I realize that I’m dating myself when I reveal this, a long shelf of vinyl LPs, one of several in the house. I never listen to them, but I don’t know what to do with them. There’s a lot of common trash in the collection–Does the world need to preserve the billionth pressing of an indifferent rendition of the Pachelbel Canon? Then there’s music so bad that you can’t bear to part with it. Case in point: The Liberace Christmas album, in which Lee recites “The Night Before Christmas.” So badly done it’s a camp classic.
A few holidays ago I decided on a few truly trashable discs and recycled them into flowerpots. It’s one of those craft projects that you can find lots of instructions for out on the web. While visiting John’s aunt last month I saw one of the examples of my handiwork, with a small potted poinsettia set inside the craft project from hell.
Here’s one of the prototypes here at home, holding a potted plant. The hole in the disc for the spindle makes a great little drainage opening. This is more of a tray than pot, but I finally worked out a way to make something that had a nice pot shape to it.
I ended up using two ceramic pots as forms, a small 4-incher and a larger one, around 6 inches. I’d place the disc and smaller pot on a cookie sheet in the oven, with the hole of the disc centered on the hole of the pot. The temperature was set at a low but vinyl-melting temperature, something in the high 200s if I remember correctly. When the disc reached the melting point and began to just sag, I pulled everything out of the oven, placed the larger pot on top of the disc, and these pressed down gently. The disc would assume a nice pot shape and form some attractive crinkles in the space between the two pots. Just let the disc cool a minute and you’re ready for the next one. The fumes from melting vinyl can be pretty intense, unpleasant, and probably not good for you, so this isn’t a project I’d tackle in an unventilated house during the dead of winter. Also, remember that plastic is flammable! Be careful.
Last month John gifted me this USB turntable for transferring vinyl into sound files that I might actually listen to. Now all I need to do in my copious spare time is sort through several hundred discs and decide which few I want to keep, which ones I want to convert and recycle, and those that can be turned into flowerpots right away.
So…
- Original Sargeant Pepper first release: keep…
- Liberace Christmas album: convert but keep (was there any question on that?)…
- Alternative TV (a British avant-garde rock duo’s album that I bought after reading a glowing review): flowerpot…
- Pierre Boulez conducting Debussy’s La Mer: convert and recycle…
- Anything Barry Manilow: flowerpot (what was I thinking?)…
A similar technique can be used on 45s as well as 12-inchers. Here’s a little Rolling Stones candy dish, for example…
These flowerpots also can be used as candle holders. Jim gifted me with one years ago (a Hallmark Christmas album, replete with the cardboard album cover turned into a box). This Christmas it was featured prominently on my coffee table with a large white pillar candle. Awesome!
How interesting! Of course being a certain age also, we have a whole shelf of albums, some rare and special, others trash, as you say. And many 45’s. Love this idea, but can imagine that smell as horrible! I believe that were instances of accidental melting back in the day. HA 🙂
Frances
Glad to hear you are recycling your music properly. Liberace’s Christmas – yes. Got to have it. Barry Manilow? I admire your bravery for admitting to it. And I’m not telling what clunkers live in my own music collection. As for indifferent renditions of Pachebel’s canon in D, I know what you’re talking about. The best recorded version I’ve owned was actually a vinyl American Heritage recording (remember those?) I think maybe part of the problem is that orchestras get so tired of playing only that Pachebel.
I can imagine that a pillar candle would look nice on these, but honestly flammable candle holders strike me as a real bad idea – why do we have so many of them?
At my library they’ve made some vinyl records into little racks that hold, I believe, young adult DVDs or poetry books or something. I admire the ingenuity, but a part of me cringes: I was brought up in elaborate religious rituals to protect vinyl from all dirt, dust, scratches, and harm. Vestigial reflex.
There is something too delicious about the phrase “A little Rolling Stones candy dish” but I can’t quite put my (sticky) finger on it. 🙂 A charming post indeed, and an interesting topic. I was never a collector. Books, got too many of those, but not albums. A friend suggests scratching the hell out of one you don’t like, for that frisson of forbidden pleasure.
Linda, I hadn’t imagined these as candle holders, but I can see it. Neat idea!
Frances, I remember leaving discs in the sun, only to have them warp so badly that they were unplayable. Who’d have thought I’d actually be warping them on purpose?
Pomona, yes, I had the white-glove handling method instilled in me as well. So much so that I still finding myself handling these flowerpots as if they were the original discs–wouldn’t want to get fingerprints on the grooves, after all… And yes, I remember all those American Heritage Society recordings. I never had many of their pressings, but I know my library still has dozens to hundreds of them, all stored securely off-site, far, far away from the turntables, not quite ready to throw them out either…
CM, I can imagine you will a house full of books, but I’m sure none of them are the literary equivalent of Barry Manilow. Even with the shelves of LPs I can’t really call myself a collector like many I knew, but it’s still a big pile of discs. Even my CDs now seem like ancient tech, the last physical connection between something held in the hand and something experienced. How do you make a candy dish out of mp3 files?
This is MOST innovative! I think the vinyl records will last forever as plant pots. Too cool. I never collected them myself but find them in flea markets and yard sales all the time. Although, when I won a free Leonard Nimoy album as a pre-teen I was in heaven. Never can remember what happened to it but I’ll never forget that album. Talk about bad music!
Leonard Nimoy LPs…sounds bad alright! I trawled WorldCat and was shocked to see so much of this bad music out there. Or maybe you just had to be there in your Star Trek costumes to really get into it?