Ok, so I have a new favorite word –  repurpose.  It’s what I have been doing the past few months.  Decluttering, separating, reusing, recycling and yes, repurposing —  anything to try to help save Mother Earth from turning into a giant trash bin.

My love for bottled scents only started when I moved here in Prague.   Before that I only liked one particular perfume by Issey Miyake.  Then some parents at school started giving me perfumes as  thank you gifts, and as they say, the rest is history.

I’ve thrown a lot of empty bottles in the past.  Yes, they are pretty but they take up space and I don’t like looking at empty ones no matter how pretty they are.  I decided to do something useful with this batch so I turned to the net for ideas.  Here’s what I found that I instantly liked and right away did myself:

Perfume bottle planters, here we are!

I love this idea as I love plants. I can’t imagine living in a house or an apartment without them. These planters are great because you can put them in the bathroom to give it that splash of life.

One thing though, opening these perfume bottles is a major task for your arms.  In my case, I needed the husband to open them.  The husband needed pliers to do the job.

On to the next repurposed project…

Shopping bags here in the Czech Republic are usually not for free.  You can bring your own or you can pay for it on top of what  you’re buying, but there are brands like Pandora that automatically gives that to you for free.  Through the years  I have accumulated quite a lot of these bags like a few pictured below:

So what to do with them?  I can’t just re-use them as gift bags without some tweaking.  Imagine handing out something to someone using these bags.  Their initial thought would be “Ohh Pandora, sweet!”  That sweetness might turn to blandness when they’d realize it’s actually something else inside.

The solution was simple.   I bought cheap rolls of stickers to decorate the bags.  Et voila,  I had gift bags for my friends who celebrated their birthdays in May!  I even had a few for friends and colleagues at work to carry the small thank you gifts I gave them for helping me survive the hardest school year I ever had to handle.

What about you? What projects are you working on to repurpose or reuse? I still have over a month of summer break to do more projects  so I would love to hear your ideas and thoughts.

xoxo