Crafting for hoarders

I am a hoarder--something my mate does not understand. Maybe its because my grandparents were products of the Great Depression and I spent summers with my grandmother growing up. She never threw anything away that had any life at all left in it. It kills me to toss anything that might have a use somewhere down the road. I never leave old furniture on the curb--I rebuild or repurpose it and occasionally, donate it. I have fabric hoards that are almost as old as my grown kids. I don't hoard to the extent of having 300 cats and newspapers piled on every surface of my house--I recycle the newspapers and magazines (or make beads) and I'm allergic to cats. But if something might have another life as some kind of craft project, I stash it away. Thankfully, I am also something of an organizer, so the hoards don't get too far out of hand and stay in my craft room, for the most part.

This week I have found several good articles written by fellow hoarders. This is a great article from Crafting a Green World on revamping old furniture. I love these articles on ten uses for old bottle caps and wine corks. I can't stand to throw either away.

T-shirts are something else I have trouble tossing, but the average t-shirt makes me look like a badly stuffed sausage casing and the length is usually totally wrong. This article from Craft Magazine gave me some great ideas for revamping old t-shirts and adding to my yarn stash. The one lesson I learned from this is that cutting a t-shirt into a yarn strip with scissors is tiring and makes your hands hurt. I don't have a rotary cutter, but will probably buy one before I do this again. I have several t-shirts left over from my son's mountain bike racing days which I plan to make into a quilt and I can turn the left overs into yarn. I've also made other projects out of t-shirts and have the book, Generation T, which I love. Many of the designs are kind of punk, but it is chock full of ideas (108 to be exact) for repurposing and redesigning t-shirts. I saw the author, Megan Nicolay, and her sisters make a wedding dress out of 6 white cotton t-shirts on DIY's Uncommon Threads (one of my favorite shows) and it turned out really nice. Definitely worth a try, but probably more appropriate for someone who is young and thin.