plastic bag woven rug in the works!

So many plastic bags in the world! Think how many awesome rugs we could make!

Once in a while I forget to say, "no bag, please," and then I'm stuck with it. Or the bags come with a product (bread and other such groceries), and are such an odd shape that they can't be used as garbage bags. And I can't bear to just throw them out, but pretty soon we had so many that they were just taking up so much room in our kitchen. We needed a rug, and we had the bags for it. Perfect solution, and actually, as it turned out, we didn't have nearly as many needed to make the rug the size I wanted. I'll be finishing it as the bags add up again.

They don't have to float around in the massive heap in the ocean, they can sit right on our floor. It's pretty downright durable as plastic bags tend to be.

Reduce Reuse Recycle!

new home!

The living room...
The backyard view
The kitchen "eating nook"Bedroom (unmade, of course, it wouldn't be a bedroom if it wasn't...not mine, at least)
The lovely living room. Yes, our current table is made up of cardboard boxes. Elegant, eh?

I had a standoff with nature

...and nature won. I have been trying to do laundry today--there is plenty to do after our move to Asheville and there's something fishy going on with the dryer (literally, there are things in there that must have sat in there forever, and it smells like dead fish), so we're hang-drying everything until we figure it all out. Long story short, it went from sunny to thunderstorm in zero seconds and it was a race to get all of the "dry" things down before the drizzle turned into a downpour.

That was ten minutes ago.

Now it's sunny again. Do I dare put the clothes out again? I'm finding Asheville weather to be very erratic...

goodbye carrboro...

bunny

ode to the midwestern storm

ode to the midwestern storm: written in response to the "storms" that we have here in NC (specifically to the one we had last night)
by Katie Chen

I miss the midwestern storm that you can see
faintly, off in the distance and you can watch,
as it barrels closer and closer until you can hear
the whisper of the trembling thunder.

It lands on you with a hardness
constant and abusive
making the trees sway to breaking,
the rain drop like glass shards,
and your heart freeze within your being.

Will the house hold?
Will the windows crumble?
Will lightning strike? Streets flood?
Tornado hit?

The thunder cracks and growls
filling your ears and mind
until all other thoughts
have been pushed out.

Everything shakes, but you
must sit still and wait. Sleep.
In the morning will come the quiet,
the calm, the cool breeze, bird song,
and a lack of memory in all things around
you, for what came the night before.

a rug out of peter's holey jeans!