warning: cheapy cheaperson, susie homemaker, & hairy-armpitted feminist, all in one post!

Perhaps I have gotten my second green wind.
Or, perhaps I have just gotten progressively cheaper so that now i've swung over to the other side of being green - from trying to buy organic and buy green to not buying anything. new. ever.

I've been using freecycle like a fiend.
I traded in the Prius for a Yaris because it cut my car payment (hey - in my defense, the mpgs are comparable - check out this guy's blog).
I'm trying - again - to grow some tomatoes. This time, I'm also trying some lettuce and spinach! (more on this to come - I'm not going to provide details on the project until i see little green sprouts!)
And, perhaps the greenest/cheapest thing of all - I have started to make my own pantiliners. Yep. that's right. Pantiliner as in 'Stayfree', 'Always', and 'Kotex'. Except mine aren't big wads of plastic and cotton or paper or whatever else the "big three" use. They're made out of an old flannel shirt and a pair of terry-cloth shorts that I wore in middle school gym.

Now, if you're not as "susie homemaker" as I am (thanks to my roommate for that label...), you can buy cloth ones. They can be really pretty! Check out here, here or here.

But if you, too, need a project to keep you busy while you're watching some poor teenager cry her eyes out after getting rejected on American Idol, you can EASILY make your own!!

first, I used a pair of underwear to figure out how much coverage I needed and made myself a paper template, which I used to cut two pieces of cloth, one for the body-facing side and one for the underwear facing side:

Then, I used one of the cuffs off the flannel shirt for some extra padding on the inside of the thing (you can see above where I'd already started sewing it in before I got the bright idea to take some pictures):

Then, I put the outside faces of the two pieces of fabric together and used a looping stitch (I totally forget the name of the stitch, maybe a slip-stitch?) to sew about 3/4 of the way around the outside of the piece so that it was sewn inside-out and was like a little pocket that opened at the top. then, I squished the bottom up through the top so that it was right-side out but still open at the top. At that point, I went ahead and sewed up the top. This means that most of the piece has a nice hidden seam but at the top you can see the stitching. Oh well. Not like i'm going to be showing this off at a cocktail party. I used one of the buttons from the flannel shirt on the little flaps so i can button it around the crotch of my underwear.

Why do I like this?

Well, I would much rather have terry cloth against my skin than some weird amalgamation of cotton, plastic and paper.
Also, the stupid "wings" on the disposable ones always end up sticking to my skin and not to my underwear - they never leave sticky stuff on me, but it's kind of like pulling a band-aid off. not cool.
But ultimately, it's because I am sick and tired of buying something that I throw away! It ends up being between $10-$15 every month between pads and tampons and the other stuff a gal might want to buy.

Now, before you go saying, "would you want to re-use toilet paper, too, D? And what about the fact you'll be using water/energy to launder these?", let me say this:

a) some people DO have reusable toilet wipes (scroll down on that link to see her tidy little stack) which I think is awesomely cool and wish i had the energy to do and
b) i'm not tossing out my underwear when/if I 'leak' so why not just have a piece of cloth that is meant to get dirty? I'm a lot more scared of some of the cleaning rags I have than I am of some stains on my unmentionables.
c) Maybe it takes a bigger carbon footprint to wash something than to just throw it away, but poo on that. I prefer to reuse, I like cloth on my tush, and I feel totally crafty having made these.
d) there's no way to quantify the weird looks your roommate will give you when you sit on the couch working on one of these bad boys, which makes them priceless.

So, there you have it. So far, I have two of these bad boys. They get better the more that I make. I'm in the middle of a third one and I have plenty more cloth to use before I'll need to cannibalize another piece of old clothing! The real trick seems to be getting good needles and thread. I've been using the thread out of those little dollar-sewing-kits (read = I've been cheap) so it breaks a lot. New needles and thread are on my buy-when-you-feel-less-cheap list.


Anyway, a happy recession/depression to you all!
a post on gardening will come.
eventually :)

FreeRice.com

Thanks to Robyn Bradley for showing me the site FreeRice.com, where you play a never-ending vocabulary game that, thanks to the advertising at the bottom, donates rice to UN hunger efforts.

For a vocab nut like me, this is pretty addictive - and I also like the pretty bamboo bowl that fills with rice as you play. I'm putting a banner link to it on this blog as soon as I figure out how to not break the template by doing so.

If you're bored at work or studying for the SAT/ACT/PSAT/GRE/etc., it's a great little site!