My Dream (Pantyhose) Quilt

If the internet had corporeal substance, I would kiss its feet.

Here's why.  Back in the 1970s, when I was deep inside the jaws of my earth mother fantasy, I used to borrow The Mother Earth News from the library.  Some of the articles led me down perilous paths, such as the one that advocated feeding poison ivy to goats and then drinking the milk in order to become immune to the plant's itch-producing substance, or the one that inspired me to carve wooden spoons.

But the most fascinating to me was entitled "Use Old Pantyhose As Quilt Stuffing."  The author showed you how to make little square bags from leftover fabric, stuff them with old pantyhose--first cutting off the waistband and saving it for staking tomatoes--and sew them together into a cozy comforter.

In those days I used to order pantyhose by the gross, in black, taupe, navy and ecru.   And what with running out to milk the goats on my way to the college where I taught, and doing a spot of weeding when I got back from class without bothering to change, I was always getting runs and snags.

Although I had loads of old hose, I didn't have much time.  I never made the quilt, but the fantasy of it stayed with me, as compelling as when I had first read about it.  That quilt seemed like the perfect combination of art and frugality--you put to use an item that would otherwise sit in a landfill for eons, and ended up with an object that was both useful and full of rustic charm.

The years passed, and every once in a while I would think about the pantyhose quilt.  Did every square require an entire pantyhose?  How exactly did you assemble the squares?

Then recently in an idle moment I googled "stuffed quilts."  There were many sites with instructions, but none used discarded pantyhose, and the little bags had tucks in them to make room for extra  stuffing, so that the quilts ended up looking like bubble wrap.

I decided to try my luck on The Mother Earth News site.  I typed in "Pantyhose Quilt,"  pressed "search," and the article came winging out of my past, as fresh and exciting as when I first read it in 1979:  http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/old-pantyhose-quilt-stuffing-zmaz79mazraw.aspx?PageId=1#ArticleContent

Isn't the internet a wonder?

So, you ask, have I started on my quilt yet?  Alas, no.  For one thing, it's been over a decade since I threw away my last pair of pantyhose.  And, for another, I am not a quilter, although I would love to be one, to sit for hours peacefully cutting and stitching and stuffing, fully immersed in my task, without a pressing thought in my head.  But that last bit always gets me into trouble, and seven minutes into an ostensibly calming, mindless task I'm running through the house looking for my Kindle.

No, I'll never make my pantyhose quilt.  I will read the article once more, figuring out measurements and wondering if old towels would work in lieu of hose.  Then I will hit "Delete" and consign the pantyhose quilt to my attic of unfulfilled fantasies, where it will pop up every couple of years and tempt me with its vision of both hominess and sustainability.

Plastic Nations

When I was in middle-school in Ecuador, in the late 1950s, it became fashionable among the girls in my class to carry books in transparent plastic bags.  Even among the privileged classes--many of my classmates' families owned huge tracts of land and had dozens of servants--plastic was scarce and prestigious.

You know how it is at that age--whatever the cool kids are doing, you want to do it too.  We were in the country only temporarily, owned no land and had only one live-in maid (in Ecuador even maids had maids in those days).  For months I longed for a clear plastic bag until my father happened to buy a ready-made shirt and let me have the bag it came in.

I thought I was just being cool at the time.  I didn't know I was recycling.

The other day I learned that Americans throw away 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour.  Even if some of those are recycled, that is a lot of bottles.  So many in fact that, along with assorted debris and contributions from other nations, they are forming big islands of floating garbage in the oceans.  UNESCO recently announced its plan to recognize one of these islands as a new state, "Garbage Patch," just to make a point.

A while ago I took stock of the plastic consumption in our house.  We didn't use many bottles, and most of those could be recycled.  But plastic bags--that's where we sinned.  I'm not talking about the occasional bag that we put our groceries in when we forgot to take along the New Yorker canvas tote, but about the dozens of thick plastic freezer bags that I used while carrying out my most earth-friendly endeavor:  preserving veggies from my garden.

Every year at harvest time I used to buy several boxes of freezer bags in pint and gallon sizes.  And whenever I took spinach or chard or kale out of the freezer, I would throw the bag away, until I realized that there was no reason to.  Only veggies blanched in water go into these bags--no oils or grease or meat.  Why couldn't I reuse them?  I began rinsing the bags thoroughly, drying them, crossing out the old labels, and storing them in a drawer until summer.  I've done this for the past year, and we haven't died of botulism yet.

Every few months I make a six loaves of zucchini or rhubarb bread, which I freeze in gallon bags.  After I take one of these loaves out of the freezer, I put the empty bag back in, crumbs and all, to await the next batch of bread.  The bags stay constantly frozen, and it hasn't done us any harm to reuse them in this way.

Recycling, I often think, is the last moral act left to those of us who who haven't sold all we have to go feed starving babies in Haiti.  I try to remember this every time we load up the car with a couple of months' worth of consumerist detritus and make our way over rutted back roads to the nearest dump.  I imagine myself on my death bed, looking back on my comfortable and essentially selfish life.  And I hope that I'll be able to take consolation from knowing that I did my best not to add to the territory of those floating plastic nations.

Feeling Green

Went to the dump today, and please bear with me while I show off a bit.

In these rural parts, there is no municipal trash collection.  There is a private company that picks up trash, but it's very expensive, so most everybody goes to the dump.

Going to the dump is a big deal, which is why we don't do it often.  The nearest dump is over the line in New York.  The New York recycling handbook, which tells you how to classify your household waste,  is six pages long.

There are three categories of glass--clear, green, and brown;  two categories of cans--tin and aluminum;  three kinds of plastic containers;  and no fewer than seven categories of paper:  newspaper, newspaper inserts, magazines, books, office paper, corrugated cardboard, and boxboard.  And then there is sheer "refuse," the dregs of our daily lives, the stuff for which no redeemable use can be found.  

You don't have to pay for recyclables, no matter how many tons you cart to the dump.  But you have to pay for your refuse by affixing $1.50 stamps (which you have to buy at the Town Office) to your  garbage bags.  The dump attendants--surprisingly cheerful,  easygoing men--take a look at your bags and tell you how many stamps to put on each.

On dump day, my husband--who saw Alice's Restaurant at an impressionable age--goes over every single scrap of paper we have generated over the last month and meticulously rips out every allusion to our name, address, and SSN, and assigns each scrap to one of the seven categories.

Meanwhile, I collect the garbage, bottles, cans and plastic and carry them to the garage.  I do not collect the deposit bottles or the plastic bags, which go back to the supermarket on a separate trip.  The black plastic pots that nursery plants come in go back to a nursery that reuses them.

My husband's next job, and one at which he excels, is to compress the refuse bags to their absolute minimum, so that we will incur the smallest possible charge.  Which brings me to today's triumph:  our month's worth of refuse, after compression, filled about half of a tall kitchen garbage bag.

Credit for this goes mostly to the chickens, who consume whatever we don't eat, and to the rural nature of this place, which keeps us close to home and away from stores.

I am usually more than glad to be living in the Green Mountains, but there are some exceptions:  days when it rains on top of snow and then freezes;  days when I have to drive thirty minutes to find a spool of brown thread;  and dump days.  

Thinking about it, though, I realize that these are the very days that keep our mountains green.  The difficult weather keeps the flatlanders away;  the paucity of malls and box stores keeps the landscape bucolic and the traffic light;  and the dump--well, when you have to handle and classify and remove from your house every single piece of waste you have generated you can't help berating yourself for your consuming ways, and vowing to live more greenly.

Recycling

Every fall, armies of mice invade people's basements in Vermont. These are not the rat-like city mice, but adorable little country mice with big ears, bright little eyes set wide apart and tiny round bodies—so cute you want to make pets of them. (That, by the way, is what Beatrix Potter did—she tamed them and they ran around in her bedroom while she painted them.)

Mice in the basement don't really bother me. Mice in the house are another story. Yesterday, on the kitchen counter, I found some minute specks that I thought might be caraway seeds—except that they were too small for caraway seeds, and I don't think I have any caraway in the spice rack. So I alerted the official pest management expert, and he duly set a trap.

Which worked. This morning the OPME considerately emptied the trap before I got up, and hid the contents in an empty yogurt box before taking them to the chickens.

Yes, the chickens. You don't think we'd waste a mouse, do you? A lovely bit of fresh organic protein in the middle of this barren season would cheer the hens no end. I was filling the chickens' water dish when the OPME came in with the yogurt box. He opened it, dumped out the little cadaver...I won't describe the scene, but will refer you instead to the Old Testament, to the part where Jezebel is thrown to the dogs.

We've fed our chickens other kinds of exotic protein in the past. Back when we used a Japanese Beetle trap (we don't anymore, because they attract more bugs than they catch), we would empty it into a bucket of hot water, swish the beetles around and throw them on the compost pile. The hens would congregate around the bugs like party guests around the shrimp platter, and gorge until not a single one was left.

Tonight we're having spinach omelette for dinner (homegrown spinach, ditto eggs). When I crack open those pinky-brown eggs, I will remember the mouse, which, through the miracle of the hen, has been transubstantiated from pest to protein, and I will give thanks.

Dump Diving And Other Post-Modern Arts

Ed and I were sorting our recyclables at the dump on a frigid day recently, when I stumbled on two boxes of what looked, under a thick layer of greasy dust, like old canning jars. I peered closer and sure enough, there must have been over a dozen in all, both clear glass and blue, their metal bails and glass lids intact. Some were “Lightning,” a brand I'd never heard of before.

How could anybody throw out such a treasure? Didn't he know how fabulous old canning jars look filled with dried red peppers, or pasta, or dried rose petals? I asked the attendant if it was all right to take some of the jars, and he said yes, grinning at my excitement. And I was excited, sort of the way I imagine morel hunters feel when they come upon an especially good patch. This was my first experience with what I believe is called “dump diving,” and I loved it.

I got into this something-for-(almost)-nothing mode in the fall, when the economy was worsening and everyone worried about the cost of heating oil. That prompted me to attend the rummage sale at a nearby village, where I purchased a collection of thick woolen sweaters, for an average of $1.50 apiece, that are seeing me through a cold winter in a chilly house.

The first frosts came around Halloween, and the chickens ran out of bugs and grass to forage as the cost of store-bought chicken food rose. Everywhere I looked, though, people's porches were festooned with carved pumpkins destined for the compost pile, or worse yet, the trash. So we got permission and scavenged a bunch of jack o'lanterns that kept the chickens happy, and their egg-yolks bright orange, for weeks.

Again, it was the chickens who inspired me to ask for my first “doggy bag” at a restaurant, something that, much to Ed's amusement, I had always considered declasse. Now, if even a single french fry remains on my plate, I ask to take it home.

Ed and I were in the truck this afternoon and heard a woman on NPR who had furnished and decorated a 3,000-square-foot McMansion with items from thrift shops, from furniture to toys to clothing hanging in the closets. She did this to support thrift shops that give their proceeds to charity, and to demonstrate that you can have something for almost nothing.

And where were Ed and I going while listening to this? We were on our way to a place that makes wooden pallets and lets us scavenge discarded sticks of wood to use as kindling for our stove.

A friend and I are collecting instances of our grandmothers' thrifty arts, long forgotten ways of making-do that are now being, or should be, resurrected. Here's an instance from my own grandmother: when bottom sheets got worn in the middle (these were the flat kind that you had to tuck under the mattress), she would cut them in half longitudinally and sew the original edges together, so that the fabric that was still in good shape was now in the center of the bed. I still have the remnants of one such sheet, made of homespun. (I were to weave a sheet with my own hands, I too would be extremely reluctant to throw it out.)

Women used to spend lots of time darning, especially socks. I've said in an earlier post that I'm too impatient to darn socks. But I did once make a terrific sweater for my small dog , Mojo, out of an old sock.

There's a substantial collection of wine corks in my kitchen drawer. I wonder what they might be good for? I can't bear to throw them out.

If you have any old, or even new, grandmotherly tricks, pass them on!