I like the word "repurpose". Although I wasn't using the word yet when we had III, where we were living rustic and repurposing logs and pans and tables and buckets and making a water drain out of a piece of pipe and shelves out of branches, we were repurposing. There are other words that go right along with repurpose -- like recycle, reuse, rerun, redo. I like them all too. In fact, I'm sure I've posted before:
Use it up
Wear it out
Make it do
or do without.
This was a long ago motto. Maybe it has been around forever but I think of it as coming out of the Great Depression or World War II. I grew up with it as a way of life.
My Mama didn't drain the potato water down the sink drain. She kept it in a bowl and used it to mash the potatoes instead of milk. Milk was better left for growing children. Mama used the paper off the stick of oleo that went in the cookie dough, to grease the cookie sheet. Left over mashed potatoes became potato patties and left over boiled potatoes became fried potatoes. Left over stale bread was turned into bread pudding or dressing or even fed to the birds. But never thrown out in the trash.
My Mama cut buttons off of old worn out shirts. This was after the shirts outlived being a "good" shirt. A shirt or dress went from being "good" and going to town, school or work to being "everyday". Everyday shirts might be patched and miss a button but they were there to put on after school, to wear to the garden or to do the laundry. Ever day saved your "good" shirt for better things.
After a shirt was demoted from "ever day" it became a rag. Mama (or her daughters) cut the buttons off and ideally removed the thread and any fabric stuck to that button. The buttons went in the button box to be used later. The shirt went into the rag bag at the bottom of the boys' closet. Someday I'll write about the rags in the rag bag and what all those rags were repurposed for but for now, I better stick to this subject.
My Mama bought laundry soap in the big round economy box and every wastebasket in our house started life as a box of soap. One girl or another would need a 4-H or rainy day project and out would come the ALL detergent box and the patterned contact paper and soon there was a color-coordinated waste basket for whatever room was needing one! Repurposed strikes again!
Newspapers were repurposed big-time. Newspapers became pirate hats, drawer liners, mats for muddy wet boots and they also lined the bottom of Petey the canary's cage. Newspapers were, of course, a source for the "current event" that your social studies teacher requested each week. Newspapers were used to start fires, wrap coffee grounds and potato peelings. Folks paid good money for those newspapers and they were bound to get their money back out of them. I know my folks did.
White butcher paper that came home clean from the grocery store could be saved for art projects. When I was small, JC Penney's often wrapped your purchases and tied them up securely with a nice long piece of string. When you got home and unwrapped the packages, you got the ball of string already on hand, tied the new string onto the leading end and rolled it all back up together. The ball of string was an indicator of the economy. The better the economy, the better the shopping. With more shopping there was more string. So a big ball of string meant a good economy and a little ball of string meant no money to spend!
Shoe boxes were always saved and had a gazillion uses. They were used as drawer dividers, paper files, containers for small toys and paper dolls, They were used to organize my Mama's kitchen and my Dad's garage. Even with nine children, 2 adults and 22 feet at home, we never had enough shoe boxes. Of course, even with all those feet we usually only each had one new pair of shoes a year -- so only eleven new shoe boxes per year. No wonder there was a shoe box shortage!
Match boxes, wooden spools, bread wrapper twist ties, rubber bands, orange juice cans, glass jars -- the "to save" list goes on and on. Now, after all this, you might be wondering where I'm headed and why I have prominently displayed a picture of a lady with curlers in her hair?
When I was in high school, it was fashionable to have long, long hair. Some girls liked the straight, "ironed" look and some of us wanted a little body in that long mop top. If you remember the pink foam or the pink plastic rollers, they weren't very big and if you had wrapped your head full of those little curlers, you would have looked like the naturally curly red-headed step child with hair uncontained and curling in all directions.
Something larger was needed. Large rollers or curlers that would give body but no frizz or curl and that was when we went to our Mama's surplus item box and dug out all the condensed orange juice cans. Now, they would have been washed and both ends cut out. With clean, mostly dry hair, you would roll it up and secure the cans with a super duper hair pin or two. Girls were known to suffer sleepless nights with a head-full orange-juice cans . . . but oh how nice to get up the next morning, shake the cans and the hair out and have all that straightened hair with body!
Probably had used cans in my hair before Mary's wedding
(that's little Audri . . . no no! that's little flower girl Sheila!)
And I am just pretty certain I would have had big fat orange juice cans in my hair before this picture. See how smooth and buoyant that long hair is! The weight of it pulled out all the "curl" -- except at the very ends.
