vinyl resting place

I real­ize that I’m dat­ing myself when I reveal this, a long shelf of vinyl LPs, one of sev­eral in the house. I never lis­ten to them, but I don’t know what to do with them. There’s a lot of com­mon trash in the collection–Does the world need to pre­serve the bil­lionth press­ing of an indif­fer­ent ren­di­tion of the Pachel­bel Canon? Then there’s music so bad that you can’t bear to part with it. Case in point: The Lib­er­ace Christ­mas album, in which Lee recites “The Night Before Christ­mas.” So badly done it’s a camp classic.

A few hol­i­days ago I decided on a few truly trash­able discs and recy­cled them into flow­er­pots. It’s one of those craft projects that you can find lots of instruc­tions for out on the web. While vis­it­ing John’s aunt last month I saw one of the exam­ples of my hand­i­work, with a small pot­ted poin­set­tia set inside the craft project from hell.

Here’s one of the pro­to­types here at home, hold­ing a pot­ted plant. The hole in the disc for the spin­dle makes a great lit­tle drainage open­ing. This is more of a tray than pot, but I finally worked out a way to make some­thing that had a nice pot shape to it.

I ended up using two ceramic pots as forms, a small 4-incher and a larger one, around 6 inches. I’d place the disc and smaller pot on a cookie sheet in the oven, with the hole of the disc cen­tered on the hole of the pot. The tem­per­a­ture was set at a low but vinyl-melting tem­per­a­ture, some­thing in the high 200s if I remem­ber cor­rectly. When the disc reached the melt­ing point and began to just sag, I pulled every­thing out of the oven, placed the larger pot on top of the disc, and these pressed down gen­tly. The disc would assume a nice pot shape and form some attrac­tive crin­kles in the space between the two pots. Just let the disc cool a minute and you’re ready for the next one. The fumes from melt­ing vinyl can be pretty intense, unpleas­ant, and prob­a­bly not good for you, so this isn’t a project I’d tackle in an unven­ti­lated house dur­ing the dead of win­ter. Also, remem­ber that plas­tic is flam­ma­ble! Be careful.

Last month John gifted me this USB turntable for trans­fer­ring vinyl into sound files that I might actu­ally lis­ten to. Now all I need to do in my copi­ous spare time is sort through sev­eral hun­dred discs and decide which few I want to keep, which ones I want to con­vert and recy­cle, and those that can be turned into flow­er­pots right away.

So…

  • Orig­i­nal Sargeant Pep­per first release: keep…
  • Lib­er­ace Christ­mas album: con­vert but keep (was there any ques­tion on that?)…
  • Alter­na­tive TV (a British avant-garde rock duo’s album that I bought after read­ing a glow­ing review): flow­er­pot…
  • Pierre Boulez con­duct­ing Debussy’s La Mer: con­vert and recy­cle…
  • Any­thing Barry Manilow: flow­er­pot (what was I thinking?)…

A sim­i­lar tech­nique can be used on 45s as well as 12-inchers. Here’s a lit­tle Rolling Stones candy dish, for example…

January 30 2010 11:25 am | Categories: gardening | Tags: • • •

7 Responses to “vinyl resting place”

  1. Linda on 31 Jan 2010 at 12:19 pm #

    These flow­er­pots also can be used as can­dle hold­ers. Jim gifted me with one years ago (a Hall­mark Christ­mas album, replete with the card­board album cover turned into a box). This Christ­mas it was fea­tured promi­nently on my cof­fee table with a large white pil­lar can­dle. Awesome!

  2. Frances on 01 Feb 2010 at 3:06 am #

    How inter­est­ing! Of course being a cer­tain age also, we have a whole shelf of albums, some rare and spe­cial, oth­ers trash, as you say. And many 45’s. Love this idea, but can imag­ine that smell as hor­ri­ble! I believe that were instances of acci­den­tal melt­ing back in the day. HA :-)
    Frances

  3. Pomona Belvedere on 01 Feb 2010 at 10:17 am #

    Glad to hear you are recy­cling your music prop­erly. Liberace’s Christ­mas — yes. Got to have it. Barry Manilow? I admire your brav­ery for admit­ting to it. And I’m not telling what clunk­ers live in my own music col­lec­tion. As for indif­fer­ent ren­di­tions of Pachebel’s canon in D, I know what you’re talk­ing about. The best recorded ver­sion I’ve owned was actu­ally a vinyl Amer­i­can Her­itage record­ing (remem­ber those?) I think maybe part of the prob­lem is that orches­tras get so tired of play­ing only that Pachebel.

    I can imag­ine that a pil­lar can­dle would look nice on these, but hon­estly flam­ma­ble can­dle hold­ers strike me as a real bad idea — why do we have so many of them?

    At my library they’ve made some vinyl records into lit­tle racks that hold, I believe, young adult DVDs or poetry books or some­thing. I admire the inge­nu­ity, but a part of me cringes: I was brought up in elab­o­rate reli­gious rit­u­als to pro­tect vinyl from all dirt, dust, scratches, and harm. Ves­ti­gial reflex.

  4. Country Mouse on 01 Feb 2010 at 7:09 pm #

    There is some­thing too deli­cious about the phrase “A lit­tle Rolling Stones candy dish” but I can’t quite put my (sticky) fin­ger on it. :-) A charm­ing post indeed, and an inter­est­ing topic. I was never a col­lec­tor. Books, got too many of those, but not albums. A friend sug­gests scratch­ing the hell out of one you don’t like, for that fris­son of for­bid­den pleasure.

  5. lostlandscape on 01 Feb 2010 at 10:32 pm #

    Linda, I hadn’t imag­ined these as can­dle hold­ers, but I can see it. Neat idea!

    Frances, I remem­ber leav­ing discs in the sun, only to have them warp so badly that they were unplayable. Who’d have thought I’d actu­ally be warp­ing them on purpose?

    Pomona, yes, I had the white-glove han­dling method instilled in me as well. So much so that I still find­ing myself han­dling these flow­er­pots as if they were the orig­i­nal discs–wouldn’t want to get fin­ger­prints on the grooves, after all… And yes, I remem­ber all those Amer­i­can Her­itage Soci­ety record­ings. I never had many of their press­ings, but I know my library still has dozens to hun­dreds of them, all stored securely off-site, far, far away from the turnta­bles, not quite ready to throw them out either…

    CM, I can imag­ine you will a house full of books, but I’m sure none of them are the lit­er­ary equiv­a­lent of Barry Manilow. Even with the shelves of LPs I can’t really call myself a col­lec­tor like many I knew, but it’s still a big pile of discs. Even my CDs now seem like ancient tech, the last phys­i­cal con­nec­tion between some­thing held in the hand and some­thing expe­ri­enced. How do you make a candy dish out of mp3 files?

  6. tina on 02 Feb 2010 at 8:29 pm #

    This is MOST inno­v­a­tive! I think the vinyl records will last for­ever as plant pots. Too cool. I never col­lected them myself but find them in flea mar­kets and yard sales all the time. Although, when I won a free Leonard Nimoy album as a pre-teen I was in heaven. Never can remem­ber what hap­pened to it but I’ll never for­get that album. Talk about bad music!

  7. lostlandscape on 03 Feb 2010 at 8:39 pm #

    Leonard Nimoy LPs…sounds bad alright! I trawled World­Cat and was shocked to see so much of this bad music out there. Or maybe you just had to be there in your Star Trek cos­tumes to really get into it?

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