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?

So we reach the end of another year – a time to look back and look forward.

Looking back at 2009, it’s been a cracking year for Recycle This – I’ve posted 204 articles and you wonderful people have left more than 3450 comments! We’ve also nearly doubled the amount of “unique visitors” to the site over the last year too – hopefully a sign that more and more people are keen to reuse and recycle more things, more often.

I finally got around to redesigning the site in May – something I’d been meaning to do for ages – which I think/hope has made it easier for people to find the most common items and related articles. We’ve also introduced a few new features, How can I reduce this? and How can I repair this? – I hope to push those ideas a lot further in the next few months so if you have any suggestions of things you want to reduce/repair, do get in touch and we’ll brainstorm some ideas for you.

Which brings me neatly onto what I intended to be the focus for this post – what are your reducing, reusing and recycling goals in 2010?

Personally, I’m going to continue working on cutting back my addiction to cheap clothes – everyone’s suggestions have been very useful, thanks so much guys – and I’m hoping to bulk cook more to stop us reaching for, for example, supermarket pizzas when we need to eat quickly or packaging-heavy biscuits when we need a snack. I’m also hoping to reuse a lot of packaging in our new garden and I’m going to set up dedicated bins for things we can’t doorstep recycle to make it easier for us to recycle them elsewhere. What are you going to do?

See you in the new decade!

Hi! Apologies for the sporadic posts of late – I’ve been having so much needed time off from everything – it’s been fab.

Anyway, 2010 starts on Friday and I’m not quite ready for it. Not only because 2010 sounds like the distant future of sci-fi films but because I don’t have a new desk diary yet. I started looking for one a couple of weeks ago then got distracted by something shiny, as I often do, and now my forward planning is taking place on a piece of scrap paper.

So how can I make a 2010 diary reusing, recycling or upcycling stuff instead? Looking around the usual sites, a lot of the homemade diaries are just commercial diaries recovered with a vintage/scrap fabrics but what about using scrap paper? Perhaps printing a week-to-view layout onto old paper bags – like Crafting A Green World’s brown paper bag recipe cards?

I suspect it’ll be easier to make a month-to-view calendar by hand since there only needs to be 12 panels instead of 52 pages. Any suggestions?

What about making reusable calendars to avoid repeating the making process each year? I thought about using a blackboard but it is quite handy to be able to see when we did something, say, two months ago. Ideas?

We’ve had an email from Beth, telling us about her great Christmas stocking substitute:

My lucky little boys get too many presents to fit into an actual stocking. In the past, I’ve got them plastic bags from the Christmas shop but when I was thinking about what to do for them this year, I remembered the novelty glittery T-shirts I had to wear for work last year. I turned them inside out, sewed along the bottom and righted them again, instant festive swag bags!

A great idea, Beth. I’ve also seen pillowcases used in the same way – felt letters and decorations tacked on so they can be removed and used as pillowcases again – and there are plenty of patterns out there for making keepsake stockings out of scraps (although they’re more like keepsake decorations instead of present-filled ones).

Another idea – although for adults more than kids – is to give a nice reusable shopping bag as part of the gift instead of using a gift bag: if it’s not too overtly Christmassy, they’ll be able to use it all year around. There are plenty of ways to reuse/recycle/upcycle things into shopping bags – including out of tshirts and vest tops.

Any other specific stocking/swag bag suggestions though?

(Photo by arttg)

Most of our “how can I make…” posts recently have been big things, or house things, or both so here is something different for a change.

How can I make stitch markers for knitting/crochet reusing or recycling old junk and whatnot? I end up using whatever is to hand and vaguely stitch marker shaped – bent out of shape paperclips or bits of paper with holes torn in them usually. The paperclips often snag on the wool and the torn paper is … less than satisfactory and usually results in me abandoning markers altogether.

Now I know you can buy super cheap plastic ones for just a couple of quid but I’m trying to avoid being a super cheap plastic kind of girl these days so I’d rather make my own – if I make my own recycling old stuff, not only am I reducing waste, I’m also more likely to take care of them/not lose them because I’ve put time and effort into them, rather than just paying a few pence for them.

I’ve seen other handmade ones using light metal rings with decorative beads attached, which are a good starting point – aside from the made-for-purpose jump rings etc, old washers from a random old fixings box or drink can ring pulls might work for the hoop — although both would probably need a bit of work (painting?) to make sure there isn’t any sharp bits or rusty spots which might ruin the yarn. Any other suggestions?

However, I prefer split stitch markers – the clip-type ones used for crochet – which I suspect will be a bit harder to make. I could just bend a piece of reclaimed wire into shape but where’s the fun in that? ;) Any better suggestions?