Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Get creative

When I was at primary school empty toilet roll tubes, along with Fairy Liquid bottles, used cotton reels and milk bottle tops, were an essential component of any craft project. With a little imagination the humble toilet roll tube could be transformed into Roman columns, binoculars, telescopes, a haunted tower; the possibilities were endless. I remember using them to make the legs of a woolly mammoth. (Semi-interesting aside: we used old newspapers as stuffing for the main body of the mammoth, and my friend Sameer stuffed his with all the Page 3 girls. The plan being that as soon as he got it home he would open it up and remove his readymade stash of boobs. Kind of like a pornographic Trojan horse. We were 11. The last I heard of Sameer he became a doctor, so it’s good to know he continued his early interest in anatomy.) Now as anyone with UC knows we go through toilet rolls like a machine gun goes through bullets. A nice plump roll of Andrex can vanish in the blink of an eye. Which means we end up with an awful lot of cardboard tubes. If you’re feeling creative, instead of just chucking them in the recycling, you could try making them into a sculpture like the one below. Who would have thought something so elegant and beautiful could be made from an old toilet roll tube. I’m inspired. I may even attempt my own, and if I do I’ll post the results here. It’s got to look better than my wonky woolly mammoth legs.