Heating your home creates greenhouse gas emissions, whether your family uses electricity, home-heating oil, or a woodstove. In fact, heating and air–conditioning devours more than half of the energy that an American home uses. Making door snakes is a fun way to defend our home from drafts that leak from under doors and around window sills.
Here’s what you can do:
Make a door snake that will fend off drafts, keeping rooms warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
Here’s what you’ll need:
One yard of fabric (scraps work great)
Small piece of felt or ribbon for the tongue and eyes
Masking tape
Sand or fine gravel
Scissors
Pins
Measuring tape
Fabric glue
Funnel
And here’s how you do it:
- Measure the width of the door.
- Cut out a fabric rectangle that is about 1.5” longer than the width of the door and 7” wide.
- Turn the fabric upside down and fold in half lengthwise.
- Glue the long end and one short end, leaving a 1 inch border. Make sure to leave one of the short ends open! If needed, hold the seams in place with tape or pins until the glue has dried.
- Use masking tape to seal the seam shut so that the sand won’t leak out.
- Turn the material inside out so that the other side of the fabric is showing. Using a funnel, fill the snake with the sand.
- Glue the last end shut.
- Cut out the tongue and eyes and sew or glue them onto your snake. You can also use googly eyes or buttons if you have them. Add any other embellishments you can think of—like spots, stripes or even a rattlesnake tail!
Creating homemade decorations was my favorite holiday activity growing up. Coming up with new ways to make gift wrap, gift tags and ornaments from things found around the house and around the neighborhood was part of the challenge and the fun. With being green on all our minds this holiday season, we have an even greater reason to be resourceful and to look to nature for inspiration. Here are some of my favorite projects you and your children can do together:
Green your gift wrap:
Save money on all that gift wrap that ordinarily gets ripped to shreds and thrown away. Make your own gift wrap by sprucing up paper grocery bags or recycled brown paper. Create nature stamps by coating leaves and flowers with non-toxic paint and stamping them on the paper. You can also find treasures from outside and glue them right onto the paper, or simply color and paint your own designs. For gift wrap that is reusable year after year, try wrapping your gifts in fabric Japanese style using a furoshiki. Click here to learn how to wrap virtually any gift shape in a furoshiki. If all that tying and twisting has gotten your mind in a knot, simply secure the fabric with a bow.
Green your labels:
Gather holiday cards you have received and let you child cut gift labels and name cards for the dinner table. He or she can simply cut off the written message and keep the cover image or cut the image into sections to make little tags. You can cut fun shapes like stars, hearts and trees to give the image new life. Or attach a ribbon and viola! You have an ornament!
Green your decorations:
Bring nature in from the cold to add life to your holiday decor. Evergreens, pine cones and berries make beautiful garlands, centerpieces and accessories to gift wrap. Gather dead vines to make a wreath that will last for years. Pine cones can be placed in a bowl and splashed with cinnamon and clove to add a nice aroma, or used to hold those homemade place cards previously mentioned at the dinner table. Remember to return these items outdoors when you are done so that they can biodegrade back into the soil and become part of next year’s evergreen boughs and berries.
Photo credit: Giraffe.org
When Aitan Grossman, a 7th grader from California, first read the kid’s version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, he felt compelled to do his part to help solve global warming. His love of music inspired him to compose the song “100 Generations” with the hope that it would be sung by children all over the world. And so far children in Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America have joined in the chorus.
Aitan’s goal of promoting his song is twofold. First, to spread the word about global warming. “I hope the message of the song makes people pay attention and will speak for itself.” Says Aitan. And secondly, to generate money from sales on iTunes to donate to his favorite environmental organizations the World Wildlife Fund and the Alliance for Climate protection.
You can download the song, ”100 Generations”, on iTunes, then visit Aitan’s website, www.kidearth.us, to get the lyrics, as well as choruses in 4 different languages!
Keep up the good work, Aitan!
