As I mentioned last week, we’ve finally, FINALLY, got the keys to our new house and are frantically doing some essential works before we can move in. One not quite essential but desirable thing is for us to fence in the wild bit of the garden – ultimately so we can have chickens* and use the fences to grow things up/along.

One side of the garden was previously dry stone walled but a lot of the stones have been pilfered for use elsewhere in the garden – we’ll try to reconstruct as much of it as we can but I think we’ll have build some sort of fencing for the rest.

John’s dad has suggested using wood from pallets to make simple horizontal-slatted fences. There is also the option of live fencing – growing some sort of hedgerow or bramble bush – but that’ll take time to grow in.

So any suggestions? Having a garden needing this sort of work is new to me so any ideas would be gratefully received!

* the chickens will need pretty high fences or a covered run. We haven’t quite decided what we’ll do with that yet but we’ll try to future-proof the new fences so we can add to them in the future.

(Photo by betacam)

Over on the suggestions page, the Eternal*Voyageur asked:

What could I do with those nice Camembert cheese boxes ?

They’re cute little wooden things and in our kitchen, most wooden boxes ended up reused as tea-bag caddies (we have a lot of teabags) – but I suspect these guys may be a little too … cheesy/ammonia-y for that.

Any suggestions for how to freshen up the boxes once the cheese has been eaten?

And what about other reuses?

(Photo by pdphoto

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’ve had an email from Rich:

Any ideas about how to recycle faux wood blinds? They are white and made of plastic. There must be some craft to make with them.

I’m presuming Rich means Venetian/slat blinds – of the type being currently battered next to my head as cats fight behind them ;)

So what can be done with them? With plastic ones like Rich or the soft wood ones about to cause me imminent injury?

Since I’m obsessed with weaving odd things, I think I’d been tempted to give it a go with the slats – no idea what the resulting fabric could be used for though ;)

So any thoughts?

We’ve had an email from “The Hirst”:

We put wooden floor down and have about two boxes left over. The shop won’t taken them back because we opened all the packs by mistake and it’s not worth ebaying them because it would be enough for a full room or whatever. Can’t burn them because they’re MDF and laminate but I don’t want to just sling them into landfill. Any other options?

Don’t under estimate what people will buy on eBay – and to a greater extent, what people will use if given it on Freecycle. Two packs might be enough for a small bathroom or an narrow hallway.

If it was just a few slats though, and you didn’t want to keep them for spares, I bet you could do some fun things with them.

My father-in-love has mentioned people using it to make wood-effect table tops and I suspect there are loads of other places where you could use it in place of real wood in crafts/woodwork – it would create a strange but fun effect to have a number of different items in the same room (clocks, table-tops, coasters, picture frames, hell, pictures) made from the same pattern of wood.

Also, unless it’s really thick (and most of the laminate I’ve seen isn’t), it would make an awesome hardback cover for a notepad too.

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by Enoch Lai