Having Fun With Old CDs

Here’s something I’m sure everyone has a million of that are lying around the house: lost, dejected, duds, and unusable.
But are they really unusable? I think not! I rummaged around a bit and found a plethora of really cute ideas that you can use your old CDs for. Don’t worry, I tried some out myself to make sure you won’t ruin your personal belongings in the process.


My favorite idea was bowl making. Yes, you can make bowls out of old CDs. Take a glass bowl, fairly small in size, and balance a CD on the rim, or flip it and balance it on the bottom of the bowl. Stick it in the oven on 300 Fahrenheit and bake it for 30 minutes (Put it on a cookie sheet lined with foil for precautionary measures).
It’s safe, I promise. I tried this out, and my bowls were either too big or too small, so I would recommend a bowl about 4 1/4″ across the top if it’s inside the bowl, or 3 1/2″ if you’re placing it on the back. While it’s warm, you may need to form it a little–use an oven mitt so you don’t burn your hands. It makes a cute bowl and there is no harm done to your kitchen dishes. You can also play around with different things to plug the hole in the bottom. I probably wouldn’t recommend eating out of them, but they do make cute coin/key dishes or jewelry bowls.
Here’s a video I found about making bowls out of records, also a cute idea:

Recycled CD ClockOne of the most popular ones I’ve found is making a clock with your CD. The instructions can be found here.
Playing with the attractive sides of CDs and their ability to reflect the light in colorful ways, you can sandwich the CD in between the lightbulb and the socket on strings of christmas lights. It plays with the colors on the CD and really makes a show!
You can also try using the CD as a candle holder.
Something you can do just to enhance all of your crafts is hammer the oblivion out of the CDs and use the pieces as mosaic tiles. (Just please–be careful!) I’ve heard of using this for bird baths, picture frames, garden tiles, disco balls, tables, reflective pieces for solar cookers, and quite a few others.
You can also heat the CD in small areas using a glue gun with no glue in it. It causes bubbling and other fun distortions.
My little sister was at my place when I was creating my masterpiece bowls and tried the hammer idea. She stuck the pieces in the oven to get the distortion, drilled holes in them, strung them on a chain, and now wears them as a necklace.
But if you’d rather keep it whole, try gluing a picture on the reflective side and either coloring it or leaving it the way it is and using the whole CD as a picture frame. They look pretty cool next to each other.
You can also drill holes in the CD pieces and string through crystals, wind chimes, paper birds, really anything. It becomes a cute mobile, window decoration, or wind chime.
You can even paint the pieces or the CD whole to disguise it’s previous life as an ordinary CD.
And as a more practical craft, use them as coasters, reflectors for bikes or mailboxes, wall decorations, or even a protector of your fruit trees. Birds don’t like the light, so just hang them from a string and they should stay away.
Or try using them as bud vases, setting an old CD on a glass, they can hold smaller amounts of stems.
I’m sure there are quite a few more ideas that I haven’t even heard of, so if you have some ingenious CD use idea, please, post it below and share!

4 Comments

  1. Ricky

    That’s not a CD the bowl is made of. It’s and old LP (Long Play) record album. I tried reading the directions thinkin of a CD and it didn’t make sense, so I ran the video and saw whoever it is using a record album then the directions made sense. Know what you’re talking about…ok?

  2. Hey Ricky,
    Thanks for your comments! However, you can make a bowl out of a record OR a CD. Both/either will work. In the post it does say that one is with a CD and one is with a record. Sorry if that was confusing though.

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