Recycling your holiday souvenirs: corks and leaflets

Recycled wine bottle cork decoration. Six corks on a saucer. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

If you don't have a frame for the corks to hang them on a rustic style kitchen wall, you can place them on a saucer as dinner table decoration.

Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

 I come back from holiday with so much clutter. What can I do with corks from bottles? Brochures, leaflets, pamphlets?

I even have duplicates of business cards and leaflets. Here are my latest ideas.

Uses For Corks

Cork Decorations

Arrange cork decorations in concentric circles, lying flat and radiating out, like the almonds on the top of a British Dundee cake, around a central point such as a cut off disc shape half of a cork.

Cork Jewellery

Use a cork as a pendant, or a string of corks, or discs cut from corks, as a lightweight necklace which cost nothing so is no great loss if you lose it. Make a matching bracelet.

Hanging Corks

On bags and backpacks.

Use corks on Hats

Hang corks from hat brims as fly swatters. I bought a hat like this in Australia. It was expensive. But I found the corks in front of my eyes were irritating. You could just have corks all around the hat, but not in front of your eyes.  

Uses For Travel Leaflets, tickets, pictures

You can stick one sided tickets, even your boarding passes, onto diagonally cut cereal boxes to be used as storage for your itinerary and other brochures or receipts from your holiday, Or just a decorative box.

You can use leaflets to cover your holiday notebook or diary.

Brighten up old cardboard boxes used for storage.

If you have three identical leaflets, or at least two, make a three D picture with trees at the back and a building at the front. No two identical? Use the brightly coloured leaflet in front and a paler one at the back.

Print pictures for a talk. Then use them to create a 3D picture. You need a frame with a gap, bought cheaply from craft stores when they have sales.

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How to protect your cabin bag when travelling

I had luggage assist on the railways. Unfortunately, people, trying to help, didn't understand that four wheel bags need to be upright. They insisted on dragging the bags forwards on two wheels. This damaged the front pocket of the bag, leaving dirt and holes, and damaging the beading edge.

I bought a patch in a craft shop. the assistant said to me, "You don't want an iron on patch. You need a glue-oo patch."

Problem
How do I prevent more damage next time? My wheel on luggage gets damaged easily. How can I protect it?

Answer
Do what you see done at the airports. They charge you to wrap your suitcase in what looks like clingfilm.

You could encircle your bag with a strap.
Use clingfilm.
Add bubblewrap.

Wrap an old blanket around it, then a plastic bag.
Place a pretty new pull-on bag inside an already old and dirty larger bag.

Author
Angela Lansbury.

Grandstand Mall for a grand time out in Singapore: seeing sea food, silver, truffle oil

Grandstand Mall on Turf Road in Singapore is where the old race course use to be before it moved to Kranji. A relative of mine said I would like it because I enthused about the macaroons he bought for a wedding anniversary.

We took a bus to the end of the road and walked up. Outside stood rearing statues of horses, reminders of the old days.

Planning, timing and shuttle bus
A handy map outside told us that a shuttle bus bay was at the other end of the mall (near Giant supermarket). Three buses go in different directions and the one we wanted left every half hour, so we timed our stay in order to catch the shuttle bus back to the Sixth Avenue MRT station.

The first half of the ground floor is a corridor containing a pet accessories shop and a budget mini store as well as several eateries. Whole ares of the upper floors are devoted to outlets offering activities for children. Because of the time constraints, rushing to catch the bus, I missed the craft shop on the outside of the complex.

Fish
If you like fish you are in for a treat. Crab from Canada. A large eating area surrounded by fish.

A smaller kiosk has a cabinet of fish claiming to be free of antibiotics. Just the thing for those who are careful about their health.

Giant
We left the supermarket until last so that we would not be carrying around heavy items. The giant supermarket and store really is giant. I found everything from a small picture frame to clothes pegs.

If I had had an unlimited budget and no partner policing my expenditure I would have bought:
A robot vacuum cleaner, a suitcase on four revolving wheels, a cushion shaped like a cat, and a cushion shaped like a dolphin.

Photos by Angela Lansbury, copyright. All rights reserved.
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.