Pallet Jack Project

Image: Tres Chere

Why has the Union Jack become such a fashion icon?

Well, because it's iconic.

Fashion designers and now interior designers (across the pond, I might add) have embraced Cool Britannia and emblazoned everything from painted furniture, art prints, clothing, rugs, and pillows with a blast of bold red, white and blue.

Garden Table Project

I'm having a small love affair.

Last week in London I was out and about with my wife and son, on my way to The Old Cinema to check out some upcycled furniture, when I found my eye wandering slightly.

It's happened before and I've become very adept at hiding these sly glances while in my wifes company but one of these days she's going to catch me out. In a way, I've already tried to prepare her for what comes next. Some days, while she is out, I'll  take my car and drive the back streets in the vain hope of fulfilling my growing obsession and I know one of these days, in her company, I'm just going to walk straight up to one and bring them home.

I am, of course, talking about pallets and this is the latest project I've found for turning these sturdy, discarded items into a unique piece of garden furniture.

Image: joy ever after

This particular table was made using 2 – 4′ x 4′ wood pallets, 1 – 4″x4″, 4 caster wheels, some L-brackets and screws and gray stain. The result is a very practical outdoor rolling table that can act as a coffee table when you’re sitting outside, interacting with your friends or family, or as a mini dining table when having a snack and you want to enjoy it outside.

Jump over to joy ever after for the 'how to'.

Pinhole Camera Project

Ever since my post last week showing you how to make a box  from a recycled cereal packet I've been trying to come up with more ideas to use up all that wasted cardboard that ends up in my bin.

My wife doesn't know it yet and undoubtedly she will now, but I have been squirreling away pieces of cardboard all week long and I think I've found a really good use for some of it.

Here's a fun idea to make a cardboard pinhole camera.

A pin hole camera is a very simple camera without a lens. Effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side.

It may look difficult to make but a diagram can be found here courtesy of Francesco Capponi.

Print out the diagram on some paper and then glue the page to some of your collected cardboard.
Instructions to assemble it come in a step by step pictorial below. You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Here's a link to the forum on flickr where you can share pictures and get advice.

Easter Project(s)

It seems to be that Easter is the most recycled event in our Calender's history.

What we know about Easter is this.

For most of us it's about eating lots of Chocolate Easter Eggs.
Full stop.

For the rest of us, Easter Sunday is the day that marks the end of our 40 day self imposed prohibition.
Whether you have given up sweets, sugar, crisps, cigarettes, swearing, junk food, lying, caffeine, chocolate, salt, alcohol, texting, ice cream, television, the internet, shopping for expensive clothes, complaining, Xbox, biting your nails, or making long lists. Now is the time to indulge.

But these 40 days of abstinence are based on the Christian tradition of Lent.

In the Christian calender Easter marks the end of Lent, a 40 day period of fasting and prayer. A period of preparation which commemorates the Crucifixion and Death of Jesus, which happened to take place on or around Passover.

Passover of course is a Jewish festival.

Passover  begins on the 15th day of the month of Nisan, which typically falls in March or April of the Gregorian Calender. This is a spring festival, so the 14th day of Nisan begins on the night of a full moon after the vernal equinox. This also means that Easter takes place on the first Sunday after a Full Moon and therefore has become a moveable feast.


Christianity has about 25 more moveable feasts in it's calender but they are all based on when Easter falls.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't observing lunar cycles very much a pagan ritual and ...
....really, we could just keep on going down this rabbit hole, couldn't we?

So you get it. Easter is recycled and this is a really tenuous link to post a few ideas on Easter.
But hey, it's a long weekend and I've got a few days off work, because that, for me, is what Easter means.

So if you find you have some time free over this weekend and want to try your hand at a few ideas here is what I've found around the pages of the internet.

First up is a simple Origami Easter Bunny.

If you have a bit more time on your hands and are a bit crafty also why not try Bunny Bowling and make these Bunny Skittles.

The tutorial can be found on Etsy courtesy of Ellen at thelongthread.com


If that all seems like too much hard work check out the Martha Stewart website that has tons of last minute Easter Ideas.

Some of the easier, little to no cost, ideas are:

Easter Egg Ballons (link broken)
                           

Flower Shoes

 

Bunny Folded Napkins

 Jelly Bean Carrot

Eggshell Candles

rePly Chair Project

Dawn breaks and it's time to face a new day.

You leave the house in the early hours and then you crawl inch by mind numbingly boring inch slowly through the never-ending snake of monotonous morning traffic. In fact, one morning I moved so slowly I may have actually seen one of my nails grow.

There is one benefit to moving slower than the aging process. You get the opportunity to peruse the lines and lines of skips that have taken up residence outside the over priced "boom years properties", which have now been forced into becoming simple old family homes - mortgaged up to the rafters (and you're lucky if you have any rafters!)

In what feels like a weird, over-sized, middle class Bric'a'Brac Sale you have skips that are filled with genuine rubbish. Bad floorboards, Rusted Pipes and Broken Windows. Others are filled with genuine treasure. Ornate Doors, Unfashionable Furniture and anything else found in the house that can and will be replaced with an IKEA counterpart - a somewhat "Furniture Version" of The Stepford Wives if you like.

As The Guardian article comments
"skip-hunting, which involves lurking outside houses undergoing refurbishment in search of discarded household items, is apparently enjoying a fresh revival as a result of the recession."

But there's another class of skip.

The "We're building an extension" skip. This is the one that I'd like to discuss here.

It's when I see these skips, overflowing with large sheets of wood and building materials that I hear the inner voice crying out in me... "WHY DON'T I OWN A VAN?????" How the hell am I going to fit 5 x 12ft Sheets of Wood into the back of my Volkswagen Polo?

It pains me to see this kind of waste. There is so much that can be made and built from the wasted material I see crammed into these over flowing skips.

Sometimes all you need is a few pieces of simple Plywood.

The rePly chair project was launched on May 4 2006. The project provides free downloadable plans to make your own recycled plywood lounge chair. How cool is that?
All the parts of the chair can be made from small pieces of scrap plywood that you can collect from anywhere.

If you Click on this Link it will bring you to a downloadable pdf that shows you how to do everything. It's as simple as that.

Here's a few examples of chairs made by people who did just that.

Perfect for the Back Garden when we have that once yearly BBQ (standing under umbrellas of course because who can organise a BBQ in advance and hope to have sunshine on the day?)







Or how about for relaxing in? Sitting and sipping some wine on your over priced balcony late into the evening, dreaming of the treasures still to find amongst the rows and rows of skips.

Spice Rack Project

A few weeks ago we started our son on solid foods. It was a very exciting time for us as our "little boy" was not so little any more.

Ok - he is still pretty little, but in our mind he's growing up too quickly.

Anyway, this is not the place to go into all that.
It's not the place to discuss the incredible look of surprise on his face at the new taste explosion in his mouth and it's not the place to discuss the absolute disaster when disgusted at the food put in front of him his only reaction was to hurl it to towards any and all available surfaces.

No, this is not that place.

This is the place, a fortnight later, that he has worked his way through carrot, cauliflower, parsnip, sweet potato & courgette and about half a dozen little jars of baby food.

This is in fact the place where those empty, half a dozen, baby food jars sit on my kitchen counter waiting to end up in the glass recycling bin.

Image: Patent Pending Projects

Until I saw this.

Which can be found at Elle Decor (Thailand)

This is now the place where I will try out these ideas that I find on the Internet and in books.

I've given myself a time limit to do this. I need to have this made before I do the next run to the recycling depot, otherwise they will go in with the rest of the glass bottles and jars.

I'll update this post next week with details. So if you want to know about the materials that I'm going to use, how long it takes and how easy it was on a scale of 1-5 for this and other future projects, well this is now THAT place.

Click here for the update.

Newspaper Bag Project

If you are anything like me, at the weekend you take a leisurely stroll to the shops and buy the Sunday Papers. Come home, have breakfast and settle down to relaxing reading.
After discarding the travel section (because who can afford to go anywhere?), The car section (because I'd be lucky to have a reg from the last decade let alone this one), The business section (well,...because it's all doom and gloom) and finally the sports section as I'm really more of a movies kind of guy...

(Remind me why I buy the Sunday Papers??)

Anyway, all I'm left with now is the news section, the review section, some weekly tv/story of the week style magazines and a new pile of what I like to call "cleaning out the fire" paraphenalia.
Most of the time this "pile" just ends up in the recycling bin - along with the news section, review section and tv/story of the week style magazines.

Until I found this little video @ The Newspaper Bag Project


And here's some other examples










Have a go. Try it out.
Even if you only try one, at least you'll have a bag to put all those discarded newspapers in until it's time to start the cycle all over again.