Here we are, again: New Year’s Eve.

The supermarket at the edge of our estate is selling giant packs of party poppers for 80p so come tomorrow, some households (and probably entire streets) will be covered in strings of paper and little empty plastic shells.

The obvious answer is not to get them in the first place but assuming they’ve already been popped, what are the options?

The paper is usually none too fancy – not glossy or heavily printed – so can go in the compost, or if you’ve got a lot of it, could be used as packaging for small items.

The plastic bits though – essentially a small cup with a (holed) stem at the bottom of it – aren’t quite so easily reusable. I mean, aside from fun hats for finger puppets. Can you think of anything else you could reuse them for?

Aside from that, do all have a wonderful New Year’s Eve and all the best for 2009. Oooh, and stay tuned for a vaguely Recycle This related announcement tomorrow :)

(Hey, sorry for not posting anything on Friday. I don’t celebrate Christmas so should have posted really but then we stayed up shockingly late playing video games on Thursday night because everyone was off work and I didn’t wake up until Friday afternoon :) )

We’ve had an email from Maya – which reminded me of an email Agata sent me a few weeks ago but which got buried in my email inbox for some reason – asking about reusing dolls’ furniture.

Maya says she has “loads of old doll furniture, mostly from Barbie sets. I don’t have a clue what can I do with them.”

Well, the obvious thing is, if they’re still in ok-to-good condition, to give them away, either to charity shops or through Freecycle – let someone else use them for their intended purpose.

It might also be worth checking eBay in case you’ve got an item that collectors want.

But assuming that’s not an option – say if they’re broken or damaged – what else can be done with them? Any crafty ways to repurpose them?

I’ve seen small dolls’ house kitchen items and the like made into jewellery – kitsch earrings, brooches or pendants – and I imagine something like a dining room table could be used as a podium type thing on a shelf to give a second layer for small items, and armchairs could become phone/ipod rests. Any other suggestions?

(Oh, and if case you’re interested, we covered the dolls themselves just about a year ago.)

(Stock photo by Carin)

We’ve had an email from Abby:

got lots of ice cube trays. don’t know where they all came from since we hardly ever make ice! ideas?

To speak like a marketeer for a moment, you have to think outside the box. Or outside the cube as it is in this case.

Don’t just think about freezing water, lots of other things freeze well and are useful in cube size quantities. I’ve made frozen grated fresh ginger in the past – to stop it going off before we could use it and also because it’s useful for dropping in stuff – and I know other people make concentrated stock cubes too. Any other cool things to freeze in cube shapes?

Other than that, the little compartments would be great for sorting beads, or small screws or the like. Novelty shapes could be fun jelly moulds too. Ooh, the square ones could make jelly bricks and imagine the construction fun!

Any other ideas?

(Photo by Prattflora

Blooming heck, it’s chilly. I’m knitting as fast as I can at the moment to keep us decked out in snuggy socks, hats and scarves – and hoping the needle-on-needle friction will create a bit of warmth too.

(I know in the UK we don’t get really cold winters like in Central/Eastern Europe or in parts of the US/Canada – by those standards, it’s tropical here right now – but because of that, we’re not prepared for it. Two hundred schools were closed in West and North Yorkshire yesterday but we only had 2 inches of snow on the ground. Also: the worst bit about working from home: you can’t use the “there are no buses running” excuse for a day off. Bah.)

Anyway, despite the new woollies and the fact I’ve got a blanket, two cats and laptop on top of me while I write this, I’m still chilly so have been gulping down more than my fair share of hot drinks. John and I have a leaning tower of teabags in the kitchen at the moment (it’s too cold to go to the compost bin after every cup) and our collection of hot chocolate tubs is growing daily.

We’ve got a few of the plastic screw-top jars in the cellar – perfect for our ever-growing random fixings collection, or random allen keys and packets of veg seeds. In the kitchen, they’re too big for spices really but perfect for pulses or dried beans (most of the jars we use are semi-transparent once you remove the label so you can just about make out what’s what and how much is in there).

But what else can we use them for?

Amongst our friends, mushrooms are a bit like Marmite: people either LOVE them or hate them to the point of inventing fake allergies about them. John and I are firmly in the “love” category but have a bit of a problem with the plastic tubs they often come in because we go through so many – we try to buy loose mushrooms (preferably in a paper bag) wherever possible but still go through one or two of these boxes a week.

I used to use them under plants or to hold seedlings in the greenhouse, but the greenhouse is now used by a local stray cat as a home and I’ve got better saucers/pots around the house.

We also used to use them as a pre-compost-bin counter top bin in the kitchen – ideal for tea bags and the like – but now we’ve got a proper little bin with a lid for that sort of thing.

So what can we do with them instead?

The tubs – deep trays really – are quite thin plastic so not heavy duty for most reusing-as-storage purposes. I guess they could be used as dividers in drawers but we have a severe lack of drawers in this house (none in the kitchen, two in the living room, none in the bathroom, and just a chest of drawers in the bedroom) so everything is already in boxes on shelves.

Other suggestions?

(As for recycling, none of the tubs I’ve checked over the years have had a recognisable identification mark on the bottom – sigh – anyone know what they tend to be?)