DIY bowling set

I looked at an empty coffee-mate container one day and thought, “What a waste – surely there is something that I could do with it?” As it turns out, when you take the wrapper off, the bottle is clear. Hum. All the caps are red. It’s a nice shape. But for what??

Hummm…

Bowling pins!!

Ah-ha.

The bean didn’t have a bowling set…..so I set out to make him one. First I had to collect 10 empties. The office in one of my schools goes through at least one a week…..so they started saving them for me too. I ended up with MORE THAN ENOUGH. So, I made a set for my friend Tracy’s little boy too!

Here’s what you do…..

Save empty coffee-mate containers.

Take the wrappers off and wash them.

Now just put anything you want inside.

Some ideas I toyed with were… glitter, ribbon, feathers, colored sand, colored rice, uncooked pasta, pennies, bells. Or I thought maybe I could swirl paint in each one and make all 10 of them a different color scheme. Then, I thought about getting stickers or decals and putting numbers on them from 1-10.

All great ideas, but.. my kids LOVE peeling stickers off, so those numbers wouldn’t last long. And, I feared that any small or messy thing (sand, rice, pennies, glitter…) that I put inside would just come right back out as soon as they figured out they could open the bottles! Unless I glued all the lids on. Which could pretty easily be done.

So, what I ended up doing was ….printing pictures of family members. I decided each pin would represent one family member. I first cut a piece of paper to fit inside each pin. Then I glued the pictures to it before rolling it up and sticking it inside.

I think they turned out pretty cute.

And I got to re-purpose 20 plastic bottles!

How very green. 🙂