River Cottage

I am appalled at the new trend to take a perfectly good book, fold all its pages and turn it into a sculpture. Or worse still, to rip the covers off and use them to enclose a menu at trendy restaurants ... As a born bibliophile I find the whole idea akin to cutting up babies and serving them as sashimi

harsh..

Certainly I don't like the idea of destroying perfectly good books and records. If the book is missing parts, and nothing can be done about it, perhaps, but not otherwise.

The drums of washing machines are good for making fires, one of our Coppice Group members does that, and we have one we rescued for the purpose.

just a few things i found..

I love the house made of bottles; we could build an estate with the bottles from this house....

I've done the record thing, and the crisp packet in the oven to make wee badges, as a kid we all did it. We used wheels of old prams and the like to make go-carts or buggies as we called them.. is that up-cycling.

Oh yes, pram wheels were very useful! Steered by a volkswagon steering wheel, but kids dont really make go carts any more. Its a once a year project here as we have downhill races at the festival.

For Mark - to go on the door of his bottle house

and for indoors...

oooohh like the cork wellie stand and the wreath. Very clever.

Very clever indeed.  When books have got tatty why not use covers etc., I occasionally shred books that I really HATE and put into our compost.  We up-cycle by selling and buying at auctions ............ I HATE pine furniture painted to give a shabby-chic look though 

So do I Leah. We have pine furniture in our bedrooms and they have seasoned to a nice warm yellowy brown.

It would take us forever to build a house of bottles, but might manage it with used coffee jars.  See other people put their bottle boxes out full of bottles, and ours goes out every so often half full of coffee jars. Found some bottles we had been using as ornaments years ago, and have now put them in for recycling, except the Chianti bottle with a straw outer which I have decided is still an ornament. I also have a fair few bottles reserved for my quince and pear wines.