Breathe New Life Into An Empty Glass Yogurt Jar With A Clever Upcycling Idea

When you come across someone who knows how to tie obscure and useful knots, it's like encountering the magic of ancient, arcane skills. It calls to mind one of those guys blowing glass in tourist towns, or a blacksmith hammering out a sword or something at a park's history day. (And when you get the knots and the blacksmith together, you might just end up with something like Frodo's mithril chainmail.) And all of that is fun enough, but when your knot magician uses her skill to turn something from the recycling center into an immediately cute and useful thing, you begin to suspect the truth: TikTok is somehow involved.

And so it is with TikTok gardening micro-influencer Dana Carpenter. Upcycling glass yogurt jars for storage is nothing new, but Carpenter takes some twine and a glass yogurt jar and creates an attractive hanging plant propagation container. We don't always realize that using propagation containers to decorate our homes with plants is a possibility. Creative propagation jars are a bit of a thing for Carpenter, who has made videos sticking cuttings in everything from car vents to picture frames to something that looks a lot like a disco ball. But the hanging yogurt jar looks both practical and refined, and, you know, it has some knot magic.

The trouble is that you might not have knot magic. Oh, there's no doubt any of us could watch the TikTok video a few dozen times and get the movements down. Fortunately, there's an easier way to arrive at this particular knot, and it comes from a true knot aficionado, YouTuber @KnottingKnots. He has a much simpler and easier-to-remember method for making this little twine sling in just a few moves, and then shows you how to adjust everything so it's as secure as possible.

What @KnottingKnots is doing, he tells us, is creating a four-legged barrel sling. It arrives in your craft room or kitchen via a long history of use in rigging to move various heavy things around. The sling is useful, for example, for lifting a bucket of adhesive or paint to the top of a ladder, scaffolding, or roof. There are lots of rigging knots for lifting things — choker and basket hitches, for example — but many aren't suitable for keeping a container upright, as you'd need to when lifting an open barrel. For that, you need the barrel sling or its two-legged cousin, the barrel hitch. (A two-legged version sounds unstable, but its cord encircles the barrel (or yogurt container) for support and stability. Whether you end up making the yogurt container plant propagation hanger or not, these are useful knots to know.

If you don't happen to like yogurt, that's a shame, because it closes off the La Fermiere terra cotta yogurt pot to you. The common jars from Yoplait's Oui brand of yogurt are very nice, but the La Fermiere pots take it to a new level. (By the way, you can actually use yogurt jars on eBay, because why not?) There are, of course, a zillion other possibilities for making your hanging propagation station. You can use lab flasks, cut wine or other bottles, those ubiquitous restaurant salsa containers with fluted tops, and thrifted glass of almost any sort. You could use a wine glass or snifter, though stemmed versions would prevent the cord from crossing precisely in the middle, which might cause them to hang slightly crooked.

The single pot with twine sling looks great on its own, but you can magnify the effect by adding more containers. And you don't have to support the individual containers with your sling; you could also use it to hold a rack of similar containers (think, for example, of our wood and glass propagation station). A row of similar but increasingly large containers would also look interesting, as would individually hanging containers at different heights. While you're at it, this method of hanging doesn't have to be just for propagation jars. You can also hang potted plants, of course — or why not try hanging a really large pot for effect? With a clear direction to go in, you can get a lot of mileage out of simple but forgotten skills like knot-tying and a little help from your recycling bin.