{Guest Post} Second to None

Hello All,

How was your New Year celebration. Let's start this year with a Guest Post from a wonderful person who is doing her best to spread the idea of recycle and reuse.I would like to talk less and hand over to her.

Please welcome Anu Gummaraju of Second to None.

Hi everyone! I’m so pleased to be doing a guest post on Swati's blog. Thank you, Swati, for inviting me! I Love to Craft! is a lovely blog that talks about hand crafted beauty, which is very close to my heart. I think every single one of us has a 'craft'y hand, and there comes a time when we simply itch to create something from scratch. My guest post will talk about creating, in a go-green way.  

Of late, my interest has been to personally practice and to encourage recycling and reuse at home and outside of it. Two friends, Reena and Shilpa, and myself started a group in Bangalore called Second to None to share and exchange ideas about reuse and to create an environment where people can buy and sell used goods. We came up with two concepts, an online space where members could interact and a physical space where people could come to buy and sell. 

The online space is our Facebook group, in which members post ideas about recycling, share photographs of their recycled craft projects and inspire others, or post things that they want to buy or sell. The physical space is our flea markets, which happen once in 2 months at Jaaga. Here, people bring used goods, vintage articles, and quite an assortment of things to sell (only pre-used or new-but-not-used for some reason), making it a fun flea market experience for both buyers and visitors. It not only finds buyers for things which can be reused instead of being discarded, it also gives visitors ideas on how they can practice reuse in their own homes. The flea markets also support entrepreneurs who make new products with recycled materials and set examples for how this can be a profitable business model.  

It has been a fabulous 6 months since we started and the number of ideas around reuse that members share every day and the number of sales and exchanges that have happened in the group is exhilarating. A large number of reuse ideas that I have seen people sharing have to do with crafting. Turning mundane objects into pieces of art or into functional objects requires crafting and in this post, I'm sharing a reuse idea which is incredibly simple and satisfies that crafty itch I was talking about!

Too often, we discard things that have a much, much longer shelf life and add to tons of garbage. If we stop and do a little out-of-the-box thinking about how to reuse some of the things we throw away every single day, we would surprise ourselves! Take the innocuous looking cardboard tube, for instance. The kind that has tissue or aluminum foil wrapped around it. 

How often have we chucked the cardboard tube away after using up all the paper? Too often, in my case :). Until I stumbled on a crafter Maya, who shares some amazing reuse craft ideas. This one is so simple, you wonder why you didn't think of it yourself!

Dinner table napkin rings made from cardboard tubes and left over pieces of gift wrap paper. 

To make these, just measure and mark the tubes at the width that you would like your napkin rings to be. 1 inch or an inch and a half is good. Cut with a sharp, serrated knife or a mini saw. Trim the edges neatly with a sharp pair of scissors and glue on gift wrap, which has been cut to size. Fevicol for slightly thick paper or even a glue stick for thin paper is all you need. 

You can try variations with similar colours but different patterns, a plain coloured band with a thinner strip of colour running down the middle, the options are endless. Silk cloth will do wonders as well! And the best part about these, completely inexpensive and you have a range of them at home to impress any dinner guest :). 

I hope you liked this enough to try it yourself! Happy crafting!

Thanks for the wonderful post Anu.

Hope you have liked this, please visit Second to None and show some love.

-Swathi