Following on in our impromptu series of all things water-y, I have a bit of a random query about a canoe/kayak.

Because of the wonders of wireless, I am currently sat our (still not paved) garden enjoying the fact it’s not raining for once and watching with bemusement as our neighbour Jason tries out his new homemade canoe trailer for his bike.

I’ve mentioned Jason’s love of creatively building trailers before but the difference this time is that he’s fixed up the canoe too. He has a habit of acquiring random things in a broken state and either fixing them (as he did with the canoe – although he’s yet to water test it – that’s why he built the trailer, to take it down to the river) or cannibalising them for bits. The previously cracked (fibreglass?) canoe has been fixed, the trailer built from salvaged planks and pram wheels.

But if he hadn’t fixed the canoe, what else could he have done with it?

I guess it could be used as a fun, feature pot for the garden – but a very big one that – if mostly covered like this one – doesn’t offer much room for the plants to surface. Any other suggestions?

(Photo by gundolf)

Right, another one in our new Reverse Recycle This series: how can I make something out of recycled stuff?

I’ve got a lot of costume jewellery because it’s really easy & fun to make and/or find going unbelievably cheap in charity shops (one of my favourite necklaces cost 10p – ace!).

At the moment it’s all dumped on the top shelf of a three-shelf unit we’ve got in the bedroom but necklaces and floppy bracelets frequently get tangled up and I can’t see what all my options are whenever I’m having an accessorising crisis (usually happening about 15 minutes after we should have left). Some of the necklaces particularly are really quite pretty too, so it’s a shame for them to be in an untidy heap.

I thought about making a wall hanging – with some cool flock-style fabric I found in a scrap-material bin a few years ago – but didn’t know how I would be best to go about this. I imagine cup hooks or something – but would have to find really big, ugly ones for my solid ’80s style bangles.

So any suggestions on how I can make something to display/tidy up the jewellery, using recycled/reused things from around the home etc, that’ll look pretty or cool enough to be in a fairly focal point of our bedroom?

We’ve had an email from Amy, asking:

I have a large kiddie pool with a crack in the bottom that is not repairable. How can I recycle this?

She doesn’t say whether it’s an inflatable one (which are the most common type in the UK) or a more solid one – the “crack” suggests the latter – so feel free to make suggestions for either.

(We’ve covered smaller inflatables before and in a similar water-holding-thing-no-longer-holding-water, we covered fish tanks last week.)

(Photo by ssdg4773)

John and I were having one of those wacky, romantic-comedy-esque moments the other day over some jacket potatoes. He was grinding some black pepper onto them and joking about giving me an excessive amount but the joke turned around on him: once he’d ground LOADS over my potato, he moved over his dish, did one grind and the whole bottom fell out of the grinder, sending tons of whole peppercorns flying all over his dinner. As I said, a rom-com moment (well, I laughed anyway).

The plastic that held the grinder together had shattered and we’re lucky we spotted all the little clear pieces in our food rather than eating them (at least we think we spotted them all…). The rest of the grinder is fine but we’re reluctant to glue it back together given the way it shattered, in case it happens again over food.

So what else can we do with it? John thought about maybe turning it into a percussive instrument but we’ve probably got as many of them as we need. So suggestions?

We’ve had an email from Tracey about reusing an aquarium:

My boyfriend’s fish recently all went away to fishy heaven and now he has a ten gallon fish tank now sitting in the basement until we can figure out something to do with it, we could just give it to value village or goodwill or something but I thought it would be neat if there was something we could make out of it. Thanks!

Poor Tracey’s boyfriend’s fish :(

We’ve actually had two fish tanks from Freecycle over the years – both cracked ones so no good for fish but used for John’s brother’s suitcase gecko – so Freecycle might be an option along the lines of “value village or goodwill”.

But how about reuses? It might be a bit heavy to be used as a general storage but flipped upside down it could be used as a mini-greenhouse (although venting might be a problem).

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by kraaft)