Posts tagged "jars"

How can I reuse or recycle pretty glass spice jars?

We’ve had an email from Dianne:

I found a box full of used glass spice jars at a car boot sale recently and had bought it before I knew it. They’re those narrow round ones with plastic lids. I’ve refilled some of the herbs and spices to make my kitchen look neater but still have a dozen or so. Any ideas?

My first suggest was going to be refilling them – but you’ve already done that ;) We buy spices in bulk bags and decant them into old jars/purpose-bought jars to make them easier to store/use. Extending that, perhaps you could also make up your own spice mixes too?

Away from their (almost) intended purpose, I’d imagine like many small containers, they’d be useful for craft storage – small beads, buttons, poppers and whatnot, even tapestry yarn/threads (fed through the holes in the lid). The clear glass would make it easy to find what you want and look pretty on a shelf too. (Actually, we’ve covered more boring shaker topped jars in the past and a lot of those suggestions are crafty and applicable here.)

How about taking the top off and using a few of them in a row as single stem vases? You’d have to be careful they didn’t topple over I guess – but they’d probably look cute (a bit like the test tube vase racks that were all over the place a few years ago).

Any other suggestions?

What can I reuse or recycle to make a moneybox/piggy bank?

A couple of weeks ago on The Really Good Life, I was umming and ahhing about whether or not to buy an automatic chicken coop door. There were several reasons arguments for it but we don’t *need* one, it would just be a convenience – and I didn’t know whether convenience is worth £100.

The wonderful Alice helped me justify wanting to sleep later than daybreak and added:

Is there anything else you could give up or change to save the equivalent of £100 in a year to compensate? For instance I’d go a whole year without a takeaway to pay for being able to lie in all year, and that’d probably save me enough money over the year (as well as probably compensating somewhat in carbon/environmental terms). Can you “trade” anything else in your life that you don’t really need, motivated by knowing that the sacrifice is “paying” for the lie-ins?

As I said, Alice is wonderful and this is a great idea – and without naming any particular thing, I’ve decided to I’ll give up numerous often-fleeting wants over the next few months to (retrospectively) pay for it — mostly, I suspect, unnecessarily food while I’m out and about, stuff that can be easily done without and isn’t really missed outside of the moment — money thrown down the drain for little value.

Anyway I thought it would be fun to keep track of this money through a moneybox/piggy bank so I can see it building up (and at the same time, see how much I normally fritter away!) – and whenever I think something like that, the next thing that comes to my mind is: “how can I make one of those reusing or recycling stuff?”

So what can I reuse or recycle to make a money box or piggy bank?

Around our house, we already have some old coffee cans with slits in the tops for collecting change and my dad uses a giant old whiskey bottle from a bar for his pennies. They’re both very practical but I’d like something that’s a bit more fun if possible.

One idea I had was to make a papier mâché chicken from old newspaper and out of date flour. I imagine a hollow plastic ball could be used in the same way instead of the papier-mâché – and could be decorated in a similar way to become a rotund hen.

So any ideas?

Interesting reducing, reusing and recycling links

(Photo by CraftyNest)