A few years ago, I went through a spate of buying candles. We don’t use them much any more but have been known to have the old candle-light game of Scrabble or lit by candles, eat soup inside a den built out of cushions and quilts in the middle of the living room (we are possibly not as mature as we should be at our age and still like building dens).

Anyway, from those times when we have used them, we’ve got a number of chunky candles still around the place but while their external wax is still fine, they’re insides are all melted away and the wick is pretty much non-existent.

So what can I do with old candles?

Can we make new candles by reusing the wax from the old ones?

Or are there any other good/fun things we could do with them?

(Photo by jilted)

A few weeks ago, I did a post about old tennis rackets but what about old tennis balls?

What can you do with them once they’ve been punctured or misshapen to such an extent that even the dog rejects them as a play thing?

(Photo by vierdrie)

We’ve had a message from Lindsay, wondering what she can do with an old radiator.

She’s posted it on Freecycle but hasn’t had any interested in it – so has anyone got any ideas about how she can recycle or reuse it?

She hasn’t said whether it’s a cool old one like in the picture or a more modern one but suggestions for either would be appreciated.

(Photo by bzride)

It’s getting to that time of the year when we pull all our winter gear out of storage for re-use and the annual glove-pairing gala begins.

Do gloves migrate north for the summer? And do some of them get lost on the journey there or back? That’s really the only explanation I can come up with for how I seem to end up with so many odd gloves, lacking a partner.

Or perhaps my grey and turquoise mitten got distracted when I moved house and is still flying back to the old place – but that was six years ago so it should really get with the program.

Anyway, whatever has happened to them, I now have a few random gloves and mittens. I could start an odd mitten/glove wearing trend – like with odd socks in the early 1990s – but I doubt it will catch on. Any other ideas about what I can do with them?

(Photo by akkia but stunningly like one of my missing gloves…)

Last week, I wrote a bit of a rant about how much I hate it when pencil leads are broken (HATE) and asked what I could do with the formerly-useful pencils.

But I didn’t think about the resultant sharpenings.

If the pencil is wood, I guess they can be composted – right?

But what about previously-foam-cup pencils that can’t be composted?

I know it seems a really small thing and almost isn’t worth caring about, but any suggestions?