Recycling Trash Items

One of the most important craft projects for us is to recycle as much as we can. The house is a great place to start your recycling projects. What objects do you tend to throw out the most in your trash? Is it plastic, paper, glass or metal? In our case it’s paper from all the junk mail we still receive. Since we shred all of our paper scraps we end up with a lot of confetti style shredded paper by the bag full. So we have tried a few creative ways to incorporate this shredded paper into our arts and crafts instead of the recycle trash. In a previous article we talked about using paper mache instead of plaster in your plaster-craft molds. And in future articles we will be using the different kinds paper items you could recycle at home. Not only is recycling great for our environment, but it’s also a fun way to craft with family or friends. This summer we had a very bad start to the spring season in Chicago.

We lost a lot of our plants we had kept inside for the winter. One such plant was a daisy tree we had for over four years. It started out fine, but by mid-June we lost it. But around our house my husband and I are always creating something out of throw-away items. Shown are photos of two of the recycling projects we created for our yard. My husband removed the daisy tree from the large center pot and cleaned the dry roots out very thoroughly and let it dry outside for about one month. He then painted the roots purple and the trunk gold. He added two wine bottle caps to the front side of the roots and a ruby round half glass bead over each bottle cap to complete the eyes. He then added an old waterbottle and an old telephone cord. It looked like some strange creature from outer space. He put a metal rod into the base that holds the piece yet allows movement with the wind. The flowers in the planter were all made from forty recycled liters of cola and one-inch recycled dowel rods. They really added a lot of charm to our yard and we can reuse them for many, many years. Re-embellish, reinvent, recycle.