nettiejdear

I love finding ways to reuse, repurpose and recycle. I make purses out of recycled clothing, jeans, coats, belts. I am doing it to help my husband and me get out of debt so we can move to Honduras eventually to become full time missionaries. One of the things I want to do to help the women in the community where we will serve, is to help teach them to sew and make purses that can be sold to missionary teams that come to do projects, and the money would go directly to the women who are sewing, to help them feed their families. They have some really cool plastic, striped grocery sacks down there, and I recently came across a tutorial on another site (www.etsy.com) that shows how to fuse plastic bags together to create a "material" you can use to make purses. Another great recycle idea! I haven't tried it yet but am anxious to give it a whirl. As a culture, we are pretty wasteful folks, and I think everyone needs to think about this more seriously!!

Just watched the video of the 1,000 strand knitting project - how cool was that? Really artistic endeavor - it inspires me to go grab a bunch of my different yarns and try it on a much smaller scale of course, to make a purse - I love to knit purses, but hadn't thought of trying to incorporate a bunch of different fibers all at once. It would make the purse thicker and maybe more structured.

I love the "bloomin' tote" - trying to see from the picture if your flowers are coiled from one continuous strip of the quilt? would love to know - thanks - ajdeardurff@netscape.net