Recycled woven tray

I learned this from the book Weave, Coil, & Plait Crafty Containers from Recycled Materials. It had been in my amazon.com wish list for literally a few years, and it is really hard to find now. But I found it on half.com. :)

The bonus is that a certain weaving technique I'd been trying to figure out for some pouches was in there. Yay! I like this book because all of the projects are sooo colorful and ingenious, not to mention ecologically sound. (And cheap. Where in my town would I find traditional weaving materials? Oh that's right, nowhere.)

Now I can just weave cool stuff with the over-abundance of cardboard boxes in my house. I just have to remember to make them neat and classy. Here's the first completed project:

I made it from strips of boxes (fittingly enough, they were Amazon boxes), a bottle of glossy red outdoor paint that's been in my stash for years, and some gold metallic curling ribbon. I think it turned out pretty nicely.

I'd love to give one of those neon-bright laundry baskets a shot. We could use a laundry basket at the lake.

But I'll tell you, I got another new book today that I'm completely excited about: Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-Shirt. Admittedly, this is for people in their teens and maybe early 20s.

For someone my age, there's not a whole lot that I'd dare to wear outside the house, and I don't have the figure for it anymore. Not to mention that my breasts are WAY too big to be going bra-less, as many of the styles would require. But I can see having a whole lotta fun doing these projects with kids.

It makes me feel sad that I'm not young anymore. Officially a "spinster", according to my boss. I'm never going to forgive him for that. So this spinster has plans to create a shaggy rug from t-shirt strips. I think it would make a great bathmat for our lake house. Heaven knows we need a bath mat. I'm tired of wrapping a towel from the bar around me, only to discover that it is visibly filthy because someone else used it for a bathmat on the nasty floor.

And another thing: there's some funky black ickiness on the back of the toilet rim... right where the pee hits when men don't bother aiming. So my sister and I are on STRIKE. We're not cleaning that freaking toilet of THEIR urine they carelessly splatter all over the place, because there is NO way it could possibly be ours. If they don't like it, they can always go take a leak outside.