Whitney has emailed us, asking about margarine tub lids:

i’m trying to do my part and make sure that i recycle everything that i can, or at least find a way to reuse it. i recycle my #5 containers of cream cheese, margarine, etc, but have nothing to do with the lids, which even if they are also #5 they are not accepted in my recycling.

any ideas of what i can do with them? typically i just put them under plant pots, but i can only have so many plants. and i thought about making coasters, but i don’t really use coasters, so i’m open to some new ideas!

When we get this type of tub, we tend to keep both the lid & the tub to reuse for leftovers instead of Tupperware or use as small storage boxes in other parts of the house (eg, we’ve got one for batteries, one for fuses and one for shoe polish in our misc cupboard). But there are a lot more uses for the tub part than the lids so I imagine there are a lot of lids going in the bin — let’s see what we can do with them :)

Funnily enough, a lot of my ideas are the same as the ones from Monday’s handicapped tags – add them to your tool box for use while decorating/painting, cut them up for plant markers in the garden, cut the rim off and shape the remaining plastic to use as a dough scrapper etc.

Anyone got any more original ideas though? :)

(Photo by cogdogblog)

We’ve had an email from Carmel:

Hello, I’m a paper crafter and was a Stampin Up demonstrator and use the Stampin Up snail adhesives or the tombow roller adhesives.

Anyhow, to refill these things you have to buy another plastic mechanism that has the tape already in it. With all the paper crafters all over the world I’m sure there are lots in landfills. Wondering how they can be recycled for the plastic.

For non-paper crafters like me, the picture is of a snail adhesive refill – as Carmel says, tape already enclosed in a hard plastic shell.

As for actually recycling it, the lovely people at Stampin Up tell me it’s a whole different set of plastics (details below) so I wouldn’t have thought many people will want to pull them apart to recycle as many bits as possible.

Sometimes I’m a bit worried about always suggesting craft projects as reuse ideas because I know not everyone is the crafty sort, but the people who buy these already are crafty or they wouldn’t be buying them so … any fab craft ideas to re-use or repurpose these babies?

Or any other suggestions?

I made my first batch of cold-process soap earlier in the year – it took FOREVER to trace, but we’ve loved the resulting soap so I need to make some more.

Ever since I made that first batch, I’ve been on the look out for what I can use as moulds this time around. Last time, I had two old food trays for bar soaps, but when I ended up making a lot more soap than I’d originally intended, I grabbed whatever else I could find – some shaped fruit trays (small hand soaps), an old round ice cream tub (too wide when sliced into discs so had to cut them into semi-circles, which was a bit odd) and the square edged plastic bottles the olive oil had come in (nice size hand soaps, but it was awkward to get it out). (The latter two can be seen in the picture.)

All sorts of packaging has been subject to my “would it make nice soap?” eye. A few weeks ago, I was reading about someone else’s soap making on Simple, Green, Frugal and she mentioned using poster tubes (with the bottom sealed up) to make nice sized round soaps. As we’ve not had any posters or the like delivered recently, we haven’t got any of those but it got me thinking about similar cylinders: a litre-ish, straight-ish juice or pop bottles would probably about the right size, although it’d probably be awkward to get out like the olive oil bottle. That led me down another juice line: John has got a bit of an obsession with chocolate soya milk at the moment which comes in tetrapak containers – that would be a nice size for square bar soaps and be easier to cut out…

Anyway, long story slightly shorter, what else can I reuse or recycle to make either interesting shaped soaps or simple practical ones? If you make your own (cold-process) soap, what do you use?

Do you have any upcycled moulds that you can reuse again and again rather than destroying (like would happen with the poster tube or my juice containers)?

Or on the flipside, anything you’ve used that you’d urge other people not to use?

(A few notes for non-soap makers: the soap mix at the point of pouring is about body temperature for “cold-process” soaps so plastic melting is not usually an issue, but it is incredibly caustic at this point, and will react to metals other than stainless steel. It’s poured into the mould when it’s hit “trace”, a gloopy rather than full liquid stage, and left to set in the moulds for a few days, then popped out of the moulds to continue “curing” for a few weeks before use.)

It’s been a while since I’ve done a “links round-up” post about some of the things that I’ve been emailed or spotted around the greater internet recently so … here goes!

• With the major gift giving time of the year looming in the near-distance, I love this idea of reusing colourful children’s pictures to make gift bows instead of using generic plastic ones. Of course the same idea can be applied to any old paper – as the tutorial shows black-on-white newspaper text looks pretty cool too.
   
• I’m always a sucker for stuff made with drinks cans but these flowers are rather cute – I especially like the painted ones.
   
• Tinplategirl emailed recently her new tutorials site about working with tinplate – the smooth heavier-weight metal from various large tins & cans. The site includes a number of free videos introducing the craft – where to find the materials and how to work with them – and how-to PDFs for making all sorts of things (some free, some costing up to $9.95). A great resource for people wanting to move on from working with the more malleable drinks can metal.
   
• And speaking of large tins, this tiered unit made from old biscuit/chocolate tins has been around for a while now but I thought it was worth mentioning because it’s a lot of fun and useful.
   
• Another thing that’s a bit old but feels newly relevant given the sudden switch to autumn this week: how-to recover an umbrella frame. Great for revamping a brolly or fixing it if it gets torn – double up your green points by using old fabric (an old tent? old synthetic clothes?) for the umbrella and reclaiming the best bits of the original fabric for other craft projects (a water resistant swimming bag? or to make foam bath cushion?)
   
• Oh, and if you haven’t seen it, do check out WeUpcycle.com, which started as a 30 day/30 upcycled things project but is now a wider collection of upcycling ideas. No how-tos but lots of inspiring, pretty pictures.
   

Have you seen any fun or interesting reusing or recycling projects recently? Or have you got anything you’d like to show off of your own creation? Do leave a comment below!

We’ve had an email from Jeroen:

We designed a lid for the Bonne Maman crême brulée cup that we usually through away.

Here you can see a short movie about it:

While I’ll admit the lid is very cute and well made, it didn’t occur to me that it needed one before reusing — my boyfriend John’s mum used to buy us frozen crême brulées from a door-to-door dessert salesman (…really) and the ceramic dishes have been part of our kitchenware ever since – one is currently employed as tea-bag dish and the others are in regular circulation as dipping sauce or olive stone bowls. We’ve also had similar glass ramekins from Gu desserts in the past: they’re my go-to bowl for making small amounts of marinade or spice mixes, or cornflour paste. And from a REDUCE point of view, which is the most important of the 3Rs, they’re great for refilling with homemade mousse or what-have-you.

Do you reuse glass or ceramic shop-bought dessert cups for anything special?