Village Garden Club Transforms Trash To Decorate Stepping Stones’ Tree
Date posted: December 4, 2014
The Village Garden Club of Indian Hill may deck halls with boughs of holly, but when it comes to decorating the tree, their inspiration is as likely to come from the garbage as from the garden.
Pamlia Connell Grafe positions a repurposed Christmas Card on the tree.
The club donated a decorated Christmas tree to Stepping Stones in Indian Hill this month, and all of the ornaments and garlands were recycled from something that would have been destined for a landfill.
“So many people throw things away without thinking of how they could re-use them,” said Village Garden Club President Ester Binns.
“This was a fun project but we hope it is instructive, too.”
Garden Club members collected would-be trash and old holiday cards and transformed them using glue guns, ribbon, a wood burning tool to melt holes in plastic, and a lot of creativity.
Plastic juice bottles became delicate bells. Wine corks and paperclips turned into reindeer. A ring of angels cut from a gallon milk jug encircled the treetop. As a finishing touch, club members draped the tree in garlands of white packing peanuts strung on red yarn.
Through all the milk jugs, berry containers and candy wrappers, the gardening connection shines through. Pamlia Connell Grafe, the club’s newest member, hung colorful seed packets in the upper branches. Other members had glued together Miracle Gro measuring scoops to create dangling ornaments. Cardboard tubes from paper towels were cut into rings and glued into flower shapes.
“This makes you look at things from a different perspective,” said Mrs. Grafe. “We thought it would be fun for the children to guess where everything came from.”
The only decorations that were not recycled are the colored lights, which were donated by Ace Hardware.
The recycle tree is at the Given Campus on Given Road in Indian Hill. It will become part of the holiday celebrations at Stepping Stones’ Saturday Clubs for children and young adults with disabilities, said Bridget Rahill, who coordinates the twice monthly Saturday Clubs, providing extracurricular activities for children age 5 to 16 and young adults age 15 to 25.
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