Amy Quarry dropped us an email this week with a link to her blog post on ten ways to repurposing old clothes, reusing as much of the original structure/shape as possible to save time.

Half the list take big clothes and turn them into little clothes: for example, with some pleating around the top and some arm holes chopped in the sides, an adult size skirt can quickly become a child’s dress (right). Or shrinking a woman’s blouse widthwise to make a baby/child’s dress. All very cute.

For those of us without small people (and/or willing cats) to dress, she includes ideas such as making a mini-skirt into a bag and sundresses into aprons (below).

I love these ideas because I’ve got quite a few items of clothing that I love but either which don’t fit any more or don’t suit me as they are any more – but could easily be repurposed like this. Time to unleash the sewing machine!

(Pictures with permission from Amy’s blog)

Lyndall, of March’s bread tag query, has got a couple more “how can I recycle this?”es for us. Firstly, following on from Monday’s high heeled shoe question:

does anyone have any bright ideas about recycling old crocs? mine now have holes in the bottom of them! would love to get them resoled if possible, but have not looked into this as yet and it’s generally not cheap.

It looks like Crocs themselves have a recycling scheme – old shoes are grounded up to make up (20% of) new ‘SolesUnited’ shoes for distribution in developing countries — but it seems only for US people at the moment (or people who are willing to pay the postage for their old shoes to reach the US). (They also have spare part schemes for replacing broken straps or rivets, which wouldn’t solve Lyndall’s worn-sole problem but might help save a few pairs from being dumped.)

So any other suggestions? I guess the good old standby of gardening shoes is out if they’re leaky but I suspect the lightness of the foam might be useful for something.

(Photo by sugarbeatl)

We’ve had an email from Naomi:

I’ve got loads of old shoes that I no longer wear but they’re not suitable for use as “dirty shoes” in the garden or whatever because they’re got stiletto heels. What can I do with them?

We’ve covered old shoes before but I guess high heels are a bit different because they’re only good for aerating the lawn ;)

Of course the obvious suggestions are to pass them onto someone who’ll wear them – through Freecycle, local charity shops, eBay etc – or put them into a shoe recycling scheme so the materials can be reused and recycled.

But what about other ideas?

(Photo by kymmie_xox)

I’ve a few old jumpers (aka sweaters, pullovers, woolly warm things) that aren’t really suitable for wearing any more by me or anyone else. I’ve either shrunk them a bit in the wash, or they’re stretched and baggy, or are stained in parts or are, frankly, a bit stinky in (under arm) parts.

I know that you can unpick old jumpers for their wool – but only if they’ve been knitted as a jumper, not if the different parts have been just cut from one big piece of cloth and (I forget the right term for it) kinda stuck together at the sides – if you unpick tops like that, you just get thousands of little pieces of wool, just one row in length rather than one piece of very long wool. Unfortunately all the woolies in question are of the latter, unpickable variety.

So given they’re not really any good for going charity-shop-ward and I can’t unpick them to feed my newfound knitting addiction, any other suggestions of things I can do with the cloth? Some of them have sleeves that are ok but the bodies are too far gone; on others the bodies are fine but the armpits and cuffs matted – so any suggestions for using up the different bits of them?

(Photo by fugue)

John’s socks have a tendency to

a) stretch to about seven foot in length
b) go hard and strangely crunchy
c) go missing

Mine hole at the heel and toe, lose all elasticity around the ankle then drain of colour.

When they’ve gone past the not-even-on-washing-day-when-every-other-sock-is-dirty stage, we usually just throw them in the dirty rag bag for using when something gross needs cleaning up. But even with all the gross (feline-related) things that happen in our house, we still have a huge stack of odd and broken socks.

Ideas?