I posted an item from my mum last week about how to reuse washing powder tablet nets and it made me think of their solid plastic friend: those funny shaped ball things that you put washing powder in before putting the ball directly into the washing machine.

I’ve got a few floating around from back in the day when they were the washing powder innovation du jour and since I’m trying to move away from chemical powder onto soapnuts now, I have no need for them.

Any suggestions for reuses? They’re really sturdy with a flat bottom but awkwardly shaped apart from that.

My brother and I got our first proper PC in the mid-1990s.

We could do word processing on it, basic drawing and DTP – lots of serious grown-up stuff that justified it as a (second-hand) purchase to our parents … but we still mostly used it for playing games.

Our favourite game, for a long while, was a pinball game which used the ALT keys to work the flippers. Before long, the worn out ALT keys fell off. So we changed the game’s controls to use the CTRL keys instead. And ditto. And so on, until we rendered our first computer keyboard pretty much useless.

I don’t go in for such abusive gaming these days but as we live on our computers now, (my boyfriend) John and I still end up with broken keyboards from time to time, or just spare ones when one comes free with a new computer or something.

When they’re still in working order, we give them away to friends or family in need, or the local computer recycling place, but any suggestions of what we can do with broken ones, or their parts? Any recycling/upcycling ideas?

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A suggestion from vweiss:

What can I do to reuse the little mini-wine bottles? I keep collecting them…hate to throw them even in the recycle bin as they seem practical to use for something?! They are so cute. There must be a creative use for them.

I don’t know whether vweiss means those half-wine bottles (which usually have a screw lid) – if so, that can probably be included with the previous narrow-necked bottles post – or the collectable miniatures, like the ones you get in overpriced mini-bars, but let’s presume the latter.

So any suggestions?

(Photo by wax115)

As I’ve said before, we’re not cleaning obsessives in this house but when we do clean, we’re the cleaning hardcore.

Cleaning sessions usually start with the hunt for a scrubbing brush, then follow with the application of gallons of elbow grease (we bulk-buy, it’s cheaper), then end with an exclamation of “oh! I forgot it was that colour!”

We’ve got a couple of scrubbing brushes lurking under sinks at the moment, all with the bristles somewhat bent out, tired from all the exertion. They’re still quite clean though (since we tended to use a lot of water and soap with the elbow grease) so it seems a shame to through them out but their effectiveness as scrubbing brush seems to have lessened somewhat.

Any suggestions about what we can do with them instead? Or how to bring them back to life?

(Photo by sparkules)

This one is from my mum.

She buys branded washing powder tablets quite regularly and each time gets a little net in the box. The idea is the tablets go in the net and then in the washing machine, and if you don’t use the net, then all hell breaks loose and demons run the earth (or something).

Anyway, as she just told me on IM: “i’ve got quite a lot of those bags,usually stick them under the sink or hang them in tall cupboard for storage” but it seems they just stay in storage.

Any suggestions on what she can do with them?

(If you can’t see the picture clearly, here’s a description of what I mean: they’re little nylon string nets with a drawstring at the top, and the drawstring has a toggle attached so you can close it up, stopping the tablet from falling out during the wash cycle. Because if it did fall out, hell, demons, etc etc.)