Activities

These sessions will use items that you would have put in your recycling to make new useful, and/or decorative objects, such as: wallets, tea lights, planters and flowers and so you can go wild with the decorations.

Things to collect / save:

• Plastic bottles of various sizes and shapes. Squash and tonic bottles are particularly interesting shapes.
• Plastic milk bottles.
• Square profile juice or milk cartons with screw caps
• Toilet/Kitchen roll insides
• Chopsticks or similar girth twigs

Essential Equipment:

• Something to punch holes into the plastic bottles – I have a jeweller’s punch but a very sharp pencil may do or a skewer.
• Good strong scissors for cutting the items above
• Small scissors for more accurate cutting. Note: A craft knife, if you have one/prefer can be used instead of scissors.
• Fine sandpaper for smoothing cut edges and for priming surfaces if planning to paint on the plastic.
• Glue to stick parts of the bottles back together – I have Gorilla Glue but something similar e,g, uhu, glue gun, superglue will be fine as long as they are suitable for plastics. PVA will take too long to dry and Pritt stick is not strong enough.
• For some projects, if you don’t have glue some strong sticky tape will work instead.
• String (or wool/yarn)
• You may wish to have a cutting mat or chopping board/cardboard for resting on while cutting. Also, if necessary, put some newspaper or other covering down to protect the surface you are working on from paint, glue etc.

Optional extras:

You may wish to gather the following (this list is not exhaustive):

• Battery tea lights (real flame is not suitable)
• Scraps of fabric
• Paint – acrylic or poster is probably best but you could potentially use some household emulsion if you have it lying around. If you have translucent paint, that may be nice for a stained glass effect.
• Marker pens – mix of tips if possible. Sharpies are good for outlining.
• Coloured pens – I have acrylic paint pens but felt tips would do.
• Tissue paper or scraps of wrapping paper
• Card for making extra parts e.g. ears etc.
• PVA glue – can be used for creating a papier mâché effect and for sealing decorations
• Stickers
• Gems/sequins/sparkly bits
• Ribbons
• Buttons
• Leaves
• Pine cones
• Bark
• Flowers – dried or fake
• Cotton wool
• Pipe cleamers
• Varnish