Alison Bailey Smith has posted a couple of messages around the site recently about the things she makes out of old wires – culled from old televisions and the like – and they’re so fab, I thought they needed featuring a bit more prominently than buried in the comments section.

Alison has been repurposing old wires to make “jewellery and other wearable art” since 1988 and has made some truly gorgeous items. One of my favourite things is the blue hat, which is made from television wire and coffee bag wrappers, and I also love the beautifully shaped data cable basket and jewellery, including the bangle below.

I’ve made various bits of jewellery out of old wires (as we’re both geeky and hoarders, we’ve got loads of random dodgy cables lying around) but all my efforts have been a lot chunkier and plainer – Alison’s work has inspired me to keep at it with the hope that one day I’ll be able to make something as pretty and delicate as her items. But she also takes commissions so if you like something but don’t fancy giving it a go yourself, you should get in touch with her :)

• How can I reuse or recycle a bundle of wires?
• How can I reuse or recycle old televisions?
• How can I reuse or recycle a wire guitar strings?

We had an email from Lori the other day about the bags and things she makes out of old jeans.

You can be a “jeanius” like me, too!! RECYCLE!

As lover of both recycling and puns, how could I resist? ;)

Her range includes bags and accessories just using the fabric and items more obviously a former pair of jeans/denim skirt – ready-made pockets = win!

She also has some random fun things for sale – like this cheque book sleeve made using an old M&Ms wrapper. I think this is very cute and fun but unfortunately now have an insatiable desire for sugar-coated chocolate treats. Thanks Lori, thaaaaanks. :)

Anyway, you can find Lori’s things at http://loriforney.etsy.com

• How can I reuse or recycle old jeans?
• How can I make a bag out using recycled things?

As I’m sure many of you great, tuned-in, turned-on people know, Etsy is wonderful – loads of homemade crafts available from a range of sellers in one very easy to search/browse place. Now the UK has its own version – Folksy.

It’s only in beta at the moment so there isn’t a huge amount of stuff on there yet – but it’s nice for us Brits to easily be able buy items from more local craftsters and not have to pay (in financial and environmental terms) for getting stuff flown in from the US.

Like Etsy, it’s not exclusively for recycled stuff but DIY crafters often drift that way – and if you search “recycled“, you’ll see there are already some things on there.

Definitely something to keep an eye.

Last week’s post on HA Schult’s Trash People reminded me of something I saw on Alice in Blogland‘s blog a few months ago (Alice is a regular commenter on this site and was the one that suggest we should make the reverse Recycle This idea a regular thing – hi Alice! :) )

Anyway, she linked to the awesomely amazing work by photographer Chris Jordan, which really illustrates the scale of the problem we face when it comes to trash.

His “Running the Numbers” exhibition combines awesome visuals with statistics about usage/wastage in contemporary America – for example, his ‘Cans Seurat’ picture “Depicts 106,000 aluminium cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds”. (It covers other social issues too – for example, gun-related deaths per year and the amount of children in the US without health care.)

Speaking about his previous exhibition ‘Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption’, Chris said:

“The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.”

We’ve kinda already covered this before – in with spent energy saving bulbs and old lightbulbs in general – but I just spotted this very cool reuse of old strip lights so thought it was worth mentioning more specifically again.

Castor Canadensis, a design studio in Canada, has thought to turn a whole bunch of old tubes into a new light fitting – with an energy efficient bulb inside to provide the actual illumination. (On a similar theme, Ikea used to do “bucket” light shades that you could fill with whatever you liked and old lightbulbs looked cool in there.) I imagine that if you were handy, you could make a flat version for a wall light too – but I don’t know how you’d go about lighting that evenly – any suggestions? A spread of white LEDs maybe?

Anyway, as I said, this is a bit of a retread so there is plenty of recycling/disposal advice for these tubes on the energy-saving bulbs post – but basically, BE CAREFUL! They’re a hazardous material and shouldn’t be thrown into an open van, shattering and sending crap and glass all over the road (as some scrap collectors did on our street a couple of months ago…). Dispose of them properly at your local household waste site.

(Photo courtesy of Castor Canadensis)