Have you ever looked at your old silverware and thought, "I wish I could find something better to do with this stuff than use it to eat food"? Well, some people have. Some people have thought about that a LOT. In fact, there are more silverware crafts projects than you can shake a stick at.
Silverware is a popular crafting item first and foremost because it is ubiquitous. This means two things: first, that everyone recognizes the objects instantly, and second, that you can get tons of them easily on the cheap. Most thrift stores have huge bins filled with unmatched silverware that you can purchase for pennies apiece.
The second thing that drives silverware crafting is that silverware, being made of metal, is relatively easy to work with. It doesn't take much heating in order to bend a spoon or a fork into a bracelet, for example. You can pretty much bend a lot of modern silverware by hand without even needing to heat it beyond warming it with your hands. Similarly, it is also pretty easy to hammer flat the dish of a spoon so that you can use it as a garden marker.
The basic tools needed for silverware crafting are also cheap and easy to obtain. You can buy a basic metal stamping kit for about $15-$20. Then you just need a hammer and a hard surface, and presto: you can stamp words or phrases into the bowl of a spoon. (They make cute garden markers.)
The wind chime is of course the traditional, maybe even canonical silverware craft. But I caution crafters to exercise judgment when making a wind chime out of silverware. Silverware wind chimes, I feel, have to be unusually beautiful. In order to compensate for the fact that most of them sound absolutely terrible.
Image courtesy Flickr/Stacie Stacie Stacie
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