about clothing recycling states that "...the average American throws away 67.9 pounds of clothing and rags each year. With some 20 million people in the state of Texas, that’s 1.4 billion pounds of clothing thrown away each year in Texas alone!"

I went through a box of boy's clothing that was given to me by a friend and pulled out shirts that were either too small or too worn, ones that my boys wouldn't wear that had some life left in them.  But not a lot.  

 

I printed out fish clipart from the web and traced around them onto the shirts.  

Several important notes:  

1.  I forgot to turn the shirts inside out.  

2. These are not the fabrics in my final product - my sewing machine died, and I used a combination of fusible bonding and hand stitching on the first batch of fish. It was not pretty.

So I found some more shirts to recycle, turned them inside out and traced the fish templates onto them.  As you can see in the images above, the outline of the fish is larger than the templates.  That was done purposefully to give additional room for the seam allowance so that the fish wouldn't end up too small.  (Thank you to my dear friend for coming to rescue and letting me borrow her sewing machine!)

Next, I sewed the fish up (leaving an opening to turn them inside out), added some fill (you can use fabric scraps, etc.), looped ribbon through a metal washer and sewed the mouth shut.  Exhausted from my previous attempts at hand stitching, I opted to use the sewing machine to seal the openings at the mouth (and sometimes the tail), though a slip stitch would look more polished.  

I added buttons from a huge collection that my mother gave me.  She always salvaged buttons from one item to use for other projects...I have buttons from an outfit she made me in 2nd grade!  Hot-glued googly eyes (try saying that ten times!) give each fish a distinct personality.

Ribbon accents on the tails above.  The fabric for the fish below had a pattern on it, and I used fabric paint on the reverse side to match it a bit.

With the addition of fishing poles made out of wooden dowels, twine and magnets, the birthday gift was just about complete and fit nicely in a bucket from the Dollar Store.

These cute sunglasses were in the clearance bin at Michaels for 60 cents and were the perfect touch to finish off the gift.  I was able to find three, one for the birthday boy and each of his siblings.

Isn't this princess adorable?!?  This is baby girl after she was cleaned up.  Evidence of a great birthday party - frosting all over the clothes and up the nose!