• 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 Nise:

Hello, I know you have featured wire hangers, and plastic shop hangers, but how can I recycle/reuse those plastic tube hangers that became ubiquitous in the 80’s/90’s?

Please help, I have several dozens! They multiply when I’m not looking!

They were ubiquitous, weren’t they? I have a good number in my wardrobe too.

If they’re still in good condition, I’d offer them to charity shops/thrift stores – they don’t tend to take the flimsy plastic ones from shops (or at least they don’t around here) but they might be more interested in sturdier ones. Someone on one of the old threads also suggested giving strong coathangers to churches or community centres to use in the cloakroom – these might be ok for that too.

Aside from that, you could use the odd one for a homemade peg bags – but that’s not going to use up multiplying dozens.

Any other suggestions?

Last week this little lady –> arrived in my email inbox.

She (I’m presuming she’s a she, from the eyelashes and pink scarf) is the work of Dutch artist Carolien Adriaansche.

Carolien makes all sorts of wonderfully cute creatures out of old rubbish – like our friend here, who has a bleach bottle body as well as her lightbulb head, and the three guys below, who are just so full of personality that it hurts :)

Carolien also uses other plastic bottles – like those thin ones that all purpose cleaner comes in – to make headless beasts.

Using the handles for their ever-quite-gormless mouths, they have drink bottle caps for eyes and ears/horns made out of rubber gloves, plastic coathangers and even toe separators. Very cute.

See more of Carolien’s work on her website – click her name, then anywhere on the pink & blue guys, then her name again and on the big “C” for the galleries.