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.

No more CLR on my dishes!

I was lamenting in a recent post about having to use CLR on my dishes to get rid of hard water stains. Now I have found something that works just as good and is more friendly--vinegar!! Using vinegar to clean my dishes just doesn't bother me like using CLR--it just seems more natural, it's less expensive, and I always have it on hand because I use it for so many other things. I put one cup of vinegar to one quart water and soaked the dishes for five minutes, then rinsed with cold water. All the white, chalky residue was gone. I did a little searching and found a website with 1,000 more tips on using vinegar--I guess I better start buying it by the gallon!

Disposing of old prescription drugs-don't flush!

This is one of those things that I really hadn't thought about until it popped up in my reader. Don't assume that the best way to dispose of old medications is to flush them. Municipal water systems are not equipped to handle drugs in the water--a scary thought, particularly if someone was up to no good. The Office of National Drug Control Policy has issued guidelines for disposing of medications instead of flushing them. The United States Geologic Survey has additional publications on drug, hormone and other contaminants that are in our waterways.