Perfectly Practical #26 - Cardboard Tubes

Toilet paper rolls are useless bits of cardboard that get thrown mindlessly into the recycling bin...or are they useless at all?...

A post on Organizing Junkie from last week showed how you can use them to keep your necklaces from tangling.



This is one of the ways we use them here at the Little Pink House; they are cable and charger holders.  Each one has its own tube so we can just grab the right charger whenever we need it.

Toilet rolls are always welcome in classrooms for crafts; apparently you are supposed to microwave them for 15 seconds to kill all the germs though before donating them.

Along the lines of crafting (which just breaks me out in a rash thinking about it - crafting...>shiver<) you could, if you were so inclined, make them into a holder.  Paint a few tubes, stand them on end, connect them together in some sort of cutesy fashion, and voila!  You have a handy holder for pencils, eye glasses, etc.

Speaking of crafty type stuff, check out these.  What artsy people can do never ceases to amaze me.

For a more Moppins-friendly usage, you can start your seedlings for the garden by putting slicing one edge vertically to make strips.  You then overlap the strips so that one end is closed.  Put some potting soil down in there and sow your seeds.  When it comes time to transplant the sprouts, just plant tube and all.

If you're in need of a fire starter, look no further than your loo.  The rolls make good kindling especially if they have been slathered in bacon grease or the like.

How about a cheap toy for children or rodents?  Kids come up with great uses for trash.  A toilet rolls becomes a trumpet or kazoo, a telescope, or binoculars if you have two of them, a megaphone, the possibilities here are infinite.  As for your rodents, they can crawl through the tubes or gnaw on them.

You can make your own Christmas crackers by filling the inside with a silly joke, paper hat, and cheap toy (that's what the ones in England always had in them) and put them at each place setting on Christmas day.  Here are two websites that show you how to make them 1.  Christmas Crackers USA has the clearest picture of how to do it 2.  Thrifty Fun shows the picture of how you are to open them, hand over hand so you pull one end of the person's cracker next to you.

Of course you can always recycle or compost them - which are equally practical methods of disposal.

This is part of WfMW.

Comments

  1. Great tips! The longer and/or wider tubes from paper towels, etc., are ideal for storing plastic bags that you have washed for reuse. I have them in 3 categories by size and ziptop-or-not.

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  2. That's very clever Ms. Becca! Thanks for sharing!

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