Had an email from Cadan ap Tomos:

My mother is a knitting fanatic. She knits all the time. Yesterday she had a bag full of wool she didn’t want anymore. She was about to throw them away, until I came and said: “We can recycle that!” and grabbed it out of her hands. Well, actually, she gave it
to me to put in the bin, but i snuck it up to my bedroom instead! So I went to your wonderful website, to find that the item was not there! So, here is the suggestion: How can I reuse or recycle: old wool?

So any suggestions for Cadan? I’m guessing they’re not full balls of wool so ideas for scraps as well as long lengths would be helpful.

(Photo by Noche)

Since it’s Halloween tomorrow, how about flipping this crazy blog-concept on its head for a change?

Anyone got any good ways to reuse or recycle bits and pieces from around the house to make Halloween costumes?

Recipes for fake blood? Gore? Green ooze?

What about ways to make realistic witches’ warts, zombie-ish decaying flesh or fake spider webs?

Go crazy : )

(Photo by cybersnot)

According to something I read the other day, Glastonbury Festival organiser Michael Eaves hates all the wellington boots that are abandoned after the mud-fest that is the Glastonbury Festival these days. He apparently said: “I hate to see wellies being ditched. We really need to find a way of recycling them.”

…. So any suggestions?

(Photo by vierdrie)

Continuing on from the tidying “rampage” mentioned earlier in the week, I’ve been sorting through our old clothes in the bedroom.

In addition to the clothes we wear regularly, we have a couple of boxes of old clothes on the top of the wardrobe. These are the clothes that we will wear again just as soon as we lose the required weight, height or fashion hindsight that caused them to be banished to the boxes in the first place. Periodically, these boxes get sorted through again and the “nah, I’m not going to be a size 10 again in a hurry” cast-offs get sent to the charity shop.

But there is some stuff that isn’t really suitable for charity shops – because they’re damaged or stained, or hideous travesties against everything that is good and/or pure — like these old ties of John’s.

Aside from sending them to be recycled for their fabric, any reuses?

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…)