ScrapHappy October 2018

One part of this box is fine – but this bit, well..

A long time ago, the world was young(ish) and Maplin still existed for all those essentials such as 741 operational amplifier chips and boxes of nails and screws. Over the years, I availed myself of both these retail opportunities, the latter lasting more years than I care to remember or indeed dwell on.

Over those years, as we all do, the box itself became battered and held together with sticky tape until one particularly rubbish day when not only was pretty much everything going wrong, but the tape gave out, covering the bottom of my makeshift box of tools and camera bits (I was attempting to install a nest box camera at Denmark Farm at the time) with the aforementioned nails and screws. They stayed at the bottom of that box for well over a year.

Last month, I decided to do what all good therapists eventually recommend and “get over it”. I collected all the loose bits and put them in a different, more intact, box. Then I came over all ScrapHappy and decided to try to repurpose this box as a, well, a box but this time for holding my Raspberry pi bits.

All I needed were new hinges and a way of building up the missing bits of lid onto which said hinges would be attached. the answer was obvious – some Sugru* which was a birthday present, and the old heating element from a defunct soldering iron. Obviously.

Any old iron? Well, a bit of one.

If it wasn’t broken before…

The iron heater is a metal tube in which there sits a now broken ceramic element. A quick hacksaw later and the tube could be removed and cut in half. Eh voilà! Two hinges.

Sugru was added to hold the metal in place and to replace the missing plastic.

ScrapHappied hinges

In theory, these bits of Sugru would hold the hinges in place. In practice, not so much.

And it was done! I waited a week for the Sugru to completely set and then tested it.

And it fell apart. The Sugru did not attach firmly to the plastic.

So now it is a box that I have used to hold a couple of ScrapHappy hinges and some (now) useless pieces of Sugru.

Back to the drawing board!!

Well, that didn’t work. At least the box is still, you know, a box.

These ScrapHappy posts are curated by Kate, who provides links to other (mostly sewing) ScrapHappy bloggers at Tall Tales from Chiconia on the fifteenth of every month. I have sneaked another non-fabric-based Scraphappy in when no one was looking!

oOo

* Sugru is mouldable glue. Honest.

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Simply the Beastie

HELLO WORLD!!

 

I don’t really do birthdays. I mean, I am happy to celebrate other people’s but when it comes to my own, I do tend to keep quiet about the whole thing, in the hope that if I say nothing then I won’t have actually gotten a year older.*

The Snail is brilliant at presents for me and this year was no exception. She commissioned CrawcraftsBeasties to create two Beasties, one of the Snail and one of me, kitted out with accessories that typify us.

The result was a series of exquisite works of art, that the word “amazing” is really not good enough to describe. To have your novel Beastie-fied is better than any award.

CrawcraftsBeasties has wonderful posts about JonBeastie and JanBeastie, so have a read here and here.

Their first trip was with me to London. They made friends with a traffic cone. I love these Beasties!

oOo

* SPOILER ALERT! This method doesn’t actually work.

 

 

ScrapHappy September: The PalletGate Affair

PalletGate dreams…

PalletGate was my earliest use of pallet hard scrap and is still in use, even to this day. And even to this day, I haven’t got around to painting it purple.

I had to buy hinges and a couple of carriage bolts but everything else was scrap from the eclectic mix of rubbish that forms “my stuff”.

PalletGate today – tatty and a bit worse for wear but still soldiering on (like its creator)

One day, I want to add a new handle made from recycled milk cartons – I started the project to do this a long time ago, but that can be the subject of another ScrapHappy!

Happy Scrapping!

PalletGate 1

PalletGate 2

PalletGate 3

PalletGate 4

These ScrapHappy posts are curated by Kate, who provides links to other (mostly sewing) ScrapHappy bloggers at Tall Tales from Chiconia on the fifteenth of every month. I have sneaked a non-fabric-based Scraphappy in when no one was looking!

oOo

 

ScrapHappy August : Barely Palletable

A Slightly Deeper Purple than this in real life

Continuing the ‘hard’ scraphappy theme, this month, because I said I would as much as anything else, I will direct you towards my series of posts on Pallet Table. This was a project I embarked on in 2015 and it worked out OK.

The project helped to underline how useful a resource pieces of pallets are as opposed to using them in their entirety. AND it was an excuse to paint something else purple.

Palletable

Palletable DIY 1.5*: The Rot has set in

Palletable DIY 2: We have the technology, we can rebuild it…

Palletable DIY 3: Painting the town table red pelt

Next month, I will share with you Palletgate and, after that, write about some non pallet-based projects!

oOo

ScrapHappy July 2018: Pal-let it Be

Daisy checking PalletCart for Regalness

For me, “Hard” scrapping (as opposed to “soft scrapping which is what all you wonderful knitters and crocheters do) tends to be either things that start and are completed quite quickly or projects that languish forever in the corner of a workshop or under a workbench. Over the next few months, I hope to share with you examples of both.

This month, I would like to show you a completed project that used that most versatile of re-usable material: pallets. They are usually free, should never be wasted (but often are) and have spawned a whole new Scrappy field, mostly converting this wonderful resource into furniture of all descriptions and uses.

So here’s a useful cart (what I did earlier to misquote Ernie Wise)  for moving things around on, built out of a scrap pallet, scrap wheels and axles and a bit of rope. This was designed for moving small weighty items through the gap between our backdoor step and the raised beds, a space that is too narrow for our smart cart (not so smart now, eh?).

PalletCart 1: It begins

PalletCart 2: It continues

PalletCart 3: When will it end?

PalletCart 4: Paint my wagon

PalletCart 5: That’s a load off, er, on

PalletCart 6: What the Romans did for us

 

PalletCart at rest after a hard day’s carting

Next month: Rescuing a table…

oOo