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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Oh, no - it's broken. What shall I do? Copy Japanese Repairs with Glittering Gold and Staples

Tunisian Trick Jugs
My first experience with packing fragile items was on a trip to Tunisia. They make wonderful trick jugs which have a lattice top half and in some cases the water flows up to the spout through a channel in the handle, around the rim at the top to the spout. How to refuse to buy one? Impossible.

I refused to buy one until the last day. I bought one. The seller offered me two more at reduced prices. I bought one.

Packing
How to pack it? Difficult. In theory a hard-sided case offers more protection.

I tried wrapping in socks and a tee shirt in the middle of the case. The smaller one inside a show survived. Another one cracked.

You can see the puzzle jugs at museums in the UK. They were once popular in pubs (taverns).

But when I went from the UK to Tunisia puzzle jugs were a novelty to me. The ones in the UK had circular holes. The ones in Tunisia were X shaped lattice, unglazed and more fragile.

Puzzle jug from the Museum of Somerset, England, UK. Picture from Wikipedia.

If you want to buy one, ebay has many at low prices, with and without lids. More on Etsy. Amazon just showed me puzzles.

If you have something broken and love it too much to part with it, you can turn the broken part or crack towards the wall.

Plant Pot
I have done this successfully with a broken blue plant pot. I have used broken crockery for plant pots and saucers in the back garden in the UK.

In Singapore saucers under plant pots are banned in cemeteries because the saucers can fill with rainwater and breed mosquitos.

Indoors, you have less problem with water.

Indoors Efforts
Again I did it the hide and seek the crack trick with a broken lamp base.

We have done invisible repairs on many items. A Balinese wood hanging.

But the Japanese have developed repairs into a fine art.

More than a thousand years ago a VIP ruler sent an item for repair. It was repaired with crude staples.

Later, another era, another ruler, another court, they stuck together broken pottery


Ceramic from Korea in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, Germany.
Photo from author Daderot in Wikipedia article on Kintsugi.

But because it was for the court, only the best would do. They added gold.

Variations on this include silver and other less expensive metals.


Repaired porcelain from the Tokyo National Museum, Japan.
wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Dish_with_hollyhock_design%2C_Nabeshima_ware%2C_Edo_period%2C_18th_century%2C_overglaze_enamel_-_Tokyo_National_Museum_-

This chip in the top is so well cone that I kept looking at the pattern on the plate and could not see the gold filling at the top until I read the caption.

The repair was made in the 1700s. If you have a beautiful item, it is worth saving.

So you need not discard a broken item. Repair it. Make the repair a feature.

Useful Websites
Information on Repairs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

Information on Puzzle Jugs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puzzle_jug

Buying Puzzle Jugs From the UK
https://www.ebay.co.uk/b/puzzle-jug

Where to see what's described:

Germany
Ethnological Museum of Berlin
Korean ceramic. Repaired dish.

Japan
Tokyo National Museum
Repaired porcelain dish from Edo era.

UK
Puzzle Jugs.
Somerset Museum, England.
Liverpool Museum, England
Puzzle Jug.

About the author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.