A Recycled Fashion Craft Project for Camporee

For this year's Girl Scout Camporee at Camp Bothin in Fairfax, I developed and created a fun and easy craft using recycled T-shirts to created personalized custom headbands.  This project was a hit at Camporee, and even parents were getting involved and making their own creations! Everyone wore their headbands, which they customized with their names and decorations, all weekend at the event.

For this project, we took another road trip to the Goodwill Outlet, AKA "the bins," in Sacramento. (You can read more about the bins and how they give un-purchased Goodwill clothing a last chance in my blog post here.) The bins was the idea choice to get affordable recycled T-shirts for our Camporee crafts, since clothing here is priced by the pound rather than the piece so we got a huge amount of T-shirts for only $1.59 per pound. In fact, we got enough to use for recycled textile crafts at this summer's Novato Girl Scout Camp, too! 

We bagged up our shirts, brought them home, and washed and folded them all to get ready for Camporee. It never ceases to amaze me how many discarded T-shirts are out there in the world. Many of the shirts seemed to be giveaways from school, charity, and corporate events that probably only get worn once and then get thrown out or given away. I'm happy we could give these a new life with this project!

The craft project itself is a simple one. I wanted to develop a project that didn't involve sewing, since projects involving learning skills like that take a lot of extra time. I wanted the girls (mostly ages 7 to 12) to be able to make something that they could use almost immediately and get a sense of accomplishment from finishing the project.

The headbands are really easy to make. Here's what you'll need to make them:

• Old T-shirts; one T-shirt can make about 4– 6 headbands.

• Fabric paints (we used the 3D kind) and markers

• Iron-on patches

• Clothes iron

• Ruler

• Scissors

And here's how you do it:

• First, find a T-shirt you like and cut a 3-inch wide strip of fabric from the body part of the shirt. You'll have a tubular strip of fabric.

• Next, cut the loop of fabric open to make a long strip of fabric which will be your headband.

• Now, decorate! For this project, I provided a wide variety of no-sew decoration options like fabric paint and iron-on patches to they were easy for everyone to do.

• Let the fabric paint dry, if using.

• Tie the ends of the finished headband together in a square knot to fit the wearer's head. I provided diagrams showing how to tie the knot correctly, too.

That's all there is too it! I had several of the leaders helping with the event tell me how amazing they thought the craft was, so it was really gratifying to hear. We had quite a few shirts left over (I didn't want to run out), and we'll use them to make crafts like wristbands at the 2023 Novato Girl Scout Day Camp at Stafford Lake Park.