Odd or fun upcycling for the home and garden

I know you all have seen pictures of fun upcycling. Or even things that make you go "hmmm..."

List 'em here!

I'll start. Crutches taking up precious closet space? Put 'em to work in the garden!



This is rather brilliant if you ask me.

I sow all my small garden seeds in yogurt cups. I make holes made in the bottom with either a hot nail or a serrated knife run at two angles to make an open slit. Larger seeds like cucurbits go in 1-liter tetrapaks with holes in the bottom.

I still like my butterfly gate I made out of a dead soaker hose the neighbor was throwing out. I had one 8 inch piece of scrap left after it was done :D

I might have found the oddest upcycling ever!

Someone in a group on another platform had old rusty barbed wire to get rid of. Another suggested she offer it up for free, but the OP was curious if people would actually want it.

There is cool art made with recycled metal of all kinds, so I did a quick web search to help the OP see some examples.

I found this, someone selling balls of rusted barbed wire as garden art for $200 (here) and I think it looks pretty cool!


Also, this blog, https://dishfunctionaldesigns.blogspot.com/2012/08/beautiful-upcycled-barbed-wire-creations.html, has some amazing home *and* garden art (even chandeliers!) that use rusty barbed wire.  Attached is a bird house example from the blog, using all kinds of upcycled items.

Wow, I LOVE this!  My upcycling tends to be picking up old bed frames and using them as trellises, practical stuff like that.

The crutches ARE genius.  I didn't see butterfly in the gate until it was mentioned...I see lizards (they are everywhere in the garden, popping heads out of the upcycled pipes I use for fence posts.)

The creativity of that cicada shell thingie too.  wow!

And the orbs are beautiful...plus they can be disassembled if need be, and reused as fencing again, I'm guessing.

Perhaps some day I will have the time and inspiration to do something more artistic.  Space is at a premium in the city, too, so it goes to try to produce food, not art.

But the seed of creativity has been planted, and if something is born from this, I will revisit and share!

I like to collect lonely plates and bowls to put under plants. And my cats eat off of fine china saucers that no longer have teacups.

Is it a plane, a chair, or a tool chest?

My late husband turned a portable dishwasher into a tool cart. The wheels are sturdy and the top tray was great for the tools he was using before putting away in their spots, and he had hooks and magnetic strips on it to store items on the outside as well.

He also made an old broken aluminum chair into a free propane holder for our $200 restored truck camper we drove across the country in, in 1994, on a 68 1/2 Mercury, arriving chez my snobbish parents to their utmost horror LOL

And upcycling more junk:
His grandfather was a chronic alcoholic who lived in the back of his welding shop in Medicine Hat, on a couch with a dirt floor. He built a plane from looking at some others, before they had licenses for planes and pilots, and flew oil men all over Sask-Alberta along with a few buddies of his who had also built planes, all of them completely intoxicated -- passengers and all. Someone fell out once at 50' and lived, according to a book written by one of the gang. Doc said he wouldn't have made it if he had been sober LOL

I am always up-cycling old pillows into mattresses by adding natural materials above and using them as the soft base layer.

Many things still have a useful life after they fade, tear or get a stain.

 

Lynne Cim wrote:I am always up-cycling old pillows into mattresses by adding natural materials above and using them as the soft base layer.

Many things still have a useful life after they fade, tear or get a stain.

 

Lynne, can you share more about how you make a bed out of old pillows?  That looks like a lot of rope in your picture.  My nephew has an old rope bed passed down to him.  I'd love to know how they were made.

Bonnie

 

Lynne, can you share more about how you make a bed out of old pillows?  That looks like a lot of rope in your picture.  My nephew has an old rope bed passed down to him.  I'd love to know how they were made.

Bonnie

Hi Bonnie, I am currently working on a blog post on my store for 30 DIY Mattress Ideas, making sample mattresses from unconventional materials.  This idea is one that I now plan to finish out to make a full size mattress with for a guest room. The rope is a hemp net I purchased for this project, but you could tie (macrame) your own net too from any rope. Here is the post:30 DIY Mattress Ideas

My use of rope here is different from a traditional rope bed, where the ropes are strung across the bed frame to make a surface for another mattress to sit on.  This is where the saying "sleep tight" comes from as the ropes were needed to be tightened often.  My hemp rope net is simply used to hold the grid of pillows together, not as a surface to put a mattress on but perhaps I was inspired by rope beds from the past!

That's got to be the coolest action figure ever!!!