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)

So, another year comes to an end this weekend and that’ll mean that a whole load of 2006 diaries and calendars will the heading to the rubbish heap.

If you have calendars with pretty pictures on, I guess you can cut out the picture to keep for future use/enjoyment, but what about other calendars now that you no longer care about the dentist appointment you had last August or your reminder to buy milk in May?

And what about all those used desk diaries and pocket diaries?

And on a bigger scale, what about those year planners hung on the wall of every office?

(Photo by ask)

In a completely un-me moment of organised and forward planning, I was looking for a pen the other day to write something on shopping list. I turned to the pot of random pens that I put together in another completely un-me moment of organised and forward planning. Unfortunately given the long time-lapse between those two periods, all the ink in all those pens had completely dried up. I ended up scratching letter-shaped holes in the shopping list instead. Useful.

So what can I do with all those old pens? Can I rescue them? Can I reuse their skins? Most of them are cheap (usually promotional) biros but there are also some felt tip types. Any suggestions?

(Photo by nazreth)

We got into our biennial toasted-cheese-sandwich obsession last weekend and while we were on top of a kitchen cabinet hunting down the toastie maker last weekend, we found a tub full of old random cheap cutlery.

We’ve acquired these random odds and sods over the years but they were superseded a couple of years ago by cutlery that

1. hangs from a little hook thing because we don’t have any drawers in the kitchen, and
2. doesn’t bend when eat something as solid as, oh, soup.

They’ve mostly got plastic handles but of all different colours and styles from different sets. I suspect the best thing I can do with them, even in their wonky bent state, would be to give them to a charity shop or Freecycle them but thought I’d see if anyone has any cool ideas for other reuses for them first. So suggestions?

(Photo by Gastonmag)

I’ve been thinking about Scott’s really big piece of slate from Monday and it reminded me that I often see old slate roof tiles in skips around our estate as houses are renovated and new roofs added.

We have a slate surround and hearth for our fireplace so slate goes well in our living room but we already have some slate coasters and to be honest, we don’t use them much.

Any suggestions how else we can use the skip-dived slate tiles around the living room or elsewhere?

The tiles are flat, and usually about 30cm by 20cm and between 5mm-1cm thick (1’x9″x um, a quarter of an inch or something).

(Photo by Flo_Evans)