Recycle more than plastic bags at the grocery store

So, awhile ago I was dropping off my plastic bag recycling, I noticed a sign attached to the bin telling me that I could be recycling much more than just the plastic bags I normally drop off. Now, secretly I have been adding things like the huge amount of plastic around big cubes of toilet paper and stuff like that for years, but now I know for sure that it is actually ok.

Curious, I did a quick internet search and found these guidelines, courtesy of plasticbagrecycling.org. In addition to plastic grocery bags, you can also include:

• newspaper bags
• dry cleaning bags
• bread bags
• produce bags
• toilet paper, napkin, and paper towel wraps
• furniture wrap
• electronic wrap
• plastic retail bags (hard plastic and string handles removed)
• grocery bags
• zip lock bags (remove zipper/hard bits)
• cereal box liners
• Tyvek (no glue, labels, other material) This is the rip-proof stuff USPS makes their Priority Mail bags from.
• diaper wrap (packaging)
• plastic shipping envelopes (remove labels)
• case wrap (e.g., snacks, water bottles)
• Bags with sealed air for packaging (like the ones Amazon.com uses, but pop them first)
• All clean, dry bags labeled #2 or #4

The site also includes things that aren't recyclable this way:

• NO food or cling wrap
• NO prepackaged food bags including frozen food bags (e.g., prewashed salad bags)
• NO film that has been painted or has excessive glue
• NO other bags or films
• NO bio-based or compostable plastic bags (e.g. Saver's bags are now biodegradable and therefore not recyclable)

On a different site, I also found the following are not recyclable:

• Chip bags
• Bubble wrap
• Window plastic
• Swimming pool covers
• Plastic bread tags
• Bacon packages
• Cheese slices & outer wrap
• Pasta packages (crinkly plastic)
• Chocolate bar & candy wrappers

It seems like the guidelines vary quite a bit from city to city, though. For instance, some cities say the following are ok, some say they are not:

• Soil, sand, peat moss & fertilizer bags
• Washed frozen vegetable bags, french fry bags, etc.
• Downy pouches - rinsed
• Milk bags & pouches

It is all very confusing... And the wrong kind of plastic added to this recycling can contaminate an entire batch, so you don't just want to guess and see.

I would suggest doing a search for your particular city's recommendation. I know I am going to be spending some time reading on the Minneapolis city website to make sure I have it right. I will probably print up a list and put it on the fridge so I can remember...

Growing potatoes in 5-gallon buckets

This year, in addition to creating three 4-foot "square foot gardening" cubes, we decided to try to grow potatoes in buckets. I really, really like fingerling potatoes but am way too cheap to buy them more than once or twice a year (even at the farmer's market they can be $4-6 a pound), so we thought we would grow them and see if doing it ourselves is actually cheaper.

We got the buckets really cheap ($1/bucket) off of Craigslist. These previously held corn syrup for a candy store, so they are food safe and don't have any nasty paint residues or anything. We drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom of each for drainage.

A package of Swedish fingerling starts from Burpee was about $18. The instructions said to cut fingerling seed potatoes into 3/4-ounce pieces, but most of the seed potatoes were 1 to 1 1/4 ounces, so they couldn't really be cut up. Nonetheless, we still got 16 seed pieces, which we planted one per bucket and then covered them with 3-4 inches of "garden soil for vegetables", which was about $2.75 per 1-cubic foot bag at Menard's. We will need about 11 of these bags, but they will be reusable from year to year.

The two really great things about growing potatoes in buckets is that then they don't wreck your garden soil (lots of things don't like growing where potatoes have grown), and they are ridiculously easy to harvest--just dump out the bucket on a tarp.

We planted the potatoes May 12 (last frost date here is May 15, so a little late), but they are doing great! They took about two or three weeks to come up, but now they are growing like crazy. (They are already much bigger than in this photo I took 4 days ago.) I think they have grown a foot in just the last week. We have filled most of the buckets over halfway with soil now, and I think by this weekend almost every bucket will be full of soil.

Toddler chef's costume

My nephew's third birthday is in a couple of weeks and apparently he likes to dress up. I sewed him a chef's hat and coat and superhero cape (I'll show that later). I tried so hard to get Johanna to try on the chef's coat and she just refused. I don't know why she hated it, but at least now I don't have to make one for her :) I made this from a crisp poly/cotton thrifted sheet and a thrifted black men's shirt.

I do not consider myself an advanced sew-er and this pattern nearly killed me. Specifically, the stick-up collar on the coat nearly killed me. The facing would not lie flat no matter what I did. I nearly resorted to glue, or cutting it off. In the end I placed a few tacking stitches--folded the facing over on itself and stitched to reduce some of the bulk and pouf-iness. I think this was one of my first attempts at set-in sleeves and they were not that easy either. Pattern was Simplicity #3650.

I did manage to get Alfred in it (however briefly) and was kind of surprised to see that he is now a 4T in girth. Maybe these patterns run small... :)

I delayed mailing these costumes for four days, hoping to get some good light to photograph the children in them. No such luck, we have had nothing but rain and more is to come. At least the garden is happy.

Antique button beaded necklace

I did eventually finish this necklace for my Grandma last summer. It is based on the cover of the October 2007 Bead & Button. I left off the fringe because I didn't like it; I thought the simpler bezel around the button showed it off better. Keeping with the simpler theme, I also made a pretty but rather plain spiral rope to go with it. The very pretty metallic Tohos matched almost perfectly to the aged brass on the button. I really like the way this one turned out--and so did my Grandma. She's 82, and was tickled that the button was older than she is. (It is supposedly from the 1890's.)

Tree green hand-dyed fabric joy

I am sewing a quilt for my nephew for Christmas and just picked a pattern from the book Modern Quilt Workshop (it has several quilts I want to make...). He will be 7 at Christmas so I didn't want something too baby-ish--something that will grow with him into pre-teenhood at least. His favorite color is green, so I chose "treehouse", which looks like this, except I am making it in greens and browns, kind of like the original in the book.

I decided this would be a perfect opportunity to make some more hand-dyed fabric, but I didn't have any undyed fabric left, so I started pricing out Kona cotton PFD all over. Turns out it is cheapest at Joann's with a 40% off coupon, so I got 7 yards the other day.

I ripped it all into fat quarters and made up some complicated scheme for getting 28 different shades of green. Two of the fat quarters turned out kind of maroon and will not make it into the quilt, but the rest look beautiful, especially all lined up together. I wonder how long it would have taken me to find and purchase so many hand-dyed greens? Anyway, I am very pleased with how they turned out and am excited to start cutting them up soon.

Of course I didn't think (before I ripped up all my fabric) that maybe I should check what size I need to cut the blocks. So of course the size of the blocks in the book is totally incompatible with my fat quarters--I would wind up wasting a ton of fabric. So, I am going to have to modify the block size and make them a fair bit smaller. Hopefully this won't affect how the quilt looks at the end too much.

Joann's restocks their fabrics fairly quickly (yay!). It took only a week or two for the Kona PFD to come back after I bought it all. I promptly bought the entire new bolt too (8 yards) and have ripped it into fat quarters already. I need a few different browns and don't have recipes for them yet, so I will have to do some experimenting (oh, misery :), especially trying out some blue/orange and purple/yellow chroma bridges, which I have never done. Once my entire family gets over this ugly cold we all have, I am sure I will have the energy to get into a 3-4 hour dyeing session. Right now it is all just sitting on the buffet, the gleaming white squares taunting me as I sniffle, passed out on the couch.

I finally signed up for Twitter.

So, I finally decided to get with it and investigate twitter this week. I admit, it had seemed really dumb to me until I watched the little intro video. I think for now this might be easier to update than trying to fit in an entire blog post more than once a week... So, I added a twitter widget to the sidebar. We'll see how this goes.

"Frugal" Olive of the month club

I thought I would show the olive of the month "club" we gave to Tyler's Mom for Christmas this year. I decided to DIY-it because the "real" clubs can run upwards of $200! I got 12 different jars of the fancy, yummy olives and sewed 12 little drawstring bags for them all the same size. I attached a tag to each indicating which month they were to be opened (and made sure the expiry dates on the jars didn't fall before then!). It seemed like she liked them.

If she gives me the bags back, I will probably do this every year since it is seems like it is getting impossible to find Christmas gifts for parents who are trying to pare down lately. Edible gifts are such a good idea :)