Pet hate into pet love

So last week I came out and admitted what you all knew already – I’m a crazy cat lady. What I’m not so crazy about is the unnecessary waste that pets can generate, such as Made in China toys for cats (who generally prefer playing with the newspaper you’re reading or the pen with which you’re currently trying to write), cat litter, and dog poo bags. While there are of course eco options for all of these, I came up with my own solution to upcycling an element of one of these three pet hates. Guess which one?

No, I’m not wearing a tunic made of reconstituted cat litter or makeup made from microbeads of ground up synthetic catnip mouse stuffing. This is all about the earrings, which I LOVE (if I do say so myself)…

… and which I made using the plastic cores from dog poo bags.*

(Didn’t you know? This season, diamonds are OUT. It’s all about dog poo bag cores, dahling!)

I’ve been saving these cores, which are essentially long tubes, for a while because they reminded me of beads or lengths of bamboo, but haven’t done anything with them yet (like 99% of my stash!). Then recently I spotted a woman on a train wearing long earrings with discs at the ends and inspiration struck: I’d had some disc-y earrings of my own that I’d tried reworking several times, to no avail as they just didn’t look right on me…

..but stick a dog poo bag core in between the clip-on earring and the dangly disc to make a brand new style, and suddenly compliments flood in! All I did was attach two eye pins to the discs (I had to use two joined together because I didn’t have long enough pins)…

…thread the core over the pins…

… and then attach the pin end protruding from the core to the clip-on earring, which I have tried to explain before so won’t attempt again. And that’s it, apart from taking crappy photos for this post!

Of course you could paint them too, but these particular cores were black and some people thought they were made from horn when I asked if they knew what they actually were, so if you’re lazy you can just leave them as they are. If you have pets for whom such bags are required (ie dogs or indoor cats), store these up and you’ll soon have enough for creating a new set of glamorous accessories – you can use them for necklaces or earrings or anything requiring long beads. Possibly even better than nearly free DIY accessories though, is being able to respond to compliments with “Oh, these? I made them out of the cores of dog poo bags”. 🙂

 

*Yes, I know coreless, biodegradable poo bags are available and are a much more eco-friendly choice, but I bought these ones at a cheap and nasty place when I was in a hurry. Not everyone’s perfect!