Had an email from Rani:

I’ve saved up the stems of old qtips (cut off the used cotton part) and now have a bunch of little paper sticks.

I’m planning to make a picture frame out of them but would like other more practical ideas before I do something decorative.

I’ve thought about this before too – we try to buy the paper sticked ones but sometimes can only get plastic ones (boo) – at least the paper ones will compost.

So any suggestions for little paper or plastic sticks?

(Photo by solneman2)

Had an email from Bill about a bathroom suite:

I have a perfectly good condition bathroom suite, bath, WC basin and pedestal that have been removed during an upgrade.

Any ideas please?

I’ve already suggested Freecycle to him to see if anyone else could use it as a bathroom suite and I also think it could look pretty cool as alternative garden furniture – but any other suggestions for reusing bits of it or a whole?

(Photo by sbennumi)

We’ve had an email from Chris Slowe about soap:

It’s unwieldy at the best of times but when you get near the end of a bar of soap it starts falling to pieces and is practically unusable. Even worse a friend of our bought us a cake made out of soap! It’s finally being used for its inherent properties but is falling to pieces. Now if there was only some way of reconstituting all those bits into a new bar… Can it be squashed, melted back together again? Any ideas?

We had some soapy suggestions back on the old tights post which made me think we’d covered this already – so good call Chris for noticing we hadn’t.

I know it can be melted back into a single bar or made into liquid soap/laundry soap but I’ve never done that myself – any soapmakers got any advice?

Or anyone got any other reusing or recycling ideas for the slithers?

(Photo by mfrietsch)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a how-can-I on those solid, upright toothpaste tubes and one of the commenters, Cadan, asked what about squeezy toothpaste tubes instead.

So what about squeezed squeezy toothpaste tubes?

They used to be metal (like tomato/garlic puree ones still are) but now toothpaste tubes – or at least the ones we used – seem to more plasticky instead. The plastic ones look like they might (MIGHT) be easier to refill – anyone got any suggestions on what they could be refilled with? The metal ones though have a tendency to weaken at the edges when they’ve been utterly squeezed dry and rolled up so I doubt they can be refilled – does anyone know if they can be recycled?

(Photo by stocker)

And from toothpaste tubes to the toothbrushes themselves.

John has a habit of splaying the bristles all over the place in a single use so we go through quite a few. We’ve got a small collection of them in the bathroom cleaning products cupboard with the idea that we’ll use them for cleaning around taps (something that rarely happens and when it does, a cloth usually suffices) and they occasionally get used to cleaning the cat hair/food/assorted beverages out of computer keyboards – but has anyone got any other suggestions from how we can use up the stash?

They’re mostly bog-standard manual toothbrushes but we’ve got a few to go on the top of an electric toothbrush from John’s short dalliance with power-assisted cleaning so suggestions for both the long and short would be appreciated.

(Photo by kadrip55)