Salty Sam’s Fun Blog for Children
Number 548
Upcycling
Hello Everyone
Do you know the difference between: reusing, repurposing, recycling and up cycling?
When you fill your water bottle up with water to take to school every day, your bottle is reusable.
lf you use the pots you ate your yoghurt out of as a plant pot you are repurposing it. You are using the pot for holding potting compost instead of yoghurt. This is a different purpose.
lf you have a drink in a plastic bottle and then take the bottle to a recycling centre, the plastic will be made into another product. The plastic in its next life might be a drain pipe or a milk bottle crate.
Upcycling is a creative reuse of by-products or waste materials or unwanted items into new materials or products which have a higher value.
You are turning trash to treasure!
l expect that if you have ever made a collage out of bits and pieces like bottle tops and straws, you think your work of art has a very high value!
People who make clothes and knitted items keep their left-over materials to make other smaller items. There are lots of knitting patterns on this blog for yarn left-overs.
The term ‘upcycling’ has been around since the very end of the last century.
Of course, broken things can be repaired and mended as well, and if you can do this quite easily, you can save money. lt is also a good idea from an ecological point of view as well.
Composting kitchen scraps and garden rubbish can create free compost to feed your garden plants.
One of the things people really love to upcycle is furniture. They can use their imagination to give a piece of furniture a new lease of life by sprucing it up or even transform it to look completely different.
You may remember when Henry’s playroom was decorated some while ago, he had a lot of pre-loved furniture painted with pictures of planets and space aliens to make it look wonderful.
When you decorate furniture like this, you actually own a unique piece of artwork! Nobody else is likely to have another piece that looks like it.
People can make shelves colourful and cover chairs with paintings, or they can turn ladders into shelves, shelves into dolls’ houses and old car tyres into seating. You can use your imagination to make lots of fantastic things.
You can buy furniture for a project from car boot sales or online. Some furniture is sold in charity shops and some is just given away.
Furniture needs to be prepared properly before it is painted. The surface has to be cleaned and sanded down, then cleaned again before it is painted.
Using a vacuum cleaner is a good way to get the worst of the dust off before you wipe it off completely with a damp cloth.
The first coat of paint is called a primer.
The second is called a base coat.
The third coat is called a top coat.
You have to wait for each coat to dry before you add another one.
lf you add decoupage on top of that you will put a coat of varnish on top of the paper shapes to protect them from wear and tear. Decoupage is gluing a lot of little paper pictures together to make a larger design onto a surface and covering them with varnish.
Bill and Bob’s dad thought he would have a go at upcycling. He collected some old furniture from a car boot sale recently and set to work to transform it.
Because the weather was warm he worked out in the garden and the paint was dry in no time.
None of the items was very big. There were four small tables, two small book shelves and a rocking chair.
Once they were painted in bright colours with some canal art added they looked great, and Bill and Bob’s mum put them in her shop to sell.
They were sold in no time – at a good profit.
They were bought by holiday-makers who were staying at the camp site behind Sandy Cove and we think they must have taken them home in their caravans or trailers.
Bill and Bob’s mum and dad thought that because the items were sold so quickly, it might be a good idea to try and find some more items to upcycle and sell on!
lf they look for some more things, they can sell store them in Auntie Alice’s shed and then sell them in the shop next summer.
Bye bye everyone – don’t forget to subscribe to my blog!
Love and kisses
Salty Sam
www.christina-sinclair.com
Bill and Bob’s Joke of the Week
Bob: ln which room of the house would you never find a ghost?
Bill: l don’t know. ln which room of the house would you never find a ghost?
Bob: The living room!
Salty Sam © Christina Sinclair 2015
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of material from this blog without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited.
Links may be used to www.christina-sinclair.com
Picture Gallery
Using left-overs
Recycling
Repurposing
You need small paper pictures to make decoupage
Canal art
Canal art
THE SALTY SAM NEWS DESK
This week, Auntie Alice was having a tidy up in the greenhouse so that she could find some room to plant some seeds and also plant some cuttings.
She wanted to try out some money-saving ideas as well.
She had heard that you can dip your cuttings into honey and then cinnamon to get them off to a good start and that you can use old washing-up sponges to line the bottom of your pots before you fill them with compost and plants.
She wanted to try these ideas out to see if they worked.
She gave an old muffin tin to the children and showed them how to press it into the earth to give you a good guide as to where to place your seedlings evenly when you plant them out.
She was hoping that the children would then be able to plant up much straighter rows of vegetables than in the past!
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Quick Quiz
What do these words and phrases mean?
- a new perspective
- salvage
- artificial
- repurposing
- a reclamation yard
lt’s the Weekend!
HOW TO MAKE TURTLE STONES
This week Auntie Alice was sorting out some vegetable beds and found she needed to pick some round stones off the surface of the earth.
They seemed perfect to use as a crafting idea…
- Each turtle is made with one large stone for the shell four smaller ones for the legs, one medium size stone for the head and two tiny stones for the eyes.
- Once you have selected your stones wash them and leave them overnight to dry completely.
- Use acrylic paint to paint on eyes and toes and a pattern on the shell.
- Use epoxy-resin adhesive to glue the turtle together.
- You can paint the entire turtle with clear varnish if you like.
Please note that the material on this blog is for personal use and for use in classrooms only.
It is a copyright infringement and, therefore, illegal under international law to sell items made with these patterns.
Use of the toys and projects is at your own risk.
©Christina Sinclair Designs 2015
Quick Quiz Answers
- a new perspective – looking at something in a new and different way
- salvage – rescued objects – maybe from a wrecked ship or a demolished house
- artificial – man-made, not from nature
- repurposing – using an object for a new and different purpose – like making a greenhouse out of old windows
- a reclamation yard – a yard where you can go to buy objects taken from houses that can be used again like hearth places and baths and ceiling decorations or a yard where materials like metals are taken from objects to be recycled
