• Craftzine linked to Christopher Paul’s painted plates – giving chintzy old plates a new lease of life (presumably just as artwork but still). A very fun idea!
• The Greenists ran a tutorial by Mudnessa on turning wide leg jeans into skinny ones – perfect if you fancy a change.
• Alison pointed us in the direction of this news story about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill – how hairdressers and transvestites are recycling stuff together to help soak up the oil
• Leo sent us an email to alert us to the RSPB’s second-hand binocular collection scheme – if you’ve got any old binoculars, telescopes or tripods lying around your house, you can donate them to the RSPB and they’ll use them in a conservation or educational project.
• And Joris sent us an email about Gumdropbins – fun bins to collect chewing gum – which are made from old chewing gum.
• It should be a bit late in the year for this type of thing but since the heating’s off & I’m thinking summery thoughts, the nights can still get pretty chilly – and that’s when hot water bottles with super snuggy recycled covers are just perfect.
• Finally, Alex from Just Cook It has been blogging about cooking with nettles recently – and the recipes sound fantastic. A great way to “reuse” those weeds from the garden!

So, as I’ve mentioned once or twice, we moved into our new house three weeks ago.

I do apologise for mentioning it a lot but it’s pretty much overwhelming my life at the moment – I’d lived in the last place for nearly a decade and hope to be here at least the same amount of time. It needs a lot of work doing to it – considerably more maintenance-type work than we’d thought (every floorboard creeks, every tap drips…) but also a lot to make it our own. It’s a lot of work but mostly very satisfying.

As we’re getting past the bulk of the “must do instantly” jobs, we’re starting to combine chores and fun tasks and one of the fun tasks is filling all the blank walls with pictures and other creations. I’m definitely going to use a lot of the frame ideas you wonder people suggested when I was asking about mirrors a few weeks ago but I also wondered how people have made the actual surface to paint on – what works well instead of actual canvas? I imagine other lighter cotton such as t-shirt jersey or bed linen might be too thin to hold the paint but would denim from old jeans work as a heavy textured alternative?

I’ve heard about the underside of hardboard being a good surface. What else?

After a month of frantic renovation (which is nowhere nearly finished but a lot of the dirty work is done), we’re finally moving into our new home today – hurrah!

Until the weekend, we’d been focusing on the renovation stuff – pulling down ugly fake walls, cleaning out sooty chimneys and ripping down plasterboard in preparation for damp-proofing work (the last thing resulted in the discover of a secret new room, it’s sadly unusable without a lot of expensive work so we’re leaving it for now) – and so hadn’t given much thought to the finer points of today’s move, such as working out where all our stuff is going to go.

We’ve got a giant (120cm/4ft square) frameless mirror above our fireplace in the living room here (acquired from a shop changing room refit apparently) and I think it will probably be relocated to above the fireplace in the dining room of the new house – but I think its lack of frame will look odd there.

How can I make a frame using recycled materials and/or repurposing other stuff?

My first thought is to try something make from reclaimed wood because the fireplace’s mantelpiece will be an old building joist – I’m not an expert woodworker but willing to give it a go. Heh, actually, perhaps I should make a frame using my existing craft skills and knit one ;)

Any other suggestions?

The Eternal*Voyageur is back again, asking:

Any ideas on how to reuse children’s drawings ? My daughter brings a bunch of them from pre-school every day. I don’t have the heart to throw them away, and I can display only so many!

I feel the same way about anything we make/draw/paint too – and we’re nowhere near as precious as children :)

If they can’t be displayed but you’d like to keep them, how about making them into books? A hole punch (and maybe some of those reinforcer stickers), some pretty string and maybe some old cardboard decorated for covers would do for the most basic version. Keeping every picture is still going to leave you with a hefty pile but at least they’ll be easier to store – and easier to enjoy in the future.

Anyone else got other storage or reuse ideas?

Last week this little lady –> arrived in my email inbox.

She (I’m presuming she’s a she, from the eyelashes and pink scarf) is the work of Dutch artist Carolien Adriaansche.

Carolien makes all sorts of wonderfully cute creatures out of old rubbish – like our friend here, who has a bleach bottle body as well as her lightbulb head, and the three guys below, who are just so full of personality that it hurts :)

Carolien also uses other plastic bottles – like those thin ones that all purpose cleaner comes in – to make headless beasts.

Using the handles for their ever-quite-gormless mouths, they have drink bottle caps for eyes and ears/horns made out of rubber gloves, plastic coathangers and even toe separators. Very cute.

See more of Carolien’s work on her website – click her name, then anywhere on the pink & blue guys, then her name again and on the big “C” for the galleries.