a new lease on life

[yukonsally]

I'm curious.

In your decluttering, what have you found to repurpose?

I tend to save buttons and small scraps of cloth for minor repairs. One scrap was nearly the exact size Spouse needed for something in a vehicle--the exact size. And the button attached to it fit the hole in a pair of my pants I fixed. (I have also given away many buttons, as my collection was beyond my needs.)

I tried to give away a little gauzy bag, those little ones that hold a single piece of jewelry. No takers. Then I realized--it'll hold my ear buds in my pack so I can get rid of the plastic tie that tends to get sticky as it ages.

No shoe laces for (secondhand) dance shoes? Here's some fancy ribbon I saved because... it's pretty? I don't even know where it came from.

That's to speak nothing of all the knitting with scraps I do (blankets, fingerless gloves, flowers, spare tire cozies, you know, useful stuff). I needed a string for my coffee scoop--well, here's some nice pink sock yarn to make a loop!

It's a fine line between keeping things that could be useful and keeping everything. But some things have ceased to be clutter and have become useful. The way things in my house should be.

Friday Report

[adair]

I continued my effort to move 500 books out of my house this year. So far 32 have gone, and I have plans to work on certain shelves in my double-stacked bookcases. At least so far I have been surprising ready to let go of books, at least some of them. Most of the 32 have been science fiction and fantasy that I once thought I would re-read, but now believe I don't care about enough to do that. A couple were books I brought home from the B2P workroom because they looked interesting, but a bit of reading convinced me that I have better things to read, so back they go. I have hopes that I can really do some book removal, and therefor make shelf room for books I want to keep.

I also started sorting all the recipes I clipped from magazines or printed from the web, mostly the New York Times. There were messily stacked on the bottom shelf of my kitchen bookcase, and sprawling on the floor. I tried once to put some of them into a notebook, but that fell by the wayside. I finally pulled all the clippings and sorted them into 4 groups - greens, both recipes and advice, - other sorts of food recipes - recipes and suggestions for alt.support.diabetes back in the days when it had good posts - and last, things to throw away. This last was smallest pile, but just getting the other groups sorted is going to make it easier to see which of the rest I really want to keep and use. My plan is to start with the greens group, and get an organized batch of information into my food notebook, and may use some of the recipes. A lot of the recipes looked rather similar as I did my first sort, so I expect that a good many will be discarded. My food tastes seem to have been consistent.