Back in October, John started collecting our used matches in a little dish and I encouraged it because it meant I wasn’t the only person in the house that collected random and strange things for some currently unimagined crafty reuse.

To be fair to John, he did have a plan at the outset – those matches, completely whole just with blackened heads, were going to become stubble on his Jack O Lantern but in the end went for a clean-shaven look and the matches keep accumulating.

They can, of course, be used as kindling for a fire but me being me, I wonder what else can be done with them.

Any crafty ideas? Or practical uses? I’ve seen people using matchsticks as tile spacers – so they could be used for that – but anything else that takes advantage of the burned bit?

(Oh, and if you’re wondering, we covered matchboxes ages ago.)

(Photo by allysonh)

We have an old gas cooker without an integral flint so we go through a lot of matches. We tried one of those clicky flint-on-a-stick things but got too annoyed with it to continue so we went back to good old flame.

We throw the used matches on the compost heap but every few weeks, we have a empty box too. We buy cook’s matches so they’re quite big boxes – any suggestions on what we can do with them?