Katie's Bicycle Bling

Katie Wallace has a mission: "to re-purpose used stuff to create bespoke products. The vision is to save all bicycle waste from landfill (whoa!)."

Whoa indeed! But she's making a good start. Katie takes bits of bike chains that would end up in the trash and turns them into beautiful pieces of jewellery, like this one:

Katie explains how once a chain has worn out and stretched, they unfortunately can't be used again. The fact that they're often made up of lots of different kinds of metal, and therefore difficult to recycle, makes them an even more deserving candidate for re-purposing.

We discovered Katie's Bike last week and loved it, and when we tweeted about it it turned out our followers did too! We got in touch to tell her how awesome her project was, and crossed our fingers that she might want to try out sugru in her jewellery making.... and she did!

She said, "I was using epoxy resins to connect my bike chains to the rings and cufflinks. That stuff is horrible - it smells bad, it's toxic and it's hard to work with. As soon as I sell the rest of my pre-made epoxy pieces I'm going to use sugru for all my rings and cufflinks. I'm also planning to do some sugru enamelling, kinda like you see in the pendant, for unique accents to my designs."

We really love this red sugru enameled pendant:

We know we'll never look at a discarded, oily bike chain in the same way again. Good luck to Katie on her awesome mission!