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ingenuous labor of love that my strict father never realized the mischief my sisters and I got into!

If the colors fade and the woollies look too shabby, soak them in cloth dye and color fasteners. Unravel the wool off them and use the wool to crochet or knit smaller items such as hats, bags, Christmas stockings and clothes for the dolls. You could even knit or crochet the yarn into book marks and doilies and sell or give them away.

Craft Projects from Recycled Wooden Goods

Carve figurines, make key chains and out of broken wooden clothes hangers. Smaller items like pencil holders, jewelry boxes and mailboxes can be carpentered off an old table. Doll houses can be made from unused boxes.
Craft Projects from Recycled Metallic Goods

Make musical instruments from discarded pots and pans. Assemble your own unique drum set from dustbins, pots and pans. Use the handles of huge wooden ladles as the drumsticks!

Make drink cans into coin banks. Glue tiny pieces of discarded puzzles, paper bits from hole punchers, buttons discarded toy bits or whatever you have onto the outer surfaces.

Craft Projects from Recycled Glass Goods

Glass containers are exciting things to hold! The most common would be stained bottles which cast beautiful glows in the room when placed on window sills.

I received gifts from my students small glass bottles filled with layers of colored sand. It took me a few months to realize that they were not just decor pieces they were paper weights! It also took months before it dawned on me that my name was cleverly painted on the inside of the bottles before the sand was poured in!

Paint your child's favorite cartoon characters on small glass jars with stained glass paint. They will love sipping juice out of them!

Recycling Plastic Products

1.5 liter plastic bottles make good indoor bottle gardens. Fill the bottle with about 2 inches of fertile soil. Drop a few seeds into the bottle and fill the bottle with another thin layer of soil. Alternatively, use a stick to poke the seed into the soil. Water the bottle garden regularly. Children will soon learn that plants move towards openings even though they have no eyes. This is a good time to discover or prove some biological truths about plants.

This may sound rather absurd but when weaving craft was the craze during my youth and we were not in the healthy zone financially, I would beg black trash bags off school cleaners or smuggle precious clean plastic bags from the kitchen, cut them into strips and weave the strips into table mats, small trinket baskets and little hats for my teddy bears. Weave red and white together and you have a bright and cheery floor mat! The A grade I had for those craft projects was a great motivator!

You can also cut even strips of cloth from old long skirts of the legs of pants to weave into floor mats and table mats.

One day, I caught my son removing drawers from the wooden chests and emptying the recycled paper boxes which held his toys. Curious, I watched on.

He placed a huge encyclopedia across the tallest two among the array of boxes and drawers, effectively arranged from the tallest to the shortest. Then he took out his Matchbox cars and started his own race track, the starting point being the top end of the encyclopedia!

It goes to show that when we so desire, we can actually come up with great ways to make good use of our existing goods when we recycle.

If we can all make optimum efforts to recycle, we do not need to exhaust our earthly treasures. We have to remember that when we cut a tree down to make new paper products, we also cut down a home for at least one creature, rob ourselves of a few years' supply of oxygen from that one tree as well as our creativity!

Learn more about this author, Lokemun Magar.
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