Earth Day

While I knew that Earth Day was today it didn’t really hit me to do something about it until Google automatically took me to a search of Earth Day. (Could have also been my possessed computer clicking at random as it does.) Every day is Earth Day for me, sometimes by choice and sometimes by necessity. At $3.50 a bag for garbage collection I’m inclined to do as much recycling and reusing as I can.

Today starts the Easter weekend holiday so I my daughter will be home soon from college – I posed the question to her – what should we do for earth day? “Aren’t you supposed to plant a tree?” It’s too rainy to dig a hole today so I decided to save a tree. Feeling the “need” for a new purse lately I decided to spin yarn from newspaper to knit one. Spinning paper has been a “to do challenge” in my mind for some time now so why not today? I should be able to knit up a nice handbag from my yarn – and then I can figure out how to keep the ink from rubbing on to my clothes.

On with the yarn! I picked out a few of the most colorful pages from yesterday’s newspaper and cut a few strips to try. Too heavy! And the join that I usually used to connect my plastic bag strips was making impossible lumps in the newspaper. The yarn was stiff and clumpy and wouldn’t feed onto my bobbin. I cut strips about half the width and joined them end to end with a spot of glue. While it made for a nicer yarn I still had to manually wind it onto my bobbin. Still, I feel success!

A word of caution: bunnies love tearing up newspaper so keep your eyes peeled for rabbits lurking around corners ready to make shreds of your hard work.

Fair Trade

These days when I hear “Fair Trade” I usually think of coffee.  Fair trade, which is intended to support decent wages and higher social standards, includes many other goods including handcrafts, cocoa, chocolate, tea and other items. 

When I was young a fair trade meant that my brother gave me what I considered to be the right amount of marbles for a handful of Jujubes.  With that definition in mind, this is my fair trade.  Every week a friend drives to my workplace, drops off the Sunday paper and picks up the coupon packets from my paper.  She is heavily into couponing and needs 4 sets of coupons for the best discounts.  I’m thrilled because I don’t have to concern myself with running out of newspaper for my bunnies’ litter boxes.  I ran out once and had to use wood shavings – it was awful.  As a bonus, the newspaper comes in plastic that’s used to protect it in the rain, which these days seems to be every day.  Sometimes the plastic from Sunday's paper is printed with advertisements and I’ve been waiting to have enough to spin some into yarn.  Here’s a pic of the yarn that I spun from the printed plastic.  What I learned while spinning was to avoid doing it on a hot, muggy day.  I had a dickens of a time getting the plastic to feed through the spinning wheel’s orifice and most of the time had to wind it on the bobbin manually.

 To see more of my plastic yarn and some of the items I made from it, here's a link to the yarn section of my Etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/Kruser?section_id=5414269