Here’s the scoop on the Dabbled Holiday Contest.

The theme for this season is Holiday (whichever holidays you celebrate, or do them all!) decor and gifts, recycled from something else. So your bag from recycled sweaters or your wreath from plastic bags, or whatever! You can enter as many items as you like (but you can only win with one), and we love tutorials…

HOW TO ENTER: This one will be flickr based, so you’ll need a flickr account to participate (it’s free, and I love flickr!). (This will make it easy for everyone to see all the entries, and easy for me to post links to the entries here — ya know at holiday time, we need EASY!) Upload your pictures of your cool holiday craftiness, with a link back to your blog on the picture description if applicable (be sure to tag them “dabbledholiday” and add to the dabbled flickr pool.
I’ll be pulling stuff from there to share with your guys all month..
Questions? Comments? Post them in the comments here, or email me at holiday -at- dabbled.org. You’re also welcome to link here in the comments to show off your stuff :)

Due date is December 12, so you have one month from today! We’ll have buttons you can put on your site, and the winners will receive nifty buttons proclaiming their greatness to the internet, as usual. I’ll add prize details later.

We had great sponsors for the Halloween Contest, but I’m not sure whether we’ll do that this time or not, but if you want to be a sponsor, just email me.

Other Dabbled Holiday Stuff for you to know about:

Best of Crafty “Upcycling” for Christmas, Thanksgiving, or your holiday of choice – Show off your recycling skills by making gifts or decor out of ‘trash’. Submit your tutorials to be featured on Dabbled! (Here’s some previous Dabbled Upcycling Projects if you need some inspiration)

Holiday Art Card Show – Artsy? Create a holiday card for the dabbled contest, and show off your work! Not Artsy? Download a cool holiday card from the cool artsy folks! More to come on this, email me if you think you’ll wanna play!

Shopping Links – Do you sell your art or craft? There will be a special page with links to Dabbled approved cool sellers. And for everyone, a great opportunity to support your fellow indie artists and crafters when you’re buying those holiday gifts! More Info HERE

We’ll have a couple of things going on for November and December (showcases and contests), so here’s a preview:

Best of Crafty “Upcycling” for Christmas, Thanksgiving, or your holiday of choice – Show off your recycling skills by making gifts or decor out of ‘trash’. Submit your tutorials to be featured on Dabbled, and their will be a contest too! (Here’s some previous Dabbled Upcycling Projects if you need some inspiration)

ENTER THE CONTEST — INFO HERE!

Holiday Art Card Show – Artsy? Create a holiday card for the dabbled contest, and show off your work! Not Artsy? Download a cool holiday card from the cool artsy folks!

Shopping Links – Do you sell your art or craft? There will be a special page with links to Dabbled approved cool sellers. And for everyone, a great opportunity to support your fellow indie artists and crafters when you’re buying those holiday gifts! More Info HERE

Wanna participate? More Details are HERE now, but here are the basics you need to know:
– Crafters: If you have already have tutorials/blog posts on making cool holiday gifts/decor using recycled materials, email the link to holiday@dabbled.org. I’ll be posting links throughout the next two months.
– Crafters: For entering the recycled craft contest, post pictures of your upcycled projects to flickr with the tag “dabbledholiday”, and add them to the dabbled flickr pool. If you blogged the project, you can link back to the blog post in the description.
– Artists: Any cards you create must be CC licensed for personal use, so other Dabblers can download them. I’ll post more details on the Art Show later.
– Sellers: If you’re interested in participating in the Holiday Shopping link page, email me at holiday@dabbled.org with a link to your shop. If you’re offering any discounts for Dabbled readers, let me know that too. If we like it, we’ll need a small (like 200 pix wide) graphic to add to the shopping page. We’ll provide you a link button to the shopping page for your site as well, and you can help promote other indie crafters too!

Jenny’s play oven ( at one of my favorite fun sites, ikeahacker) was made from a small laminated cabinet from the as-is department. If you are lucky enough to have an Ikea near you, the As-is department is a great source of material for projects (they give away broken glass you might use for a mosaic, plus you can buy cheaply broken furniture pieces or tabletops which can be used as wood) and also for almost complete items that just need a little love (like the toddler bed). If you don’t have a local Ikea (you poor thing), you could do something similar with any small laminate furniture you might find.

Go to the post to read the whole thing, but I love some of the clever repurpose they did with items from the hardware store:
– 4 pinewood wheels designed for making a toy cart, painted them with black enamel paint to make them shiny, superglued to top panel, to create hotplates.
…- 6 pinewood doorknobs, again enamel painted black, then once dry added numbers and dial-style icons, using a tippex pen – for the oven and hob controls, superglued to front
– red electrical insulation tape (self-stick), to smooth out the plywood rough edge of the top panel (chance, it was exact width)…

They glued their knobs on, but you could use the techniques from the one we did to make your knobs actually turn.

Also from Ikeahacker – a really simple cardboard stovetop requiring no carpentry at all!

Ariacielo writes on the Mondopiccolo Blog on how to use the actual box that this little kids cookware set came in to create a mini stovetop to make the cookware even more fun. They do it with the Ikea kids cookware set box, but I suspect you could modify their techniques to work with any right sized box. I think this is a great idea for when you have a small space (or let’s face it, a boy*) and one of the full kitchen sets isn’t in the priorities, but the little one still needs a place to cook when he feels the urge!

The $2 Play Stove
And finally, a super-cheap option from Dollar Store Crafts. It even has storage! I love the re-use involved here. Go get the instructions!

Related Posts:
– Toddler Bed – Hack a toddler bed to use a smaller crib mattress
– Kids Play Stove from an old side table
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*OK, OK, before you send the hoards after me for gender stereotyping, let me state for the record, my little boy loves to cook. In fact, he has a chef’s hat and his own little kitchen gloves. But the typical pink and purple storebought stoves just didn’t fit with his decor. He doesn’t play chef all the time, and a homemade little stove does just fine for his needs. So go make your little boy a playstove! :)

Cutting Sushi; Playstoves are also for jumping, apparently; Making a cake with Daddy.
Click through to see the cuteness of The Boy in all it’s cooking glory :)

Sweater recycling:
Old sweaters (and you know we all have them) are a fun and easy thing to recycle. They are forgiving of mediocre sewing skills as well..
here are some ideas…

The Ele-purse – great for little girls!

The easy peasy hostess gifty – the wine cozy!

The always adorable Octopuppet

Another cute toy, the sweater snake!

non-sweater related…
Recycling furniture into toys!
The uber-cool play stove-includes tutorial