EVERYTHING ELSE

As I say on my Home page, many of my collections have come about simply by hoarding items that most people would throw away. An obsession with packaging accounts for some of the collections in this section but the two on this first page, I have to admit, do defy a rational explanation - but I'll try! 

Persil have now gone back to a waisted bottle - they say it's easier to sqeeze. I have a whole trunk full of the old style. Why? Well when the Liverpool Tate first opened I saw an art installation there that consisted of hundreds of plastic items in a whole variety of colours that had been placed in a large frame on the floor. They had been arranged so that the colours gradually worked through the spectrum from one end of the frame to the other. I was impressed. Someday, I thought, I would like to create something using plastic containers. So I started saving them. I'm still waiting for inspiration!    

Washing up liquid was originally sold in cylindrical plastic containers but then waisted ones, like the one shown on the left became the norm. Persil went against the trend and produced the ones on the right, complete with thumb 'print'. I liked the design and the solid colours but I guess they were not popular because you couldn't see how much liquid was left in the bottle. They were replaced by the see-through ones show on the extreme right.

On the left is my collection of coffee jar lids! When I started taking bottles to be recycled I obviously had to take the lids off coffee jars. At the time there were no facilities for recycling plastic so I just placed them in a box with the intention of putting them to some use at a later date. As with the plastic bottles, I have yet to come up with an idea but I can't bring myself to throw them away. Nevertheless  I don't add to this collection anymore because the council now recycles plastic!