We’ve had an email from Adele:

For my Product Design A2 level I am aiming to create a chair made from recycled materials. I’ve got to be able to collect them in a fairly short time, and of course it would be very helpful if the items were free…I’ve got an open mind about it, and I need some inspiration fairly quick.

Cardboard chairs are the first thing to spring to mind – designers have made them in all sorts of shapes and styles and there are a number of how-tos around the internet, and people talking about the theory of making them too.

If it doesn’t have to be a formal chair, it might be worth exploring upcycling old clothes or bedding to make a bean bag. (I’ve also used old clothes to repair broken chairs on a number of occasions – an opened out jean leg is about the right width for a director’s chair seat – but those projects did start with a real chair frame.)

Getting a bit more involved than just cardboard or fabric, you can make chairs from old oil drums/barrels – for example, these basic chairs or a more flamboyant rocker. Plastic barrels might be slightly easier to work with but still transformable (these chairs aren’t made from old barrels but give an idea of possible shape).

Any other suggestions for Adele?

(Photo by Jascha400d)

A couple of weeks ago on on The Really Good Life, I post my top 5 clothes line drying tips.

One of my tips is to use a clothes peg airer thing if possible – one of these things – it stops the little items taking up space on your main line and is easy to take inside if it starts raining.

Petra liked the idea and decided to make her own out of “some electricity pipe, an old iron coat hanger, some rope and pegs” – and that’s so great that I’m now adamant about reusing and recycling to make my own, once my current flimsy plastic ones break. And it got me thinking about making other line drying/clothes airing stuff too…

Have you made any clothes lines/airers/drying racks yourself, reusing and recycling old materials? What did you use?

Or have you fixed/extended a shop-bought airer to make it more suitable for your needs?

Any tips or advice for anyone else?

(Funnily enough, I was thinking about this a year ago too – I asked how to make a cover for my rotary airer so I could leave clothes out during occasional showers. It must be something about this increasingly moist time of year!)

When we were talking about making jewellery from drinks cans a couple of months ago, Mary Anne Enriquez sent me links to some relevant Flickr groups which then got buried in my inbox – sorry for that Mary Anne!

Anyway, Mary Anne thought Recycle This readers may be interested in the following Flickr groups:

• PET Bottle and other Plastics Recycled Creativity – jewellery and other knick-knacks made from old plastic bottles
• Fan>TAB>ulous Aluminum & Tin Can ART – art and accessories made from, or incorporating, drinks cans or can tabs.
• Cardboard Tubes ReCrafted – all sorts of ornaments and other things made from assorted cardboard tubes – from toilet roll tubes to giant sturdy ones.

Lots of wonderfully creative work – inspiring stuff.

Thanks so much for the links, Mary Anne and sorry again that it’s taken me so long to post them!

(Roses photo by rosely pignataro; cardboard cutout photo by giulia massera)

We’ve had an email from Louise W:

Our church hall has accrued dozens and dozens of tea towels over the years, I don’t know where they come from. We usually tear the tatty ones in half and use them for cleaning rags but I was wondering if you had any ideas for other things we could do with them. Some of us are good at sewing so could make things with them for our jumble sale.

If it’s a straight-up surplus of good condition towels, I’m sure there would be local shelters/re-homing community groups who would love a bulk donation – either for use in their own kitchens or to be give out to those in need of even though most basic household supplies.

If they’re too tatty for donating, the decent parts of the fabric can be upcycled in a number of ways – I’ve seen aprons made from cute dish towels, cafe-style curtains/blinds for kitchens, baby bibs (especially if the towels are super soft from frequent washing) or quilt-style hot pad tablemats using a few different towels.

Finally, if they’re far too tatty for any of that, they do make great dishclothes/cleaning rags and can be shredded to be stuffing for small toys or the like.

Any other recycling ideas? Practical as well as creative crafty ones?

A couple of weeks ago on The Really Good Life, I was umming and ahhing about whether or not to buy an automatic chicken coop door. There were several reasons arguments for it but we don’t *need* one, it would just be a convenience – and I didn’t know whether convenience is worth £100.

The wonderful Alice helped me justify wanting to sleep later than daybreak and added:

Is there anything else you could give up or change to save the equivalent of £100 in a year to compensate? For instance I’d go a whole year without a takeaway to pay for being able to lie in all year, and that’d probably save me enough money over the year (as well as probably compensating somewhat in carbon/environmental terms). Can you “trade” anything else in your life that you don’t really need, motivated by knowing that the sacrifice is “paying” for the lie-ins?

As I said, Alice is wonderful and this is a great idea – and without naming any particular thing, I’ve decided to I’ll give up numerous often-fleeting wants over the next few months to (retrospectively) pay for it — mostly, I suspect, unnecessarily food while I’m out and about, stuff that can be easily done without and isn’t really missed outside of the moment — money thrown down the drain for little value.

Anyway I thought it would be fun to keep track of this money through a moneybox/piggy bank so I can see it building up (and at the same time, see how much I normally fritter away!) – and whenever I think something like that, the next thing that comes to my mind is: “how can I make one of those reusing or recycling stuff?”

So what can I reuse or recycle to make a money box or piggy bank?

Around our house, we already have some old coffee cans with slits in the tops for collecting change and my dad uses a giant old whiskey bottle from a bar for his pennies. They’re both very practical but I’d like something that’s a bit more fun if possible.

One idea I had was to make a papier mâché chicken from old newspaper and out of date flour. I imagine a hollow plastic ball could be used in the same way instead of the papier-mâché – and could be decorated in a similar way to become a rotund hen.

So any ideas?