Rainy day activity - Tea Napkins

Now that we're a little more settled in our new barn, we've been having more folks over for dinner and keggers cocktails. I tend to go all out for these get togethers - loads of appetizers and deserts, using my fancy serving ware, and then...paper towels? Not super classy and most of all, not super fun. I also don't feel like buying paper napkins, because they're #1 wasteful and #2 there not super versatile, they're just...napkins.

So that brings us to cloth napkins. They're stuck in the worlds of fancy restaurants and thanksgiving dinner at Grandmas. Wrap your head around how awesome they can be! They're cute, reusable, cheap, and you can go nuts making them in different style for every season.

Sure, you can go buy fabric napkins at a place like Crate & Barrel, and pay $8 a piece for them. Better yet, you can dust off your sewing machine, pick up a few yards of cute fabric at JoAnns, and kill a few hours making however many napkins you'd like. For the following project, the total cost per napkin came to less than a dollar per napkin.

Cutting mat and quilting ruler, useful for so many projects!

You'll Need:

• Fabric (1.5 yards made me 9 12" tea sized napkins. Try to get a fabric without a lot of stretch and a non-linear pattern, you'll find it much more forgiving) 
• SHARP scissors
• Regular weight thread
• Sewing Machine
• Iron with steam function
• Measuring devices - I find that the quilting ruler and rotary cutting mat are well worth the extra dough for projects like these.

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Lazy Corners

1. Pick out your material. I wanted something spring/summer flavored, and cheap. This fabric was $3.99 a yard. The irregular pattern means I don't have to worry about the print looking crooked like you do with a line pattern. Also, the less stretch it has, the easier it will be to iron straight seams.
2. Decide how large you want your napkins. Full size dinner napkins are around 14". Take into account seam allowances  (for my 12" napkins I cut 13" raw) and the width of your material.
3. Measure and cut. I forgot to pick up a soluble fabric pens, so I used a soft pencil on the backside of the fabric to mark my cuts. They will get rolled into the seam.

Ziggy to the Zag stitch

4. Using an iron with the steam on, roll over 1/4" of fabric and crease flat. The steam will help really set the crease. If your machine doesn't have a serger, you'll have to roll the edge over a second time and press again. This ensures that all raw edges are wrapped up and sewn inside and you won't have to worry about frayed edges. If you do have a serger...I'm jealous.

5. At some point, you'll have to decide what sort of corner you want. You can do the lazy, folded over corners like I did, or you can do a mitered corner (think hospital bed sheet). My fingers aren't nimble enough to hold the fabric in a mitered shape, let alone holding it to iron. If you did 1/2" seams, it would probably be a lot easier. The mitered edges do look a lot cleaner, there's no arguing that.

6. Sew away! I used a zig zag stitch because it's more forgiving if you're not doing an absolutely straight line, which I definitely don't have the patience for. I find the ZZ also did a better job at locking down the seam. None of this applies if you're a lucky bastard with a serger.

7.  That's it. Throw a party, then throw these bad boys in the wash. Enjoy over and over.

Finished product!

Worm Invasion: My Introduction to Kitchen Vermiculture

There's a lot of buzz about composting these days, from turning your own leaves and lawn clippings into compost for your garden, to municipal compost - heck, the ski resort I work for composts all of its food scraps. In college, our house would fill a 5 gallon bucket with scraps and send it off to the compost center - the trash company would pick it up on the curb along with our trash and recycling.

We never gave much thought to processing it ourselves, however, until we were living in Colorado. Unlike Vermont, which is covered in farms that accept household scraps for compost or forward thinking cities like Burlington that collect it, southwest Colorado is high, dry desert with ranches instead of farms and an environment that doesn't produce the hot humidity that works best for composting.


I learned exactly how difficult it is to find composting centers in SW CO when my job at the ski resort there tasked me to explore options for composting its organic waste. The only commercial size compost facility at the time was at a prison 3 hours away. So, we decided to do it on our own, and compost on site. Doing so means we had to go small scale, and we settled on using worms, or vermiculture, as our method.

Unlike other forms of composting, many of which require high heat, frequent turning and maintenance, space, and time, worm bins are a self contained system. As long as the temperature is comfortable (if you're not shivering or sweating, they're not either!), there isn't too much moisture, and they have just enough food, you're going to get compost - pretty fast, too.

Towards the end of the winter, we (Eco Adventures) hosted an event with the The New Community Coalition (you're going to want to click that link and check them out - they're awesome!) that was a 1 hour build your own compost workshop. For $20, we got a Rubbermaid bin, worms, bedding, and hands on instruction. I ate an apple and threw in the core to get them started. Sure, you can spend moolah on fancy-ass bins like these,  but you can just spend $7 on a bin, drill the holes yourself, use wet shredded newspaper for bedding, and order a pound of worms for $21 a pound, and go.

As you can see, we threw in pumpkin seeds and old beets - and now it's become a little alien ecosystem!

That's in. Worms eat, they reproduce - their numbers were up after about a month, and we haven't thrown away a worm-compostable food scrap since. We even drove our big back east, across the country, wrapped in a blanket to keep them warm - that's how awesome they are.

I'll add more later with how we built it, our trial and error process, and more - but for now, go ahead and surf the web and learn more about why there is no good reason why you can't rock a kitchen vermiculture system.


vermiculture.net - the best guide to building your own bin I've seen yet, outside of going to a workshop.

Green Product: WIN!

If there is one category of eco products that is full of more lies and propaganda, it's beauty and health products. You either aren't getting what you pay for (false packaging, greenwashing, etc), they make you feel like a hippy, or are ridiculously expensive. I've tried various flavors of Nature's Gate and have been super unhappy with dried out hair - smells great, looks gross, and I'm definitely not getting my $8 out of it - $1 Suave works better.

But, alas, I am a child of the guilt driven eco friendly generation and had to find something that was both eco friendly and ethically sourced.  So I found the Body Shop (thanks to my sister in law) and decided to give their Rain Forest Moisture therapy a go.

 My in-store tests:

• Smells good
• I can pronounce the ingredients
• Has a warm fuzzy feel good story about where the ingredients came from.
• It's not cheap - $14 per large bottle. But with my rewards from their customer loyalty program, it was about $5 per bottle.

Test? It was super thick out of the bottle, the directions actually recommend  adding water to your hands first. So, despite its smaller size, it's pretty concentrated. My hair feels clean, not too many frizzies, and smells GOOD.

Info from their site:

 The Body Shop® difference: Our Rainforest Moisture Shampoo contains no silicones, sulphates, parabens or colorants. It also meets our eco-conscious standard*. It is respectful to the aquatic environment, meets strict biodegradability standards, and minimizes the use of non-sustainable packaging resources.

 That's the warm and fuzzy. Now the ingredients are just damn neat.

The pracaxi tree grows in the wet tropical climate along the Delta of Amazonas River and its precious seeds are cold pressed for its oil. Manketti nut oil is traditionally used as a body rub during the dry African winter to moisturise skin. We buy Community Trade honey from organic sources in Africa and sugar from the Montillo Co-operative in Paraguay. Our trade rewards local suppliers fairly for their expertise, and helps them invest in their futures.

 Moral of the story? Don't be a hippy. Wash your damn hair.

Green Product: Fail

If you haven't heard by now, phosphates are bad for the environment, specifically aquatic habitats (cheap and easy education found here). So bad, in fact, certain states have banned their use in dish washing products where they are most commonly found. So, wanting to help save the ol' gal Mama Earth, Brian and I decided to give the Seventh Gen powder a shot.

Fail. Epic fail. I suppose if I had read the reviews on their website,  I would have known better. Our dishes are clean of food scraps, but they are very filmy, especially with our hard water.So filmy you can rub lines in it with your fingers. Seventh Gen said they are reworking the formula to perform better. Until then, they recommend soaking dishes in a sink of vinegar water before you put them away.

What?!

Really.

To get any dishes that have filming on them back to normal, you can soak them in a sink of water with a cup of vinegar. A quick rinsing afterward should have them back to normal. For any dishwashers that are getting film on the inside you can again use vinegar. Add about 1/2 cup to the bottom of the machine and run a rinse cycle, this should restore in the interior of your machine.

We'll finish this box, and we'll be testing their capsules next. Anyone use their liquid for automatic washers?

Don't forget to put on your blinker.

Every Friday, I cruise down the interstate heading to my part time job in Burlington. This is in addition to the full time job at the ski resort, the committees and volunteer organizations I'm a part of, and my other full time job as a mom to two furries. There are so many ways that we all spend our time that, much like my weekly commute, we all go ten (or twenty) above the speed limit to get around our days.

In good weather, racing along the spine of the Green Mountains is a really pretty drive. Relaxing, almost. When I get on, I'm inevitably running late and spend most of my time in the left lane, guzzling my coffee and bagel and listening to NPR. I pass mini vans, trucks, old beaters, and get passed by Audi's and Beemers. Everyone's speeding along until we get to our exit, then we pull off, park, and start the next part of our day. We race home, microwave some food, scratch the dog, and proceed to watch a movie, go to bed, do it all again in the morning. Surfing through the channels, the web, and life.

I'm ready to get out of the left lane. Get of the highway entirely, if I can. I'm 24, I just got married, I have a stable - if small - income, and I'm ready to slow down.

Those of you who know me would expect a blog about climbing and skiing, a puppy/kitten worship blog, or a blog about trees. Not saying there won't be anything about that, but my focus (for now) will be on home made projects: old school baking, household sustainability, gardening, smart buying, and more. Once I get a better feel for what's taking shape, I'll be asking for ideas/contributions. Expect to see:

• How to build and maintain your own kitchen compost (you thought I was obsessed with my dog, you should hear me rave about my worms!)
• The Bread diaries
• The poor college graduates guide to gardening
• The Lumberjack versus the Picky Wife: Localvore menu's for any palette
• Burly and Nugget's guide to systematically destroying everything of value
• Reviews of 'green' products - this is a new obsession of mine. They're so damn expensive, but are they worth it?

I know there are a million trustifarian's out there blogging about the same thing. I hope what makes this a little different is I try to be green, but we can't afford it. I try to eat local, healthy, and organic, but I also freaking love a Big Mac with extra cheese. All of the documentaries on corn syrup have me scared shitless, but I still drink gallons of Coke. I love my puppy, but sometimes I wish he still had nuts for me to kick him in. Life is full of paradoxes,  but I believe that realizing we have choices to make and educating ourselves on them is the first real step to slowing down and changing our lives.

I don't know if that sounds interesting. I don't even know if I'd read it. But before we run out of gas, we need to figure something out. This is my attempt.