a bit o crafting

I took advantage of the quiet time tonight and was able to finish a project I started before Christmas. I bought the rice, and we're still eating it, because, well, ten pounds is a lot of rice. But after staring at the empty rice bag for a while, I knew I could turn it into something, so why not a totebag of sorts? I think it's big enough to hold a water bottle, a notebook and a library book. I lined the zipper part as well (the original opening on the bag), so I can put my drivers license and cell phone in there, not worrying about them getting lost.













My first piece of upcycled/recycled art.


I'll see how it holds up, and how crazy people think I am.

can you be too green?

Okay, so my green-ness may be getting away from me. I don't even know what posessed me to do this, it just sort of popped into my head.

I have just cut up my grandma's old living room shears and turned them into five reusable produce bags for the grocery store.

The shears were in the fabric bin already, and there was no intense emotional connection to them - it was just pretty, lightweight fabric that I figured I'd use one day. Well, today was the day.

I also weighed a plastic bag with three peaches and my fabric bag with three peaches, and the weight difference was only 0.4 ounces. It's not a huge difference at all. Even if I use all five bags in one shopping trip, it will only be a two ounce difference. Not enough to notice for me.

I wonder how many goofy looks I'll get when I go to the grocery store in two weeks? Reactions from the cashiers?

What is the Mother of Invention?

Or maybe it should be, Who Is?

Actually, I don't know who it is or what it is. All I know is that I'm too cheap to get what I really want, one of these. So, I bought a $0.99 Tazo Iced Tea, which is a treat for me these days, and I turned it into my reusable water bottle.

Reduced - yes
Reused - yes
Recycled - in the end, when it has lived it's life, yes
Repurposed - sure did

Since, in reality, it's an empty tea bottle, I don't care if it gets left behind on accident.

Not that we ever leave anything behind.

No, not us.

And, for the ultimate in Cheap Mommy Fashion, I took one of the 942 errant kids socks I have, and turned it into a koozie for my water bottle. And, since I have a few additional socks laying in a pile upstairs in my room, I could probably coordinate my bottle cover with my clothing, should I choose to.

Not bad for a $0.99 tea bottle.

Any other resourceful, repurpose it, reuse it ideas out there?

junk

So, amongst the scrap papers on my desk is the one that says "tags" "ties" and "flyers"

It's a good thing I am an expert in cryptic, because I am the only one that would understand that note.

It means: last year (2007) I saved every twist tie and plastic bag tag that came into the house. This was something very do-able - a small bowl on the counter - and on January 1, 2008 I tallied it up. The number was quite high - 71 bread type tags (the plastic flat ones) and 69 twist ties. That is 140 tags and ties that came here and eventually would have gone to the landfill, had I not put them in a ziploc bag in my pantry. It doesn't sound like that much, and it definitely doesn't look like that much, but if we are an average household, imagine that number multiplied across my street, my county, my state, and then the entire United States. Holy crap that's a lot of plastic. I have no ideas or solutions to offer - it was just something I did for a year, and am doing it again this year. The kicker is that I even reuse these things - if I open a bag of frozen peas, I grab a twistie and put it on there. There were weeks when I even made our own bread, so I'm sure our number could have been a bit higher. Interesting.

Another interesting number I came up with, and this is slightly more annoying, is the number of flyers for political candidates we received in the weeks and months leading up to the election on February 5th. I ended up with 54 flyers, a stack that was over an inch high. This is crazy. And, we're not done yet because I have started another stack of flyers that we are getting on an almost daily basis for the special election which is next Saturday, March 8th. The stack won't be as impressive this time, seeing as there are only two candidates running, but since there are two registered voters here, we get two of everything, from each candidate. You would think that they would have a mailing program that would let you do a query and eliminate duplicate addresses, or something like that.

So that's my rant about junk. It's just something to think about, or at least it's something I think about.