Creativity: Unsafety pins in Sevenoaks

NOT CONTENT with the indignities heaped upon Yorkshire terriers the week before, several readers re-used them in creative conjunction with safety pins. Kerry Wiggs glued her safety pin to a terrier to create a stylish brooch; Andrea Johnson used hers as a clothes hanger for a puppy's garments; and Andrew Middleton pinned his terriers together to clean a large floor, writes William Hartston.

Joanne Doughty, however, finds your suggestions for Yorkshire terriers cruel and hurtful. 'The use for Yorkshire terriers is as a pet,' she maintains, going on to suggest some cruel and hurtful things to do with the Creativity column. So no more Yorkshire terriers, please. Except this additional idea from Andrew Middleton, who uses his safety pins to link together several odd socks to be hung from Canary Wharf with a roof made of empty toothpaste tubes. As ballast, he uses Irish potatoes, and the whole thing becomes a secure shelter for London's homeless rodents, security provided by the use of Yorkies as guard dogs and vacancies advertised with used light bulbs in the socks.

Michael McGinn proposes attaching safety pins to everything you possess in order to locate them, when lost, with a metal detector. He also points out how useful safety pins are for storing safety pins.

Isobel Montgomery Campbell wrote to us twice, developing and expanding on ways to be cruel to nose-pickers and lemmings. She could have saved postage by pinning her letters together. Which is exactly what Lindsay Warden did with her two pages of suggestions including a car aerial for a Dinky toy, an escargot extractor and an economic aid, to be used for pinning the green shoots of recovery above ground before they retract again.

Several readers suggested opening the safety pin to create an unsafety pin, or offering them to Group 4 as locks or handcuff fasteners. Chain mail for leprechauns (Wally Reynolds) and a jousting lance for small mammals (Rhodri Edwards) were two equally practical suggestions. Mollie Caird suggested that a number linked together would make an excellent chain of office for the mayor of a rate-capped council. G Grant, however, has sent us a cutting from the Sevenoaks Chronicle which points out that nappy pins are essential for holding the mayoral chain in place anyway.

The best suggestion of the week came from Paul Copeland who has used an open safety pin, a cork and a piece of cotton wool to create a hairdresser's chair and drying helmet for minuscule people. We omit his use of the safety pin to make an aboriginal wind instrument with a piece of cord and a Yorkshire terrier for fear of what Joanne would do with the paper if we printed it.

This week's object, by popular request, is the cardboard inside of a roll of lavatory paper. Send your ideas to Creativity, The Independent, 40 City Road, London EC1Y 2DB.