T-shirts. Is there anything more plentiful in modern America than t-shirts? “I’ve got more t-shirts than Carter’s has pills!” There are other uses for them beyond wearing them, of course, and crocheting them into rugs, as I’ve already written about. They’re absorbent, right? Why couldn’t you make them into cloth diapers? The truth is, you can! What is printed on some t-shirts just has no higher call than absorbing pee and poo. Just sayin’. The diapers don’t really have to be any certain size; serge around the biggest rectangular shape you can make from the front or back. They are one layer and dry quickly on the clothesline–and the sunshine actually kills germs and freshens the diaper fabric. This is not just conjecture. Two littles I know spent their baby days in t-shirt diapers. You can look online for all the different ways to fold them to fit your little’s bottom. There are lots of diaper covers out there to buy, and patterns to make your own. Did I mention free, and environmentally friendly, and just plain cool?!
Those sleeves you cut off need not be thrown away just yet. During the pandemic, one lasting memory we will have world-wide is that people got absolutely ridiculous and hoarded toilet paper! I’m not makin’ this up! So some of us weird folk decided to adopt the policy, No TP for Pee. I know some folks are actually making “family cloth” to be used in the bathroom out of new, cutesy fabric, but it’s washable toilet paper, for goodness sake! We cut t-shirt sleeves into usable sizes which work great! I started out serging the edges, but that is actually unnecessary because they do not ravel. When the plastic ice cream bucket is full, I wash the wipies, as we call them, and–you guessed it–dry them in the sunshine. Reducing the paper waste is good for our lagoon like it would be for the wastewater treatment plants of towns and cities. This is one pandemic policy that has enough merit in my mind to continue! In addition, strips of t-shirt fabric make great ear loops for homemade face masks.
Two years ago, when our Tip was a puppy, he chewed on everything! One casualty of his teething was some of the wood on our porch. What dog chews on porch railing?! Ugh! Other items he wouldn’t leave alone were the solar lights next to the sidewalk in front of the house. The plastic globes all got broken, though the lights still worked. I just put them in the garage with the solar lights whose unusual 3/4 AA batteries were irreplaceable, even from the vast selection on the internet. It turned out that the glass lids from candle jars were about the same size as the metal part of the solar lights and would protect the tiny bulb and radiate the light. I just took some used copper wire and attached the glass lid to the metal solar light, then hung them by used toilet flapper chains and other miscellaneous used chains. Hooked onto the soffit trim they provide free light to the side of the porch that was blocked from the yard light on the other side of the house. I was emboldened by these nice little lights to think outside the box on the 3/4 AA-size lights. I was able to break the plastic molding that housed the batteries and move the positive and negative leads. A regular AA battery now fits and can be easily replaced when it gets too tired to recharge from the sun.
I didn’t mention when I was talking about laundry that I don’t use laundry detergent. Well, not if I can help it. Most of the time I use Ivory bar soap, placed in a netting bag and agitated on the small load setting until the water is soapy enough to wash the load. When I have it, I use homemade lye soap. The problem is, I just haven’t had any for a long time. I come from a long line of soap makers, I guess, and I have the equipment my mother and grandmother used: an enamel baby bathtub, the plastic utensils and containers for the lye and water mixture (dangerous stuff!). Several times, my mother and I have made the soap, with all its preparatory work and danger. Right now, I have lard and lye–and the time to do it. Sounds like a good job to do on a cooler day, like this Wednesday, when all can be ready and the lye solution can cool more quickly. I’ll report back here on that process.
It didn’t go so well. It turns out that the lye packaging has changed from when my recipe was printed. It called for an entire 12 oz. can of lye; I didn’t check to see that the lye cans I inherited from my parents’ basement actually had 18 oz. That batch had to be ditched. The second batch seemed to come to the point of complete absorption of the lye into the fat, but when I poured it into the lined boxes, it separated and had to be heat processed. Hmmm…why did I want to make soap?
Another strangeness I have embraced is in the fencing I use for my sheep. I don’t have many, just three ewes and three spring lambs right now. They often will respect a visual barrier, especially if the pen they’re in has plenty of grass and they’re not hungry for whatever is on the other side. The ewes are not usually ambitious enough to jump over the fence, but will if they feel cornered or especially naughty. The lambs, on the other hand, see places to escape and then complain from the other side of the fence from their mothers. I discovered last fall that for the three weeks the ewes were visiting the neighbor’s ram, my lambs found a great place to sneak under every day and clean up corn left on the ground from harvest. Maybe they saw me out in the field surrounding our place picking up ears to store in big sacks for the chickens over the winter, another odd practice I discovered would have cost more than $150 if I had wanted to buy “wildlife ear corn” at Orscheln. Needless to say, the lambs really grew and continued their naughtiness even after their mothers returned, up until they were taken to be butchered. (I’m told they were delicious.) So then, the fencing needs to be repaired and reinforced to keep them in. As a cheapskate, I want to reduce the cost to…well…nothing. So I look for ways to do that. One type of fencing I’ve discovered takes a lot of time, but uses saplings, which I have millions of. To keep the sheep in my main pen, I’m adding some 24-inch woven wire along the ground in addition to the four strands of barbed wire. But in order to get the wire up to the posts, I have to clear the immediate area of all the volunteer elm trees that my time-starved disregard has allowed to grow like hair. It turns out the saplings have a good use in an ancient practice called wattling. The long, thin wood is woven in and out of upright stakes placed 16 to 18 inches apart to make a strong fence. It is even possible to make individual panels, called hurdles, that are (supposed to be) lightweight and strong, and can be connected to make a temporary pen. I like to put the sheep out in areas that are hard to mow, and corral them with a combination of panels. The metal panels I have used for several years are heavy and cumbersome. Doable, but not much fun. So I have that wattling hurdle project going and will see how that weirdness turns out.
Those sheep were originally bought to reduce the need for mowing the area around the outbuildings. Any pictures you’ve seen of sheep mowing the White House lawn during World War II have been photoshopped for sure! These girls don’t to anything close to that level of neatness. In fact, there are certain types of grasses they ignore entirely. So then, several years ago, I didn’t have a riding mower for my large areas and thought I could let the grass grow, scythe it by hand, let it dry, and then pack it into bales. Videos abound on the internet to teach you just about anything, including how to scythe grass, it turns out. I went out in the mornings while it was cool and cut the grass with a scythe that belonged to my great-grandfather. As peculiar and time consuming as this process was, it was also lovely to be out in the cool of the day and hear the birds singing as I worked. I learned how to sharpen the blade, and the scything was good for strengthening my physical core. When the hay was dry, usually that evening, I used a garden cart and baling twine to make the bales. They weren’t tightly packed like a mechanical baler, but they did hold together enough that I could stack them in the shed in layers of two bales. It smelled wonderful and the sheep loved it more than any mechanically baled hay I’ve served since. And, by golly, we were doing our part to save the planet by not using a gas-powered mower for a couple of summers.
