Personal identity fraud, sadly, is growing so it’s important that we do all that we can to protect ourselves. We have always shredded our sensitive waste documents to try to protect ourselves as best as we can. But what do you do with all that shredded waste? Many moons ago I used to work in an office who gave all of their shredded paper to a local lady who used it instead of straw for her horses stables. Now I don’t know anyone with a horse but I do have a couple of young crafters on my hands so we loved the idea of the smART attack challenge set by Fellowes. Fellowes provided us with a fandabbydozy cross-cut shredder so that we could take part in the challenge, and it was one which the children loved.
Fellowes have created some great instructional videos on craft projects with shredded paper but we chose to try something of our own design – Shredded Bowls!
To make our shredded bowls we covered two bowls in clingfilm and turned them upside down. We mixed up a solution of 2/3 PVA glue to 1/3 water and painted this over the back of the bowls and then added the shredded paper.
Once we had covered the bowls well in shredded paper, we squashed the paper as much as possible and then painted all over the shredded paper with the PVA/Water solution until it was soaked and then left them to dry overnight.
The next day we removed the bowls from inside and using scissors carefully trimmed off the excess shredded paper and clingfilm, et voila!! You could paint the bowls (on the outside) if you so wish but we liked ours just as they were.
When it comes to the shredder, I am really impressed. The idea of having a shredder in the house when you have young children can be pretty scary. Our last one was dropped when we moved out of our old house and so we have been without it ever since. Now that the children are of the age where they like to explore I was worried that they might be tempted to post a few things into the shredder themselves. There are three things about the shredder that I particularly like for this reason;
- The on/off switch is on the back of the shredder so it is unlikely that the children would know how to switch it on in the first place and once it is switched on at the back, you then have to switch it on at the front too. We keep our shredder in a room where the children aren’t allowed to go unless we are in there so they wouldn’t have access to it anyway.
- The silver strip around the mouth of the shredder is touch sensitive so if you touch it whilst feeding the paper into the shredder it will automatically stop. Just the kind of protection you want if little fingers get anywhere near it.
- The cutting blades are a long way down into the mouth of the shredder so they aren’t accessible by little fingers at all.
Other features of the shredder that I like are the ability to cut up bank cards and cds and the scale on the front of the shredder which tells you if you are inserting too many items into the shredder at one time.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent the Fellowes Shredder free of charge for the purpose of this post. All words, images and opinions are my own and may not be copied without my permission. I have not been instructed what to write.