We’ve had an email from Trish:

My son has recently bought a drum set and we desperately need to sound-proof a room where he can practice. How can we do this using recycled materials?

The old cliché is egg boxes – does that really work though? Waffle foam packaging would probably be slightly better but possibly difficult to source in large enough quantities. I guess egg boxes might be too since the people who tend to have open trays of them – egg sellers or small grocers – tend to reuse them for their original purpose. If egg boxes work, would shaped foam sheets used for packaging round fruit be an alternative?

My boyfriend John, who is a drummer too (although one that doesn’t care too much for soundproofing), has suggested carpet as something good at muffling and easy to source in large pieces. He also suggested cork tiles – the air in the cork structure aids sound deadening apparently.

Another thing I’d add although it’s not really a reuse/recycle thing is, if possible, try placing the drum kit in different parts of the room/house. Some sounds – footsteps, creaking floorboards, John jiggling his legs – really travel around our house but only from/to certain spots. I suspect it’s a joists/floor board thing but don’t know any more than just suggesting trial and error – anyone know why it’s like that?

Any other suggestions?

• Now the rush to the holidays is out of the way, it’s a perfect time to catch up with fixing and mending stuff around the home and those dozens of jumpers snagged by cats over the first properly chilly bit of the season (… just me?). The Craft blog recently had a roundup of some fab repair projects to get fixing juices flowing.
• MJ over at Making Do with the Not So New posted about a great scheme someone has set up in her area – community give and take chests. Perfect for things not suitable for a charity shop (such as food or once-used bottles of bathroom supplies) or things too small to warrant a Freecycle/Freegle posting.
• MJ also linked to webecca’s yarn winder (swifts) tutorials – made re-using random household objects such as clothes pegs and coathangers.
• Crafting a Green World’s Becky linked to a video tutorial on making cute little handbags from the covers of old, damaged hardback books.
• Craftstylish’s Cal has written a great how-to on replacing a coat lining to breath new life into a tattered vintage coat. The same idea can also be extended to making a coat that bit warmer for winter.
• Finally, reuse old drinking straws and expanded foam packaging to make handy storage for seed beads. It would work for actual seeds too – easy to sprinkle them out at planting time.

(Photo by Diane Gilleland for Craft)

We’ve had an email from Sally asking about squeezy hand cream tubes:

Do you know what number plastic hand cream tubes are? The ones with the flip lids. I don’t know whether or not to put them in my recycling bin.

Along with the inconsistency of facilities available, lack of information on packaging is one of my major pet hates when it comes to recycling. I’ve got three different types of face/hand moisturiser in our bathroom cupboard and only one has recycling information on it – it’s number 4 (LDPE). LDPE isn’t as widely recycled as PET/PETE (number 1) or HDPE (number 2) but it is recycled in some areas – my old council Leeds used to pick it up at the kerbside so it’ll be worth checking your local advice to see if you can do the same.

Aside from recycling, any ideas on how the tubes can be reused? I suspect there will be some overlap with squeezable plastic toothpaste tubes but any new suggestions?

I know a lot of people go for no-drop types of Christmas tree these days but some of them still shed like billy-o.

Pine needles can be composted – they can be quite acidic though so if that’s undesirable, make sure you balance them out in your heap with some alkali things (wood ash, for example). Also don’t drop a heavy layer into the heap all in one place – they sit pretty densely together and can restrict airflow.

They can be used for lots of other things too – Crunchy Chicken linked to a range of recipes using pine needles in drinks and biscuits, and you can use them to stuff pin cushions.

Any other suggestions?

Oh, and happy Christmas to those that celebrate it :)

As I mentioned the other week, we had a woodburning stove fitted a few weeks ago. Because of some previous thoughtless building work, the chimney stacks are damaged – smoke leaking all over the place – so we had to have them properly lined.

The liner is a double skinned metal tube that is dropped down the chimney and attached at the bottom to the stove’s fluepipe. It’s also blooming expensive – and the fitters left the end-of-roll offcuts with us. We’ve got one piece about a metre/yard long and about 18cm/7″ in diameter, and a second slightly smaller piece (in both length and diameter).

What can I do with those leftover bits?

My first thought was the old reusing favourite – plant pots in the garden. We’ve got some old chimney tops already (left by the previous owners, currently home to my garlic) so it could be a bit of a theme. But that seems to be a bit of a waste of their potential – another thought I had was to save one of them to use when we finally get around to making a rocket stove.

Any other suggestions?

(Pic to follow when my camera is charged and I’ve put some shoes on ;) – still rather disorganised after being ill I’m afraid…)