S'all good, bra

What do you ladies do with your old bras? This is an old one I've poofed up to look more appealing, but really, it's a pile of stretched out, warped, unsupportive, shoulder-chafing Lycra. I'd be embarrassed to give it to Goodwill. So naturally I poked around online to see if anyone had ideas about bra recycling. I came across the following overly-recycled, exceedingly enthusiastic recycling ideas:


1. Give it away to a secondhand store! 

Yeah, yeah. I guess there are people out there who have multitudes of semi-wearable bras and haven't thought of this option.

2. Make a bra quilt!

I'm trying to figure out the construction of this one, and I can only assume that to make a practically useful bra quilt, you'd have to use the cups only, tons of them, and and layer them together sort of like feathers (which might be prettyish, but also pretty nubbly texture-wise, I'd think). Otherwise I think you'd just end up making a regular quilt and then stitching the bras on top. Which sounds really unattractive to me, and not very cuddly. But I have small imagination for the artistic value of my old bras, I guess. Quilts and bags and purses made out of old pants, I can get behind those. Which leads me to:

3. Make a bra purse!

Look at all the bra purses on etsy! While I do think some of those are cute, they're not really my thing -- I'll take a big bag or pockets over a clutch purse anyway. Also, the above stretched-out sad bra is pretty plain; it would need a lot of doctoring up with lace and beads and other pretties before I could feel good about giving it to someone else. (Still trying to figure out how to do that. "Merry Christmas! Here's something I made for you! What's it made out of? Oh, this and that...you know me, I'm crafty!")

4. Make a sachet for your closet and dresser drawers!

This isn't a terrible idea. In fact, I might take it another way - fill the cups with peppermint oil-scent and stick the thing outside behind the chairs and grill on our patio, where I recently discovered enough piles of mouse turds to support a massive invasion force.

5. Patch your clothes!

Hrrmm. The stretchy parts of the fabric aren't great for this, because they're stretchy and meshy. Not exactly great patching material unless you're doing, I dunno, tights or nylons? (I suppose patchwork tights could be interesting, and Halloween is coming up.) The straps, ditto, also all the little clasps and underwire nonsense. The cups would be okay for patching jeans, though - and if you're a gardener or a catcher, you could have some built-in knee pads. Or you could try singlehandedly to bring shoulder pads back.

6. Make bra art!

The concept behind this is basic: you stick your old bra in a pretty frame, hang it on a wall, and make your friends and family admire it and your thrifty, craftin' style. I have no further comment on this, but instead offer my own idea:

Bra beer cozie(!)

Think about it. It's padded (or at least, the one you use for this "craft" should be) to hold in moisture! It's soft! Just cut the cups off the bra and twist them around and pretend to sew them into one big cup shape, and stick a beer in it! Genius! Cup and can size might not marry. If you can't get a perfect fit you might want to experiment with different brands of beer, or tallboys. Just stop by Victoria's Microbrews and they'll give you a free beercan fitting, no purchase necessary.

So, those aren't bad ideas, even with the exclamation points tacked on the ends. I don't think bra quilts and art are necessarily good ideas, but they're better than my automatic-trash impulse. I do think my searching ability gave out after coming across the above six ideas more than ten times -- in some cases, word for word -- in various blogs and sites, so I wonder, do you have any ideas? Let me know. I got a serious case of warped bra here.