DIY: Party Streamer Seed Tape

Thanks to Mad in Crafts for such an easy and useful craft!  We love the idea that this will make gardening easier, and more efficient.  Just imagine you, but with a stunning garden in the background with upcycled materials from your latest party! 

The old becomes new: You can prepare useful seed tape from leftover party supplies!

Why make seed tapes instead of just planting the seeds directly in the ground, you ask?  Seed tapes:

• ensure that your seeds are spaced correctly, reducing the need to thin your mature plants.
• eliminate wasting seeds.
• make planting tiny seeds much easier.
• allow you to sow seeds from the comfort of your kitchen chair, instead of on your hands and knees!

With a items you may already have in the house, you can make your own inexpensive seed tape with your kids. 

To make party streamer seed tape, you will need:

a small saucepan,

water,

cornstarch,

white party streamers (dollar store),

a measuring tape,

a washable marker,

and seeds.

NOTE: I recommend using white streamers, not colored, just because I am not sure how the dyes would affect the plants as they grow.

Let’s begin!  First, the responsible adult will need to cook up the “glue” for the seed tape.

SEED TAPE GLUE

1 cup water

1 tablespoon cornstarch

Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly to prevent lumps. Once it starts to boil and make a gel, remove it from the heat. Cool to room temperature.

While the glue cools, roll out the streamers to the width of your garden plot.  Lay the streamer next to an extended measuring tape.  Using a  washable marker or felt pen, make marks on the streamer at the intervals recommended for your seeds.  We spaced the dots for our cucumber seeds at 3 inch intervals.

Drop a small amount of cooled “glue” on each dot and have your child place one seed on each dot of glue.

Continue until all of your dots have seeds.

Fold the streamer in half and press to stick the streamer to itself, enclosing the seeds.

If you are making seed tape from more than one variety of seed, I recommend labeling the end of each roll of seed tape so you don’t mix your cucumbers with your zucchini.

After the streamers are dry, the tape can be rolled up and stored for whenever you decide to head outdoors to plant them.  Just create a trench in your garden at the depth recommended for your seeds, unroll the seed tape, and cover with dirt.  Water as you normally would and watch them grow!

DIY: Upcycled Bottlecap Flowers

A Bird in the Hand's blog has given us an idea on how to upcycle our bottle caps into something wonderful.  We have been looking for a way to upcycle our bottle caps and this may be just the thing.

Be sure to check out their blog for more fun DIY!

Now, here's a step-by-step tutorial.  First I collected my materials.  I used bottle caps (I used 20 in mine), a tin can lid, a chopstick, and glue (I started with super glue but switched to epoxy b/c some weren't holding).

From there, I started bending my bottle caps into the shape of flower petals.  The basic idea was inspired by a previous Iron Craft project where I had created a felt flower.  I used my pliers and just started bending until I got the shape I wanted. 

For me, the easiest way to do it was to grab the rim of the bottle cap and pull it down to flatten it.  Then I would bend in the two sides.  Finally, I would bend down the top.  My first few petals looked like blobs of metal so it takes a little trial-and-error.

As I went, I laid my petals out on the tin can lid to determine how many I would need.  I did two layers of petals, but you can switch it up and do more if you like.

Next I glued on the petals.  I did the entire outside row first and then switched to the second layer.  Like I mentioned above, I tried using super glue but found that some of my petals weren't holding so I switched to epoxy.

Finally, I added one more bottle cap in the center.  Now you have a finished flower!

From there, I attached a chopstick by gluing it onto the can lid in between two of the petals.  This allowed me to turn it into a garden stake.  But there are lots of other possibilities.  You could paint it, add leaves (maybe cut from soda cans?), turn it into a pin, etc.