Okay so I really wanted to make something new for this challenge, but I kept on putting it off and then a few days two really old friends of mine came to visit me and now I simply do not have the time. However what I do have are lots of photos of the things that I have made in the past from an abundance of waste materials.

Check out this wonderful post to find out all about the wonderful challenge, which ends on the 9th May.

Recycling/upcycling is a huge part of my life. I hate to create waste, or to see things being thrown away that can still be used or repurposed into something else. There are so many resources around us that we simply do not need to be purchasing so many new objects just to meet our needs. We just need to keep our eyes open and allow our imagination to run wild. So many things that we bring into our household, things that we believe are for single use, can actually be turned into something else. The magic is in how creative you allow yourself to become.

I have already posted about some of the things that I will be talking about, but if something is good, it deserves to be seen twice, no?
So here are some of the things that I have created out of waste materials.

I made these monsters out of the clothes that my children grew out of, these are clothes that were at the end of their life as they were full of holes. I usually would use them as rags but instead I created these monsters, which I sold at the Christmas Markets where I live. Some of the more colour material were scraps of fabric that my friend was getting rid of, I can never refuse any scraps of material and it was great to find a way in which to use them.

A few years ago I visited a squat in France and I held some workshops there that looked at the different ways you can grow food and also the importance of soil building. I wanted to create a food garden, and use only resources that came from the actual site. This included everything thing needed in order to feed the soil and design the garden. There was an abundance of this flooring that was being thrown out. It was plastic, but it was also semipermeable. Making it perfect to use as a path way whilst also allowing the soil underneath to be watered.

I used the left over pieces of the flooring to build these pallet gardens, once again utilizing the fact that it is semipermeable, so that the plants do not get water logged and also so the plants underneath benefit from any water that does seep through, in effect reducing any water being wasted.

Above are the water towers I made as part of the same workshop,finding a way in which to use up the bottles that were lying around the squat in order to grow food. This is such a great way to grow food if you live in a small dwelling and have very little outside space, they actually work really well on balcony’s.

Another thing that I love to reuse is wooden boxes, baskets and plastic buckets that have holes in them. I would always be on the lookout for anything that can hold some soil, so that I can plant food in them. The fact that they have holes in them, really make them perfect for growing, as they come prepared for drainage.

When we were converting our truck into a home, we had to decide what we wanted to use to cover the plywood that was covering our insulation. I wanted to find a way to use materials that we already had. So we used brown paper bags. We had collected quite a few and some we still used, but what to do with the ones that had holes. Well we tore them up and scrunched each piece into a ball. We then used wood stain to change the colour of some of the pieces and then we put them on the plywood. My kids loved helping with this as they are all very good at tearing paper. We were all very happy with the end result, which you can see a little of in the above picture.

Be sure to check out all the other entries to the challenge, which you will find under the EcoTrain tag.

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