Monday, June 23, 2008

Reducing and reusing creatively and a few other finds

I like checking out DIY and crafts sites or blogs -- especially their posts or articles on environmentally-friendly creations. There are a lot of original ideas to be found that make being practical sorta fun.

For instance, here's a step-by-step guide to how to make your own reusable sandwich wrapper. You need some basic sewing skills to do it, obviously, but it's something that wouldn't be difficult to learn (and would have wider applications than merely making a bunch of reusable sandwich wrappers).

Then I stumbled upon instructions for making a solar food dryer. There are lots of these all over the internet and there are even more for solar cookers (with everything from satellite dishes to pizza boxes incorporated into the designs).

And then there's a lot of buzz about Zeer pots, which are refrigerating earthenware pots (you put a terra cotta pot into a larger terra cotta pot, slip sand in between then and keep it wet -- the evaporation of the water cools the inner pot).

Oh, and if you're like me and you have boxes and boxes of old VHS tapes in your shed, attic or basement -- here are some instructions on how to make a totebag using tape from them. The My Recycled Bags.com site has tons of neat blurbs on how to make bags out of just about anything, by the way. Very neat! (Do people still say 'neat'?)

3 comments:

jessy said...

these are all great ideas and links! thanks! i totally want to make my own solar food dehydrator! i would totally make raw crackers and flatbreads with that instead of buying a dehydrator. that's so cool! and i like the idea of reusing the old VHS tapes. anything you can create as opposed to buying is reducing even more, and that rocks so hard!

M said...

I have five days of vacation starting Friday and have decided to try to build either a solar dehydrator or a solar oven. I think it'll be fun (and useful, if either of them work)! If I can get back online at home, I'll try to take and post photos.

I think I have a link off to the left to a site with a whole bunch of designs for solar ovens and dehydrators, by the way. I'll check after I post this and if it's not there, I'll dig it up again and add it.

jessy said...

wow - that would be awesome if you build either of those and posted photos, too! it would be such a fun project (i agree!) and having photos would be nice for people looking for more direction in building their own! i'll check for that link, too. thanks! :)