Making crafts out of laundry detergent lids helps keep garbage out of landfills, creates something useful and/or attractive from essentially free material and educates other people on the importance of recycling. Once clean, these deep caps, which often aren't accepted in curbside recycling, have numerous uses. Children can easily do a detergent-lid craft with a little help from an adult.
Laundry Detergent Lid Planter
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Decorate a clean detergent lid with stickers or pictures of flowers. Have an adult use a hot-glue gun glue a ribbon around the outer rim of the lid and glue a bow onto the ribbon. Fill the lid with potting soil and add a small house plant or start a flower seed.
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Ball-in-Cup Game
Find a ball that fits inside a clean laundry detergent lid. Take a 13-inch piece of yarn and glue or staple one end to the ball. Glue the other end to the bottom of the lid. Let the glue dry for 24 hours. To play the game, hold the cup and lift it sharply but carefully to try to maneuver the ball into the cup. See how many times in a row you can get the ball into the cup.
Laundry Detergent Lid Bells
Pick out several clean laundry detergent lids of varying colors. Have an adult punch one small hole in the top of each lid. Tie a jingle bell at a desired length onto a pieces of yarn or thread, then pull the yard through the hole and knot it so it won't slip through the hole. Pull an ornament hook through the knot to hang on a Christmas tree.
Pin Cushions
Tightly stuff a small piece of pretty fabric with lots of nylon net fabric or the mesh fruit and vegetable bags that come from the supermarket, squish it into a ball and sew it shut. Apply glue around the inside edge of the cap. Then push the ball -- smooth side up -- into the cap, which you can trim with small decorative items such as ribbon or stickers.
Silk Flower Arrangements
Make a very simple silk floral arrangement by tucking some floral foam into a laundry detergent lid and poking silk flowers into the foam. Make a single arrangement, use different shapes and sizes of lids to create several small flower pots or put a few together for a larger arrangement.