Waste From Weaving

As anyone who knows me or has read this blog will know, I hate waste.  There is always something you can do with leftover pieces of whatever project you are working on.  Food scraps go to animals or compost.

But the short bits called thrums that are left on your loom when you have finished weaving and cut your project out, what can be done with them?

They're not short enough for me to be comfortable with just discarding, even into the compost bin.  But they're not really long enough to do much with.  I had been keeping them in a bag and using the odd strand as a marker in my knitting or to tie up the tomatoes but the volume was distracting and I needed to find a better use for them.

I was reading one of the books I got with my loom.  It had a section on the thrums in it where they recommended re carding and re spinning your thrums.  What a wonderful idea!

It's not exactly easy to pull apart the ply and card these threads.  It is a very long and slow process and one best suited to several days with nothing better to do. The resulting thread is uneven but very pretty. Hopefully it will make for a lovely rustic project at some stage.

I did kind of like the way the carded thrums looked on the combs though (this process did not work in the drum carder by any stretch of the imagination).  So I decided to try out how it would come out felted. Previously I had tried just laying down some loose thrum threads on some carded wool for felting.+

Both of these have become cat beds, just as pieces of felted wool. While they reduce the amount of time my cat spends dominating whatever project I'm working on, he still needs to sit or sleep on every woollen thing we have.

Vertical Gardening

A while back I wrote about my grey water garden.  It has gone through several incarnations, I think since Hubby got involved each has become less successful than the last, but we will get there.  Along the edge there was a cut or slipped wall of earth.  It looked dreadful, but was a fairly good spot for a garden.  It faced North and East, was sheltered from the South and West and was near where the grey water came out.

I came up with the idea of building a stepped retaining wall type thing along there with tyres.  Inside the tyres I would grow veges.  It would be a great place to move some of the strawberries that were threatening to take over every available spot in my other vege garden.  I would also fill some of these tyres with the large amount of stones we have and make them into steps leading down to this area.

Hubby couldn’t ‘see’ it.  I drew a picture, he kind of got it, but not really.  He’d brought most of the tyres he’d found up to a spot very close to where I wanted to do it, so I just started to do it.  I’ve spent months on and off, working at it.  I’ve filled tyres and gaps beneath the tyres with weeds, lawn clippings, pig and chook poo - every organic scrap you can think of.

 

 

I didn’t realise just how many stones are needed to fill a tyre.  That’s been quite a mission.  It took a few tyres before I realised that I really needed to make sure I also filled the rims of the tyres.  It can be quite disconcerting to have them move under you when you step up or down.  It got to the stage where anyone going down the paddocks would pick up an armload of rocks and stones on their way back up to toss into the tyres.

We opened up a new patch for the pigs and for some reason they dug this bit over - something they hadn’t done anywhere else.  This gave us plenty of easily accessible rocks and stones, but also a great patch to plant spuds.

 

The tyres I hadn’t used yet - although I haven’t finished building my wall - were getting to be a nuisance, so I made three ‘pyramids’ from some of them.  A 3 x 3 square on the bottom, 2 x 2 on the next layer and one in the middle on the top.  I filled these with pig poo and the fallen oak leaves from their paddock and threw a handful of pumpkin seed in each tyre.  In one I used watermelon seed.  Only two plants have come up in that one, but (I’m guessing through the pig poo) we have a couple of tomato plants popping up there too.  They’ve been simple but effective.  The pumpkin plants have been doing reasonably well, we have more than we expected so Hubby is keen to start more. 

 

He pointed out that (when we buy it) a bag of pig nuts is between $25 and $30.  This seed has cost us nothing as it came from last year’s pumpkins and the pigs love pumpkin.  The cattle will also eat it.

He also now loves the tyre wall and is helping me to work on it.  I noticed that I keep getting big healthy grass and weeds come up along the front at the bottom.  They can be quite a challenge to pull out and they drop seed all through my tyres.  So I decided we needed a path in front of the tyres.  We’d found plenty of weed-matting in all the crap piles and sheds and there was probably a couple of trailer loads worth of small rounded stones in a paddock.  I found that quite by accident - it was overgrown with sorrel and grass.

The hard thing about that is the soil we’re digging up for the path.  It’s clay with a disproportionate amount of stones.  It’s taken at least 6 hours so far to get about 4 metres along.  First it needs loosening with a pickaxe/grubber type tool.  Then I’m screening what we’ve dug.  The soil and small stones are going into tyres for veges, the weeds are going into a compost drum and the bigger stones are going into step tyres.

 

Pumpkin Pyramid

All the organic material that has been going in is settling too.  It’s an ongoing thing to top up the tyres with fresh soil and compost and try to keep them going.  I don’t think this is a project that will be finished any time in the near future, but we’ll get there eventually.

Although chances are, by the time it’s nearly finished, Hubby will have a new grand scheme and want to pull it all down and start again!

One Man's Trash ...

One big bonus with our little block (that at the same time seems to be a huge pain in the proverbial) is the amount of well, crap that was left lying around.

We’ve cleared sheds that were chock full of “other people’s treasures” and found more and more just lying around the place.
 

Hubby gets on a big neat binge every now and then and goes through it all, sorting and tidying while trying to be hard and throw away what isn’t going to maybe be useful someday.  We’ve found leftover rolls of chicken wire - mostly in 2 metre lengths that did get used in the chook run after I spent a painful and painstaking day tying all the bits together.  Bits of sheep-fencing mesh, one I found when it blew against a fence from Gods know where and my darling heifer Brownie got her head stuck through it.  Poor girl, I guess we were both lucky that she is so tame and didn’t panic when I was untangling her head and horns from three or four layers of fencing.

Some of the irrigation hosing (as far as we can tell it’s been partially set up but never used) has been useful, some of it has perished or been damaged by animals.  There are jets and sprayers and bits of every imaginable type and level of usefulness.

Pipes, tanks, tubs and hoses galore.  Enough corrugated iron to build a chookhouse and to go around the pigs.

And tyres.  So many tyres.  Every so often, Hubby gathers up more from the various spots we’ve found them.  I would have assumed that there was a huge silage pile at some stage, if only they’d all been remotely near each other.

We try to make use of these bits as much as we can.  We don’t have a lot of spare income and we do have a lot of grand ideas.  Being resourceful with this stuff is also part of our self-sufficient philosophy.  Why buy stuff new if we can make the old stuff work for a while?  Although the gates held shut with baling twine are a very temporary measure - especially since we’ve found the steers figured out which bit to pull on to open the gate!  Might have to go to proper knots rather than slip knots for a while.

Hubby also started to bring home pallets from work for firewood.  Every so often he’ll spend a day with the skill saw cutting up pallets and filling the woodshed.  It only takes a day or two to fill our small wood shed.  Although, with the storm a few months back, we have probably enough macrocarpa drying for at least one winter.

The pallets have turned out to be useful in so many other ways too.  I know there are plenty of sustainable living websites that show ways to make furniture out of them, but we’ve used them for pig fencing, building compost bins and some are being pulled to bits to make a bench seat around the deck.

For me it is a point of pride to be making useful stuff around here out of what would otherwise be rubbish.  I love that we didn’t need to buy a single thing to be able to build two chookhouses.  The only purchases for the farrowing shed were the electrical components.  We still have a number of projects in mind and the first place we look is at the crap pile!

Crafty Ideas for Recycling People

Most of us end up with a drawer filled with a million plastic bags. From supermarkets, department stores, even the corner dairy.  Some get used to line rubbish bins but most end up going into the rubbish or recycling.

Except they don’t seem to recycle them anymore.  I learned that in Christchurch anyway, while you can feel good about putting your plastic bags in the recycling bin, at the recycling centre they put them into the landfill.  There just isn’t anyone who will or can take them and make them into something else.

So I sat and thought what could I do with them?

I found a few ideas for “plarn” (plastic yarn) online, it was a big thing a few years ago but for the most part, it seems to be out of fashion to make or do anything with them now.  I find this rather sad as the problems they cause haven’t gone away just the interest in doing anything about it.

I started by making drink coasters.  They’re simple and easy.

Firstly, lay your bag straight and flat.

Trim away the handles and the bottom.

Cut the bag into 1cm (approx 1/2”) strips.

Join the strips together by looping them through each other.

You have plarn.  Now you’re ready to crochet.  I usually use either a 5mm or 6mm hook for this.

Abbreviations: ch - chain, sl st - slip stitch, sc - single crochet, st - stitch.

Foundation: ch 4, sl st into 1st ch to form a ring.  Sc 6 times into the ring while carrying the tail.  Slip a stitch marker into the last st of the round.  Cut the carried tail flush.

Round 1-2: Sc 2 times into each st. (24)

Round 3: *Sc 2 times into the next st, sc into next st.  Repeat from * around. (36)

Round 4: Sc into all sts in round.

Round 5: *Sc 2 times into next st, sc into each of the next 2 sts.  Repeat from * around. (48)

I usually find that somewhere in the last round I run out of plarn, so I sl st as far as I can and then weave the remaining tail in.

Press flat with a cool iron through a tea towel.

The colours sometimes come out a little differently to what you’d expect when you pick up a plastic bag.  The red warehouse bags crochet up to a rose pink for example.  Almost clear bags tend to become white. 

If you wanted to make placemats in the same style or pot stands, just keep going in the same manner - after every three increase rounds, work a straight sc round until you’ve reached the size you want.  Or you could cut wider strips and make it thicker. To turn it into a basket, use this for the base, and then stop increasing, work sc rounds until you reach your desired height - or like the tote bag I made, you could change at that point to trebles.

I haven’t had any issues with the plastic melting unless a lot of direct heat is applied in one spot.  Mind you, I haven’t tried sitting a pot straight from the stove on one of these either.

 

Some printing on bags wears off easily - Farmers bags for example, I wouldn’t recommend using them for this kind of thing (there are other uses however).  Which is a shame as it’s such a pretty purple.  The black printing on Pak’n’Save bags stays put though.