Yes Sugru, have you heard of that? Well, it's mouldable glue and can be really useful - I've used it before to mend our barbecue handle and more recently my indoor clothes horse, but that's not what I want to share with you today. If you've not come across it, it's pretty amazing stuff it can be moulded into the shape you want and it sets over twenty-four hours and becomes hard, but retains it's flexibility.
I've been thinking about upcycling a pallet into a herb planter for a while, and then it struck me - I could make some herb planter labels. And so, as increasingly seems to be the case lately, I sketched out my ideas. This was my idea:
I've yet to acquire the right-sized pallet, but I didn't need that to get on my with labels, so I sketched those out on some old bits of card.
Inside the Sugru Create & Craft kit were four packets of glue in black, white, red and grey, a "thumb" and a brush, which looked all too similar to those dental hygiene sticks, a booklet to provide inspiration and a fab little tin to keep the essential kit, and Sugru in.
There's so many ideas in the booklet, that that can be overwhelming too. And as you can see it's not just the two items shown above that you can use to add texture to your masterpiece.
So how did I get on?
I opened the red packet and broke off a small piece.
I started by rolling the small piece into a ball to get a feel for how it might work and to see if my hands would be turning red as I went. My hands didn't, but later you'll see some of the red did come off onto the paper I put down to protect my workmat.
From the small blob I progressed to a very long sausage shape, and my plan was to drape the rolled out Sugru along the pencil lines.
It went ok, I think. It was quite tricky to follow my design. I'd tried a thin version and that proved quite tricky. I tried a fatter version in white for the Basil sign and that was a little easier to manage. Of course, if I had less fancy handwriting it would probably have been easier still. But, I like a challenge, and I like the idea of having herb labels that resemble my own writing.
I left my Sugru lettering to dry overnight and was intrigued to know how it would turn out.
It had set, and peeled off the paper easily too. I'd considered adding "hooks" as part of the design so they'd be easy to attach to the pallet, but then I remembered that this is glue after all so I'll be able to use further blobs (yes I'm using technical terms again) to attach it to my painted pallet.
So with a textured Basil label and a "Love Herbs" label I'm pretty much all set to add Thyme and perhaps Chilli to my collection. I'd considered adding Coriander, but have reconsidered that for the time being. I'm pleased with how these turned out, but I'm still looking for the small-ish pallet on my materials list. When I've found that, I'll show you them in situ.
And if you're wondering why I chose a "Love Herbs" theme, it's quite significant for me. This year we're celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary with a party in our garden. Ten years ago we had our wedding reception in our garden, and our table names were, yes, you've guessed it, herbs.
Perhaps a strange choice but they've been the stalwarts I've grown in every garden I've had, and we use them regularly in cooking. It was one of the themes we could both agree on - so it had a big plus in its favour - and it meant that we could have really pretty and natural looking table centrepieces, which were economically priced too.
Have you tried Sugru before, or are you tempted to try it for crafting or for fixing your things? Let me know, it'd be great to hear how you've used this super versatile material.
* This is a collaborative post but all views and opinions are my own.