• Wine cork noticedboards are pretty common but Craftynest have a new spin on it: a wine cork bathmat.
• I see a lot of upcycled wool jumpers and clothes turned into bags but this is the nicest example I’ve seen in a while – and I’m not just saying that because it’s my favourite colour.
• I love how a little bit of crochet transforms these simple jars into pretty lanterns.
• Check out this fun, flowery chandelier made from unwanted plastic bottles.
• Or if you’re a can drink, turn them into stars and a mobile/room divider.
• Finally, this one’s a bit meta – a link to more links – but Junk Jewelry’s Jane has collected together some upcycling ideas for fashionistas.

(Photo by CraftyNest)

Our new furry food-processing unit is settling in well – she’s curled up in a ball on our office sofa at the moment – and we’ve been enjoying the woodland walks with her now that she can go off lead and tire herself out.

As with the cats, I’m trying to keep the waste produced by her food packaging to a minimum – and also, like with the cats’, it can mostly be recycled – cans, cardboard boxes and the giant paper sacks which are the focus of this post.

I bulk-bought the 15kg bags to save money and reduce packaging – but thought that, like with smaller bags of the same brand, the big bags would be plastic so could be reused as rubble sacks or similar in the garden. They turned out to be paper which is better in some ways – much easier to recycle – but less reusable. Or are they?

They’re a double layer arrangement – brown paper on the inside, shiny printed paper on the outside. The brown paper layer smells somewhat of dry dog food so can’t be reused for things I’d ordinarily reuse brown paper for (packaging items to post etc).

So any ideas?

Polly has emailed us with a Compost This question:

Can I emptied my hoover bag into my compost bin? I know you can compost dryer lint so wondered if it was the same.

Like with tumble dryer lint, it depends what the lint/dust is most made up of – but most of the time the answer would will be yes. The contents of your vacuum’s bag/canister tends to made up of dirt brought in on shoes (compostable), human/pet hair (compostable), human/pet skin skin cells (compostable) and, depending on how tidy you are when you eat, food crumbs (compostable). Probably the biggest thing to be wary of is if your carpet sheds a lot of fibres – if it’s a synthetic carpet, you don’t want to add that to your compost really but if it’s natural fibre (such as wool), then it’s fine.

You should to take to mix it well into your existing compost – that’ll both add moisture to the dry dust (and help start the composting process) and stop it being a suffocating layer on the top. Because everything is in pretty small particles anyway, some people say you can skip the compost stage and just dump it straight onto your garden – again though, dig it in or the dust will just blow around when you get the slightest breeze.

Any other advice? Or other suggestions?

We’ve had an email from Petra:

From a party project, we have left two big foam “things” with holes in it. See the picture included. They measure 108 by 47 by 18 (in centimeters). The holes are large enough to hold a winebottle. But the foam is quite soft, so it’s not safe enough to make it into a hanging wine rack.

I thought about it being playing items for the kids in the garden, but any better ideas are more than welcome.

The bright colour, softness and chunkiness make them feel very much like something for kids – one of those things that if we’d had it as a kids, we’d have come up with a thousand different play uses for it. If you have a few, another kid-related thing might be to string them up as hanging dividers in a bedroom – such as between the sleeping area and the playing area, or to give kids a little privacy/sense of their own space in a shared room.

Aside from that, if you could find boxes big enough to hold them (under bed storage boxes maybe?), they might be useful for keeping glasses or bottles safe during a house move (if you’re not moving, someone on Freecycle probably will be!).

They also could be useful in the garden if you’re growing a lot of seedlings – holding plant pots upright when they start to get a bit top heavy or if it’s windy.

Any other suggestions?

When we moved into our new house last autumn, we got a new bed.

Despite our love of slumber, our last bed was awful – the cheapest double I could find when I needed a bed in a hurry back in 2002. It was small, uncomfortable and had been repaired so many times, I think by the end it was made out entirely of glue and hope, not badly laminated wood.

When we moved here, we decided to do things right – after looking at the options in all the big bed shops and online, we ended up commissioning a local furniture maker to make us a bed frame instead*. He made it out of reclaimed wood (yay recycling!) and to a chunky design of our choosing. When he came to assemble it, he gave us a little tool which we might have to use to tighten some bolts — in twenty years time. It’s the best, most solid bed I’ve ever met and we’re very happy with it.

Why am I telling this story in a post about sheets & bed linen? Well, because we decided that after getting the bed frame right, we were going to get the rest of our bed experience spot on too. Like with the bed itself, we decided to buy good quality items that would last us for years and years, instead of cheap things that would fall apart – a key part of “reducing”. I spent ages tracking down & more money than I would normally do on bed linen to get top quality 100% cotton duvet covers. And you know what? Both have ripped already.

We think one of them got ripped on our cat Carbon’s last day – sadly, I can imagine him using the duvet to claw his way onto the bed, or using his claws to drag himself around the space once he was up there. There is a straight tear in it about four inches long, and some smaller tears & L-shaped tears in other spots too. The other duvet cover? I’ve no idea how that got ripped. I just found an L-shaped tear in it – about four inches on either side – when I was washing it the other day. Whatever happened though, it needs fixing.

So what is the best way to repair these supposed-to-last-years duvet covers? Will something like iron-on mending tape work? Or would good old-fashioned sewing be better – and if so, any stitch/method recommendations? Or would patching them be a better route in the long run? Any advice on doing that neatly and smoothly?

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by uvo_design)