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 | Categories: gardening | Tags: • • • | 7 Comments »