 Hello, I'm Carl and I'm a library assistant at the Long Beach Public Library. Today I'll be showing you how to make functional art with our upcycled flower pots made out of recyclable materials. If you have not joined us for the summer reading program yet, feel free to do that at longbeach.beanstack.org. And if you'd like to get credit for today's challenge, go ahead and use the keyword gardening. Alright, so let's get started. As you can see, I've already made two examples. So these are made out of completely recyclable materials. These are things that you would probably recycle in your house. Instead, we're going to repurpose them to make them into customizable flower pots. A couple of things first. You can use almost any recyclable material in your house except for two. You can't use glass because there's no way to make drainage holes in the bottom. And I would definitely recommend not using cardboard because as you water your plant, the cardboard will disintegrate leaving your plant naked. So the best materials I've seen are soft plastics such as seen in soft drinks bottles. I really do think that the containers that carry icing for cakes are really, really good. They're like almost a perfect size and there are soft plastics so you can be able to cut holes in the bottom of them. Also, anything that has cardboard but has like a 10 or aluminum inside, that's meant to keep water away from the product. But that will also keep the integrity of you watering your plant over and over again. They also usually have 10 bottoms. So this is of course a Pringles can. This was a coffee can and today, like I said, we'll be using a icing container. The first thing that you want to do is you want to soak your container in warm water. You don't want to use hot water because your container may warp. So you want to soak your container in warm water and what that allows you to do is just to simply take off your label. And again, we're going to be using materials to cover that up so you don't have to get it completely clean. You just have to be able to remove most of the labels. Speaking of materials, here is what you're going to need for this project. You're going to need a plant. You're going to need potting soil. You're going to need mosh posh and you need an applicator for your mosh posh. I'm using this brush, but if you don't have it, you can use any other brush in your house. You can use a kitchen knife or you can use a makeup applicator. You can use whatever you have. You're going to need some type of recyclable material, either a comic book or an old newspaper or you can draw something. You can pay something to make this yours to decorate it with. I for today am making this for a friend who really loves the Sabrina series on Netflix. So we are making a Sabrina themed pot for her. So we'll be using that. Optional are glitter paints or any other materials you want to add. I also would recommend a strip of construction paper to go around your pot at the end. And that sort of makes it a distinction. It turns it from just a pot covered in pictures to more of a flower pot aesthetic. The first thing you're going to do is you want to put drainage holes into the bottom of your pot. So the way we're going to do this is we're going to hold our pot like this away from us. We're going to open our scissors. We're going to gently place our scissors against the end of our pot, making sure we're watching. And we're going to twist in this motion, applying gentle pressure. You're doing this A for safety, but B you're also doing this so the holes you make aren't too large. You don't want soil coming off the bottom and you don't want that when you water your plant, you don't want everything to be washed out with it. You want to make holes that are a little bit bigger than, I don't know, a little bit bigger than an eraser on a pencil. So you want to be able to sort of see through it, but not really. And you want to make maybe around three of these. If you start doing this project with your chosen container and you find that you're having a really hard time getting these holes, into the bottom of your container, I would say switch the container. It should be super simple and super easy to do. And if there are so many recyclable containers probably in your house, you can probably easily find another one before you wrestle with making holes and something that doesn't want holes in it. We're going to pick one of our comic book panels. And I like to choose one to sort of be in the middle and then work from there out. So I choose it, I place it, you want to start at the very top. And if your panels are a little short, that's fine because you're going to put that red strip of paper at the bottom or whatever strip of paper you choose at the bottom. But you don't want them to be too long like this one is. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this and I'm going to give it a snip. And then I'm going to recenter it. And as you see, it doesn't go to the bottom completely. I could have measured it so it did, but I know that that bottom part is actually going to be covered up when I'm done. So my next step is to put a little moshposh right where I'm going to put that at. And I'm just going to put it all the way down, even though the picture doesn't go all the way down just to be thorough. I'm going to put this here. I'm going to make sure that it is lying down flat. The reason why we're using moshposh instead of glue is that moshposh will protect your image as you water it. Again, because we're anticipating water spilling accidents happen. You want to have a little protection. If it's just glue, what will end up happening is that the paper will get wet and then it will be not nice looking after a while. And it will shorten the life of your pot. So then after we have laid down the moshposh, we're going to do another coat of moshposh right on top of it. And we want to try to get it as flat as possible, but you don't want to spend too much time on it because you're going to be overlapping images. So that's our first one. Next, we're going to do that again. And we're just going to line it up, make sure they overlap. And again, we're going to be doing our cutting afterwards. So I'll go ahead and just trim that while it's kind of stuck to it. And just where those two overlap, I'm going to put some moshposh underneath and I'm going to put some moshposh on top. I know the urge to use a lot of moshposh to make it stick or lie down better. But go ahead and ignore that urge because what that actually will risk doing is ruining the image you're using. So as you see, I'm using pretty big panels because I didn't want to take too long with my example for you guys. But feel free to use. You can add a lot of pictures. You can have like the Beyonce one is pretty much just one long Ivy Park ad. And then a picture of Beyonce I printed out from the internet. And, you know, that was pretty simple to do. But if you want to make more complex ones, this Catwoman example is actually individual panels from her comic book. And that one took a little bit longer because it's more like a collage of images. If you get any stubborn pieces like this one little piece that won't stick down, you might consider adding another semi smaller image over it and seeing if that helps. And it does. Okay, so after you're done, you should have something that looks like this. It should be recovered and whatever design you picked. And again, you want the sides to be laying down. So I missed the side. Okay, perfect. Next, what you're going to do is here where the options come in at. I like to glitter the bottom piece of paper that I'm going to stick around around the base because glitter makes everything better. So I'm going to start with a little bit of mosh podge at the bottom. And then I'm just going to. So this is a pre measured strip that I have took and measured to make sure it would go around my pot. And it will save you a lot of time and grief if you do the same thing because then you won't have to worry about trying to cut something while it's wet. And at the end of it, it will look like this. Now normally I will let this dry. This is also the time if you want to add glitter or other things to it. This is where you would do that. If you have cold gyms. If you had, if you maybe want to add some other art, this is the time to do that. Once this dries completely, you kind of want to leave it alone. But for the sake of time, we are not going to let this dry completely. I just want to give you a warning that if your mosh podge is not dry completely and you try to do the potting in the dirt, you make it dirt and on your mosh podge decoration, which will sort of ruin the aesthetic. So feel free to stop at this point and then come back and watch this video later. But the next part is actually the repotting. So this is not a pot that you actually want to plant something in and then let it grow. You want to put something in here that's already started maturing that maybe has gotten too bad, too big for its little pot and needs a new home just because you want to be able to constantly, new plants need to be constantly watered. And you want something that sort of can sit on its own and keep the life of your pot long. So the first thing we're going to do is we are going to put some dirt at the bottom of this container. Again, how much dirt you add depends on how big your container is. But you want to make it about, I would say fill it maybe a third of the way with soil before you even put in your plant. I'm using just basic general potting mix. You do want to use potting mix because it's going to have the nutrients your plant needs to be repotted and survive that. You don't want to just like use dirt from outside or something. You want to use specialty potting mix. But I actually grabbed this from my local 99 cent store and it was exactly 99 cents. So it is cheap to grab. They have it at most hardware stores and some craft stores. So I have my pot about 50% full. I'm now going to take my plant. It's always best to do this after your plant needs a good watering because you want to water when you replant anyway. So you want your plant to be nice and dry for that reason. You also want your plant to be nice and dry because it's easier to remove from its container. In order to remove a plant from its container, you're going to massage it, move your container, give it a few quick pulses, just like so. And then you want to dig your fingers in or you can use your trowel if you have a trowel. And you just want to grab the plant by its roots. You're going to make a mess. But as soon as you have the whole plant, you're going to drop that whole plant in there just like so. And you should have new soil on the bottom so your plant roots has room to grow, meaning your plant will grow bigger. And you should have nice fresh dirt on the top. I mean the nice dirt on top. So it should reach just about where it reached in the old pot. And there you go. You could give that a quick water, put it in a window, and now you have functional art. This can be custom made for you. I've seen people put family photos on some as gifts. You can use comic books, newspaper, crossword puzzles, anything that suits your fancy. And while they're perfect for planting, they are also good as pencil holders and other things. Thank you for joining me for this cool craft. Continue to plant and garden and have a wonderful summer. And remember, if you haven't signed up for the summer reading program yet, visit longbeach.beanstack.org and you can sign up there. And today's challenge, the keyword is garden. Have a great summer guys. Bye.