I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people who saw our Access Hollywood segment last week that I thought I would dedicate a Daily Danny post to answering some of the questions.    Yes, I realize the segment we did was on “How to Have a Green Thanksgiving,” and I am fully aware of the fact that Thanksgiving has already passed, but with so many of the ideas useful for general entertaining, I thought it was worth sharing the upcycling ideas from this segment!

I think my all-time favorite kids project are these mini fruit and vegetable turkeys.     It’s really all about raiding the produce aisle at the supermarket, grabbing some long bamboo skewers, some crayons and going wild.    I used a cordless drill to insert the crayons into the potatoes, but you could also just make an opening with the blunt end of a bamboo skewer and shove them in.    The turkey feathers are just grapes on a skewer and then jabbed into a honeydew melon.    All edible on the fruit turkey!

By the way, many thanks needs to go to my co-hort in Los Angeles, the ever talented Jules Moore.    She helps me a lot on many, many shoots out West—-from Instyle to O: Magazine to this Access Hollywood shoot.   She and I were on the soundstage at 6AM getting ready for the show and she crafted the fruit turkey all herself.   Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

One of my favorite upcycling ideas is to use old paint chips, a hole punch and a 1″ hole punch cutter from Michael’s craft stores.  Just punch out the disc, punch a smaller hole at the top and tie it to the neck of a wine glass.  Use a Sharpie to write the name of the person drinking from that cup right onto the chip!   I always write “MINE!”

I like buying real Chinese tea from Pearl River Mart in New York City to drink and then save the tins to reuse them as vases.  Looks pretty colorful and festive, doesn’t it?   Sometimes the tins aren’t water tight, so it’s important to drip a candle inside to make them waterproof.

And I did these paint stirrer lanterns on The Today Show, but I thought it was clever enough to repeat on Access.   Just wrap paint stirrers around and around a round vase and tighten two pipe clamps use a flathead screwdriver around them until very, very snug.   That’s it!  

We’re going to be doing more Christmas TV segments in December, so stay tuned.     And as always, keep upcycling!

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