We’ve had an email from Tracey about reusing an aquarium:

My boyfriend’s fish recently all went away to fishy heaven and now he has a ten gallon fish tank now sitting in the basement until we can figure out something to do with it, we could just give it to value village or goodwill or something but I thought it would be neat if there was something we could make out of it. Thanks!

Poor Tracey’s boyfriend’s fish :(

We’ve actually had two fish tanks from Freecycle over the years - both cracked ones so no good for fish but used for John’s brother’s suitcase gecko - so Freecycle might be an option along the lines of “value village or goodwill”.

But how about reuses? It might be a bit heavy to be used as a general storage but flipped upside down it could be used as a mini-greenhouse (although venting might be a problem).

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by kraaft)

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Lucia, of the weather balloons from last week, is another one of those fab people who makes cool things by recycling random stuff.

You can see examples of her creations at http://www.jblarts.com but I thought I’d also feature a few of my favourite things here - namely the egg box fairy light shades (above) and the old electronics as earrings below. I also think what she’s dubbed a “tattoo bracelet” is also very cool - a shaped strip of an old plastic bottle with a pretty design on it - a simple but great idea, with loads of possible variations.

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Lucia of JBLarts has sent us a bit of an obscure one:

Such a strange thing, you may say, but I have a good quantity of meteorological lattice balloons: any suggestion on what doing of them, apart fulling them with air to make huge balls to play with in a big garden? Huge snow/lattice-men?

I tried to cut the lattice to use it in some other way, but it was not so easy to maintain the form of the cut pieces.

Any ideas?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen one so I can’t really offer any suggestions. Anyone else got any ideas?

(Oh, and on the subject of balloons: we’ve covered deflated helium ones in the past too.)

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Following on from Tuesday’s post about recycling old jewellery, I’ve had an email from Jane Eldershaw about recycling junk to make new jewellery.

Jane loves making jewellery out of junk and found items - and has even written a book about her creations.

I love this type of stuff - and not just because it justifies me keeping loads of random little things to turn into jewellery or whatever one day. I think my favourite piece of Jane’s is the yellow peg necklace below and the more delicate key chain above - but the pencil necklace is very fun too. I’ve only featured necklaces here but Jane also makes bracelets, earrings and all sorts of things so if you’re interested, check out her site - http://junkjewelry.blogspot.com/

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We’ve had an email from Ewan, asking:

hello, any ideas on what i could make with a broken basketball?

it looks exactly like this (–>)

and is completely intact apart from the bit where the pump goes in..

We had an old deflated football in our garden for a while (no idea where it came from) and one of the cats, Carbon, decided it was his own private rainwater collector/bowl — but that was an unintended, temporarily reuse.

So has anyone got any better ideas for Ewan?

(Photo by lusi)

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