Earth Day: 3 Projects to Inspire, Motivate & Celebrate
April 22nd marks the 49th anniversary of Earth Day. A day that is now a global celebration, where different organizations encourage participation in various activities. If you’re looking for different ways to become involved, Earth Day Network is a nonprofit organization that specializes in environmentally focused activities, campaigns, and education.
I remember looking forward to Earth Day in elementary, middle and high school. While I wish it was for selfless reasons, I was excited to spend the day outside and not doing homework, even if it meant I had to pick up garbage. With a daughter in elementary school now, I started to think about how I could get her excited to learn more about the purpose of Earth Day. For those who have littles in school, National Geographic Kids is a great resource for environmental facts and activities.
I started to make my school-aged daughter a shirt, which grew into making her little sister a shirt, a clean-up bucket, and classroom treats. The designs I used for the Earth Day shirts can be found in Design Space.
While the “Earth Laughs in Flowers” can be found within Design Space’s “Projects”, the Love shirt was designed manually. Using the provided Earth image, I added text around the shape and welded them together.
Materials Used:
Cotton/Polyester Shirts
Cricut Glitter Iron-On in White
EasyPress (the timer, exact temperature control and evenly distributed heat triumphs over my household iron)
With the small detail within the flowers and Earth, the tweezers and sharp weeder were both a project saver!
I may age myself with this next project. My daughter’s class will be picking up garbage around the school and sidewalks, so I thought it would be fun (and easy) to make personalized Clean-Up buckets. In addition, whenever I think of cleaning up litter, I think of Captain Planet followed by the theme song.
I found the buckets at my local Dollar Tree store, used sticker paper, vinyl and transfer tape. The longest part was finding an image with my favorite pollution fighting hero to upload into Design Space. The Print-Then-Cut feature was intimidating at first, but it was a lot easier than I thought it would be!
Materials Used:
Cricut Printable Sticker Paper
Dollar Tree Buckets
12×12 Light GripMat
Captain Planet Image (not my own)
At Home Printer
Scraper
The next treat is saved for last and is my favorite. Using mini terracotta plants from Amazon, cake mix, Oreos, chocolate frosting, and more sticker paper, my daughter and I created easy classroom treats for her school friends. Delicious, easy, and fun!
Materials Used:
Mini Terracotta Pots
Cake Mix
Chocolate Frosting
Oreos
Cricut Sticker Paper
Toothpicks
Happy Earth Day everyone! Feel welcome to share what projects you created!
Matless Cutting with the Cricut Joy-Organization Labels