doily crisis

As you can see, I am stockpiling in anticipation of the coming doily crisis. Hmm, what did you say? Oil crisis. Oh. Well. In that case I’ll be using these doilies (one day) to make a patchwork quilt for baby bear. I got the idea from the excellent book Make Your Own Contemporary Quilts. While it seems a shame to cut up some of these gorgeous pieces of needleworkmanship many of them are stained or torn in places and it is better for them to have a new life as a bedspread than to languish forever at the bottom of a drawer or to be thrown out.

A swag of these came from my recent op shopping in Tasmania, others come from various Melbourne op shops and some were found for me by my mother-in-law - thank you! Most op shops will have a couple hiding somewhere in the manchester section but Tasmanian op shops seem to have a doily section all of their own.

Re-use is one of my favourite environmental strategies and I would like to do a whole lot more of it. This idea has been around for a while – I’ve had a Freitag bag for a few years now, made from old truck tarpaulins, seatbelts and tyre inner tubes. I’ve done a bit of yarn recycling, a lot of it sitting waiting to be re-knit. Lately I’ve been reading the excellent Brooklyn Tweed knit blog – boy, can that boy knit and take great photos to boot – but Jared is also a yarn recycler – hooray. And on The Lab recently I came across the fantastic Dutch design group, Zo. I am elated and inspired by their innovation – particularly the telephone wire used as a chair seat

I still can’t get over how much stuff there is in the world, how much there is in resources right to hand that otherwise get overlooked. All it takes is some imagination, some inspiration and some creativity to re-use them. I want to do more of this.

We’re off to the Strathbogie Ranges this afternoon. Alas, there are no op shops in Strathbogie. Actually, there’s no internet in Strathbogie. Maybe I’ll actually get something done over the next few days!