Knitting Night

So Yvonne came over for one night last week for a knitting night...
 

She was working on a washcloth...

...which suspiciously began to resemble...

...the beginnings of a bikini top!

Uh, or bottom...  haha!

Zero Waste?

So Yvonne calls me on Friday to tell me about this article she read in the January edition of Sunset magazine - lucky for me, the article is also online: http://www.sunset.com/home/natural-home/zero-waste-home-0111-00418000069984/.  This family strives to have zero waste. Yvonne was inspired to try some of Béa's ideas and was pretty sure I'd be into it too.  She was right.

This (French-born) lady who lives in California with her husband and two young boys, takes glass jars to the grocery store to put her deli cheese and meats from the meat counter into and brings a pillowcase to the baker to put her loaves of bread in so as to not end up with plastics at home to dispose of. Brilliant!

Yvonne and I are all set to sew up some cloth sacks for our bulk foods and to bring containers for deli food and to scope out sources of bulk shampoo, other soaps, and various other things. A key to making this work obviously, is to prepare foods "from the bottom up" rather than getting pre-processed foods. I already do this mostly but clearly there is opportunity to do more.

This is sort of exciting! I've been looking for some sort of idea I could become passionate about... well, other than knitting that is. It has occurred to me that knitting could really be my stress reliever and not necessarily a "passion".

Uh, on second thought, probably everyone who knows me would disagree with that assessment given the fact that I do manage to work it into a lot of conversations...  :)

So after spending some time reading The Zero Waste Home Blog at http://www.zerowastehome.blogspot.com/ and following links that led to other links and getting really inspired to declutter and try to impersonate a "minimalist", I am ready to tackle a couple of things.

1.  Make cloth sacks for bulk foods and produce. Put them into trunk of the car along with reusable grocery bags I now consistently remember to use.

2. Try to avoid buying things in waxed cardboard cartons. Since these items are not supposed to be recycled with regular cardboard, I'm not sure about any alternatives other than the garbage. I suppose they could be burned... but we live in a "no-burn zone". For much of the year anyway. Too much opportunity to start a forest fire.  So my first step will be to make our own almond milk. We've been avoiding dairy as a family for quite a while now since we discovered Aidan's chronic sinus infections and sniffly nose cleared up when we quit using milk. And that discovery was sort of by accident - when he was about six, we were at a health food store and he got really excited to see boxes of soy milk. "That's milk like in Bucharest!" Not really, but in Romania they vacuum seal regular milk in those types of cartons for shelf stability and he remembered that so wanted to try this kind. Within a couple of weeks all his sinus problems had cleared up so we made that deductive leap... which has been confirmed a couple of times over the years when he gets to using too much dairy.

3.  Make my own glass cleaner and store it in a glass jar/bottle until my current bottle of Windex runs out and hope it works just as well. I know better than to wait until the current supply is gone because then it will just be a big deal and hard to work in.

We'll just see how all this works out... haha.