'Recycling' (aka new and brilliant uses for ordinary objects) is a suggestion by Lizard_Wizard. Sawn-off plastic bottles used as funnels? Perhaps items usually thrown away but made into useful items instead?

Mrs TW's professional hair-dryer went wrong, so it would ordinarily have been thrown away. I managed to mend it though (a broken winding). It was quite expensive and far to good to throw away without a fight. The red ball was once used as a washing machine liquid-soap measure. The bit of tube with tape wrapped around it is part of an old toy.

All put together, it makes an efficient electric air-bed inflater. The tube (the bit of tape increases the circumference) is just the right size to seal into the air-bed valve. The hair-dryer's airflow has to be set to 'cold' of course. Been using this for years.

I have been recycling out of date wallpaper sample books in order to decorate greetings cards. I have visited several shops which sell wallpaper and then asked if they have any old books, unfortunately I have a number of duplicates but it is free.

It has to be admitted that I have also visited a certain UK DIY store with the company colours being red, white and black then helpng myself to a few samples pieces of papers which appeal to me.

My daughter Erin has made herself a couple of useful items from throwaways - a bank out of a Quaker Oats container, and a crafts container from an old cracker box. She has another couple of boxes waiting to hold magazines.

This is a "sculpture" I made for my sister for her birthday a couple years ago. It is a pair of pants my daughter had outgrown, stiffened with liquid porcelain and molded around an structure made of sculpted aluminum foil over plastic bags. The waistband has a wire oval in it, but otherwise the shape is entirely from the underpinnings it was hardened around.



For those who didn't know, it's a pair of pale green pants with nobody inside them. It's from a Dr. Seuss story that my sister loved when she was a kid.

OOoo, I loved that story, too, Lothruin! Great sculpture.

Thanks! It maybe seems like a strange gift for a 25 year old (my sis's age when I gave it to her), but she loves it. She laughed so hard she almost cried when she opened the box. This link will take you to a pic of what they look like from above:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2312/2488949977_2aed184a16_o.jpg

That is really neat, Lothruin. I know there is no one else with that 'sculpture'!

Wow!

I quit smoking a couple of months ago, so needed a new use for my Dad's floor model ashtray. It's now a button display stand in my office

Thanks everybody. 'My favorite ...(anything), which someone else in your home hates' is this week's theme.