Lately, we’ve been hearing the phrase “pick a lane and stay in it!” Sound advice in theory and yet, challenging in practice. Even so, we’ve been mapping this metaphor to our life wherever possible. For example, our website, a previous one-lane road to building relationship, has expanded into a multi-lane highway for everything from building a family heritage site to libraries and book publishing.
We won’t lie, there’s been some lane shifting, but it’s all for a good cause. For this month (at least) we have returned to the slow lane and thought we’d share yet another up-cycle project—and what project is more apropos than turning an old license plate into a useful catchall.
While there are certainly other ideas for using retired license plates, this project was a perfect way for us to work together and create something from our own, shared imagination. In this post we celebrate “a license to repurpose.”
For this project we used common tools:
Utility Scissors
Utility Knife (box cutter)
Needle Nose Pliers
Lineman’s Pliers
Ruler
Sharpie Pen
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First, on the back of the plate, we marked out cutting lines ¼” from the top edges and 2 1/8” from the side edges on both sides.
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We cut the lines using the utility scissors.
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Using a piece of stiff metal (we used a second license plate, but a metal ruler would work as well), we scored the area between the two cuts on each edge.
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We bent each of the sides inward.
We used our hands (with gloves) and we also used the lineman’s pliers.
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We then bent the ends over and crimped them down tightly with the lineman’s pliers.
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Not only do we have a useful little tray for organizing items, but we also have a regular reminder of the power and importance of lane staying.