Posts tagged "ceramic"

How can I reuse or recycle crême brulée/dessert ramekins?

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?

How can I reuse or recycle broken bathroom tiles?

ceramic tilesWe’ve had an email from Kevin:

What can I do with broken tiles? I’ve just retiled my bathroom and was careful taking the old ones off but most of them cracked in half.

I also have some whole sample tiles that I got from the supplier from when I was choosing. I’m going to use one of the big ones as a hot dish plate in the kitchen but don’t know what to do with the smaller ones.

Following on from your trivet idea, smaller sample tiles would make good coasters or a place to rest your wooden spoon while cooking – especially if they’re pretty or nicely coloured.

Depending on their condition, the cracked ones could be used to “crazy tile” somewhere that doesn’t need to look 100% (like a storage cellar or shed) or smashed up further for a crazy mosaic effect. Offer them on Freecycle if you don’t want to do it yourseld – someone else might like the idea.

(If you fancy renovating them for reusing, I’ve used a translucent glass paint thing to paint ceramic tiles in the past – it let the original gloss of the tile shine through but it wasn’t particularly hard wearing and couldn’t handle being scrubbed clean. Other tile paint is thicker so harder wearing but it can easily look messy and a bit weird because it’s opaque and gloopy. Anyone else got any advice about this?)

Aside from that, there is always crocks for the bottom of plant pots.

Any other ideas?

(Photo by ftibor)