Remodel, Reuse, Recycle

Just a quick "reuse, recycle" note.

When I was doing the remodeling project at my rental house, I hated to throw away anything that might be usable again later. Yep, "Packrat" is my middle name.

One thing that got kept was a hollow door that was no longer needed. It got replaced by a wall. Not in perfect condition, and has a small chunk cut out of one side of it (it was a pocket door), but it is pretty clean and flat.

As I mentioned before, I have been working to make my craft room more usable for the many projects I always have going. The door is just small enough to fit in the room, so I got a couple of Vika Artur trestles from IKEA. I had a couple strips of leftover foam flooring, which I put on top of the trestles to help absorb vibration (I hope).


Well, flat surface in my house never stays bare for long, and this didn't even stay bare long enough for me to get a picture! But the door is under there, valiantly serving as a workbench table top, covered partly by a reused drycleaners' bag to protect it from the contact cement I'm using on my sandals.

And since I'm now buying contact cement by the gallon, I'm storing smaller quantities of it in a jar that once held Procion dye powder from Dharma (the black jar in the middle of the following picture). Gotta use them for something!


Another Recycling Note

I have been working on my jeans circle quilt a little bit at a time. At this point it is in three big pieces (safety-pinned together in these pictures), and I have sewn down most of the tie-dyed squares and batting. I have about 21 squares to go (out of 221) before I can sew the three pieces together, but now I need to stop and figure out which square fits where, since several have fallen out somewhere along the way. Good thing I have a few extras.

This is the first time I've laid the whole thing out since I started sewing down the squares, and it's huge! That's my whole seats-eight-comfortably dining room table underneath the quilt, with the two table leaves pulled a bit apart for extra length and the chair backs supporting the extra width. It didn't look quite so big upstairs on the floor of the kids' playroom.


I imagine it would go more quickly if I didn't have to clear everything off the dining room table to work on it.

Someday I'll finish this...