Upcycling

This is like, one of my favorite hobbies now. It's absurdly fun. BTW you can absolutely make a business out of any of the more involved upcycles. 6/23/23 Reorganized to put the recommended resources at the bottom of the page since that list just keeps growing

General Listing

• Upcycling Miscellany
• Upcycling Basketry Materials
• Upcycling Glass
• Upcycling Ceramics
• Upcycling Compostables and Food
• Upcycling Fibers
• Upcycling Metals
• Upcycling Paper and Cardboard
• Upcycling Plastic
• Upcycling Wood and Bamboo

Recommended Resources

• Flickr Search for "upcycled." Added 2/9/24
• Dumpaday Genius Ideas Section Added 6/23/23 Starting from the oldest entries, page 47
• Family Handyman search for Reuse Added 6/23/23 Surprisingly informative, though there are admittedly some sketchy ideas
• Jessica Lawshe on Ranker You might need to scroll down some to find the upcycling stuff posted
• The Secret Yumiverse at WonderHowTo Kind of mind-boggling.
• Sustain My Craft Habit A fun blog from Canada, containing nifty stuff
• Am now transferring items from Recycling Insanity section over here piece by piece via duplication so anyone who bookmarked the page won't look at it and go "where did everything go?" so this is going to get a little bit redundant. But hopefully better organized.
• Moms and Crafters Recycled Crafts Section
• Happy Hooligans More of a focus on arts and crafts for kids, but these are interesting enough for anyone of any age really
• Creative Jewish Mom Recycling Crafts Section
• Tip Junkie All Crafts Section
• DIY n Crafts Repurposing Section
• Instructables
• One Crazy House
• The Krazy Coupon Lady Tips At Home
• Sunshiine on Instructables A wide variety of ingenious upcycles and DIYs here
• Jessyratfink on Instructables Generally reliable tutorials be they for upcycling, food, or anything else.
• Hometalk Added 7/9/24. Link takes you to "drink can" search results, but you can search for any kind of stuff you'd otherwise throw out and find a wide assortment of stuff you could do with it instead.
• Gardening By The Yard TV series
• Don't Throw It Out! by Lori Baird and the editors at Yankee Magazine
• The Tightwad Gazette I and II by Amy Dacyzyn
• Back To Basics by Abigail Gehring
• Woodland Craft Handbook by Ben Law
• The Complete Practical Book of Country Crafts by Jack Hill
• Country Crafts Today by J.E. Manners
• The Joy of Cooking, almost any edition
• Craigslist See the "free" section. When you can't think of anything to do with something you'd otherwise throw out, put it on the curb, list it on Craigslist's free section, and it will probably disappear.

These suggestions come from a variety of sources. Figuring out who came up with what, and when, and who did it first is such a tangled knot of annoyance that copyright law can just go fuck itself on this one. However, if you would like to try to make this for-profit and copyright some idea or other such as "you can't reuse tin cans without paying me a royalty" after all the work many many people (and I) have put into it, then uh, that be bad karma. For some of these, I don't remember the source and for that I apologize. Ironically, I remember that a lot of these ideas which are now being copyrighted on various sites, including some of these, originally came from memes of unknown origin. Or, in particular, Instructables. You know? If you know you know.

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