How we decorated a dorm with items from Turnip Green Creative Reuse, a pay-what-you-want store selling craft materials.
By Jasmine Parkes and Karissa Sitepu
How to Source DIY Dorm Materials
Turnip Green Creative Reuse
Turnip Green is a donation funded store that contains an assortment of recycled materials. The store contains everything you can imagine from pool noodles, frames, and shells; there is so much to go through. The unique aspect of the store is that you decide the price for the materials you select—essentially making a donation.
Outside view of Turnip Green
As we wandered through the store, we picked out a few items that caught our eye: a map of North Carolina (Karissa’s home state), sea shells, a collection of old photographs, postcards, a magazine, and a knitting loom. The store promotes creative reuse of materials in a sustainable manner, and while there’s a small donation fee to support the store and its workers, it’s worth it for the various knick knacks and treasures that you may encounter.
Pictures from the store.
Items to Collect on Campus
Next to the Commons, you’ll find a free book exchange area where students can drop off books they no longer need and pick up new reads at no cost.
Additionally, there are various GroupMe groups, like Reuse Vandy, where students can sell unwanted items at affordable prices.
How to Create Simple Dorm Decorations
After visiting Turnip Green, we went to the dorm to put together the decorations to put by her desk. Here are the things we did with the materials we had:
- Origami
- Floating crane circle
- Taped the postcards/images on the wall
- Cut out cool poems
Here are some cool things that you could also make from similar materials:
- Pin images on a bulletin board (some are available at Turnip Green)
- Add ribbons on top of pictures
- Cut out shapes (stars, butterflies, etc…)
- Make paper flowers
Materials we sourced from Turnip Green included:
– a vintage magazine
– yarn
– a knitting loom
– postcards and other photos
– a map of NC
Post-Decoration Images
How we decorated a desk with the materials we got.
I used an old scarf (which is easily thrift-able) to decorate my chair.
Floating Crane Circle Tutorial
- Wrap yarn horizontally around the base of the loom
- Wrap yarn vertically over the horizontally wrapped yarn
- Wrap the remaining uncovered loom horizontally with yarn
- Fold paper cranes (we made 8). You can also make other figures like stars, butterflies, flowers, seashells, etc…
- Tie pieces of yarn on the loom pegs (you will hang the cranes off of these)
- Tape cranes under the wing to the end of the pieces of yarn
Dorm Decor Pinterest Board: https://pin.it/495WpaL3K
Visit “Your Guide to Navigating Nashville” to see how we got to Turnip Green using the WeGo bus system. Thank you for reading!