Flowers vs. Snow

Every year the same thing happens:  You think spring is coming, you even see little bits of green starting to push their way through the ground and you're like "It's getting warmer!  Can't wait!" Then....it snows.  Ha ha, April Fool courtesy of Mother Nature. 

The other day one of the kids at work asked me to show her how to make a snowflake.  Urgh.  I didn't want to see any more of those things whether they be actual frozen water or just paper.  So I said I'd show her how to make a flower to color instead and it came out great so now I'm going to show you.

You will need:  an 8 x 10 piece of paper, scissors and nubby, broken crayons with the paper all peeled off.

* Square your paper off.  Fold the bottom corner over to one side like this and cut off that extra bit like this to make a big triangle. Save that extra piece for later!

* Fold your big triangle in half and then fold that one in half.

*Now the tricky bit.  Fold the top of your triangle (the side with the fold) over toward the cut edges of the triangle.  It makes this sort of wonky icecream cone shape.

* Cut the top off of the "icecream" so it's now just a skinny triangle.

* Now make the top a little more interesting.  You can round it off, make it jagged or do a swoop like I did.  You can also make some little cuts up the sides and cut the bottom tip off if you like or leave it smooth if you'd rather not.

 * Open it up and it'll look like a snowflake. 

*Take your crayons and rub them from the center to the edges like the spoke of a wheel.  The crayon will be darker on the edges. 

If  you use more than one color it makes a cool gradient effect.

*Take the extra bit from the side that you cut in step one, and make a leaf or two.  Color it in and add some details.

Now make a whole bunch of them and tape them onto your window to blot out leafless trees and brown grass!

The Wearing of the Green

I consider myself lucky to have a big thrift store like Goodwill right down the street.  I buy things there all the time and I also donate things there all the time. 

A shirt from Goodwill that I've upcycled.  It's green in more ways than one!

But my daughter recently told me that some of the girls in her class have said that wearing clothes bought from Goodwill is ‘gross.’  Now I know girls are mean and kids and teens in general are obsessed with image and labels at this age.  I was guilty of this myself.  I sported Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and 9 West shoes, and like Will Smith, I remember being MORTIFIED that one time my Mom bought me Zips instead of Adidas sneakers.  The bratty neighbors down the street threw yew berries from their bushes at me when I wore them and I ran home crying.  Good times.

All of this got me to thinking; buying a used item of clothing is actually a form of recycling.  Buying a new item of clothing means that that item had be manufactured and manufacturing means the use of resources.   How much of the Earth's resources does the textile industry actually use?  I thought I should do a little research since I’ve been striving to become a part of that industry.  Here is what I found out:

The textile industry uses 2.38 TRILLION (that’s trillion with 12 zeros) gallons of water and about 129 BILLION tons of fuel every year to produce new cloth.  When they’re done producing it, there’s equally disturbing amounts of waste water and air pollution that is created as a byproduct. 

An ordinary cotton tee shirt starts as a cotton plant.  This plant needs to be watered, tended, sprayed with pesticides to protect it, harvested (using fuel) transported (using more fuel) processed (even more fuel) and dyed (water and chemicals) to create fabric. 

From there it most likely travels overseas (more fuel) where it is cut and sewn, packaged (paper and plastic) and transported Back to the US (again with the fuel) to be sold and then finally bought by you or me.  That's more fuel than I want to do the math for. From start to finish this whole process (for one shirt) took 2,000 gallons of water.

 But putting the big carbon footprint aside, here are some other things to consider when buying a pre-owned article of clothing:

  *Many  times I’ve bought something from Goodwill with the tags from a previous store still on it which means it was new anyway and therefore not gross.

  *When I donate to Goodwill, I’m not donating my favorite stuff that I’ve used or worn all the time.  I’m donating the stuff that my family and I hardly ever wore or never even used.  Children’s clothes are almost always like new because they grow out of them too fast to really ruin them.  Less gross than you thought.

  *Goodwill has standards.  They will discard things that are stained and destroyed.  They don’t want to sell those items any more than you or I want to buy them.  Again, less gross than you thought.

  *I wonder how many of these kids have worn USED hand-me-downs from a brother or sister?

Now I don’t expect K to go to school and give a big report on why it’s greener to buy from a thrift store everytime she's teased by fashion conscious mean girls.  They will: a. not care and b. not wait around to hear the facts and figures of the whole thing. 

But for those of you who may have offhandedly said to your daughter, “Ugh!  Who wants to wear something someone else already wore?”  Wasting the Earth’s resources is kind of gross.  Pass that along to your kids, OK?

J'ai besoin d'acheter de nouveaux marqueurs.

 This is my visual list of the Prismacolor Markers that always need replacing:  pomme vert, pervenche, ardois bleue, vert fonce, bleu pacifique clair, vrai bleu, mure, vrai vert, blue deco, blue d'outremer, bruine violette.  Yes, they also have English names but everybody knows that stuff sounds way cooler en Francais.  A totally mundane sentence like "I need to buy new markers" sounds like poetry, ne cest pas?