meanderings0ul replied to your post

via https://ift.tt/2ltO4vq

meanderings0ul replied to your post “meanderings0ul replied to your post “Reusable Bulk Containers” …”

Thank you for clarifying. About the only thing the US does a consistently good job at recycling is steel. It’s very frustrating that a lot of formally recycled materials end up in the landfill, but if the city is getting official credit for their recycling program it has to be buried in a specific part of the landfill where it could technically be retrieved for reprocessing at a later date. It’s a paltry excuse for a system in most places, but usership is how cities

…get funding for better recycling infrastructure, so it doesn’t work well so don’t bother was just not a good vibe for me. The international garbage fiasco is a whole nother layer, but how cities actually deal with this stuff is part of rl job, so I had to ask….

Ah, this is good information!! See, I didn’t know all that, and was just feeling glum, but instinctively thinking well, I still better keep recycling. So!!! Even if your municipality isn’t properly recycling things, it’s still worth keeping in the habit of separating everything. I just think it behooves us to reduce use as a first step.

I just wish there was more transparency and information about this, because for example at the farm we collect recyclables and trash and take them to the town transfer station ourselves but if we were informed and could determine that they’re putting recyclables in the landfill, we’d compost the paper, etcetera. (It would require us to do some rearrangement of our compost, but like. We’ve got the capacity. We’re just not going to do it if there’s a better place for paper to go. But if it’s not really going to that better place… well…)

fabledshadow replied to your

via https://ift.tt/2l6ROTl

fabledshadow replied to your post “meanderings0ul replied to your post “meanderings0ul replied to your…”

This is a Serious Topic and all i could think reading that last paragraph is “the paper’s gone to a Better Place”

By which i mean to say i’m in the camp of ‘make friends/allies locally and source as much as you can there because shit is going to hit the fan and thinking on a nationwide scale is going to be unneeded soon’ so like …i’ll just be over here in my Oscar the Grouch trashcan lol

LOL, old paper is happier as soil, surely?

I also plan to do some papermaking, so I have actually been hoarding paper to recycle myself. (I want to make paper with the waste from flax processing but without a Hollander beater I don’t know how successful I’ll be, but I just met the person who owns the old mill on the stream by the farm and I want to ask him about setting up a tiny water wheel in his millrace so I can make hydropowered drop hammers. That’s probably a bit of a pipe dream, though.)

But like… I mean, I’m becoming a big advocate of coming up with local sources for your food web etc., and you’re not wrong, if shit hits the fan you’re better off the shorter your supply chain is.

But I’m really trying to be hopeful about it, and positive, and my point is, paying closer attention to possible local sources for your life needs can only have a good impact. The Troy Farmer’s Market just won a big award, it’s about 20 years old and the city has transformed around it and partly because of it, it’s such a huge focal point for the community– and I want that, but more inclusive, I want American cities to be able to have inclusive local cultures, and I don’t know how to do it but I know part of it is not just blindly buying eggs from Wal-Mart that come from mistreated chickens tended by human trafficking victims halfway across the country because that’s the cheapest price you can get. That’s not how to eat, that’s not how to have a human society, that’s not how to care for yourself or your people. 

Knowing where your garbage goes, knowing where your food comes from– that’s my point. And even more positively, it’s just nice to be in tune with your countryside, you know? What’s in season right now? Who has autumn blueberries, what a treat! You appreciate stuff more when it’s in tune with your environment, I think. Local flowers, not hot-house, are so much more beautiful, and incidentally you’re not endangering the health of Colombian flower workers and spewing carbon into the air from having tropical flowers flown to you. Like, it’s layers, here.

If your guiding principle on food shopping is not “who can give this to me for the absolute cheapest price”, but is rather “what is this, where did it come from, and did everyone handling it make a living in the process? did it live well and did it die well? was it produced sustainably?” then there’s a lot less incentive for the cost-cutting self-inspection bullshit that gives you human fingers in the sausage and so on.

And yes, if there’s any kind of destabilization, living somewhere where there’s a robust local food web is going to put you in a lot better position for, like, continued survival, than living somewhere that only has imported food. I’m definitely not not thinking about that.

Also, as an aside, I keep commenting on people’s “time to go vegetarian!” posts to harp on about how vegetable markets aren’t any more sustainable, but I should point out for the record that I ate a vegetarian dinner last night and am not actually some kind of meat fiend. (Tomato soup, all from stuff from the farm. It was super nice.) I do think Americans eat more meat than they need to, and that meat ought to be an expensive thing you build meals around and sometimes do without rather than the bulk staple so many American diets treat it as. (I’m relying on one half of a chicken for all my meat needs this week. It’s plenty, for two people!) But just discarding meat from the diet without giving any thought to the whole system is not going to solve any of our larger problems, so. Lettuce listeria will make you just as miserable as the e. coli in uninspected pork. And the horrible things Driscoll’s workers go through do nothing to convince me that berries are somehow more virtuous than chicken! I’m super tired of “meatless mondays” level of zero-introspection into the foodweb, is all. Demonizing a foodstuff instead of investigating the whole system isn’t going to help one tiny bit at all.

that upcycled dress

via https://ift.tt/2mHYwPO

that I talked about in this post [https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/187717557964/saturday]

I finally took a moment to get a photo of it. It is not a great photo but it is in focus. As an aside, wow I never look at full body shots of myself, that is uh not how I think I look. That’s okay, let’s not discuss my feelings. (Part of it is that I had my phone propped against a fire extinguisher and thought it might tip over at any instant. There’s a semi-hilarious outtake I’m not going to bother posting where just that happened. Imagine it: me looking dismayed and blurry and sideways in the distance, mostly ceiling though.)

So this is the dress I was talking about before that I made out of two or three old t-shirts and the bottom of a torn skirt someone handed up to me. (The waistband of that skirt is part of another almost-finished upcycled dress that I’ll take pictures of at some point!) It’s reasonably closely based on the Natalie Chanin t-shirt-corset pattern from her Alabama Stitch Book, which has to go back to the library today whoops, though I had to trace the pattern and size it up somewhat inexpertly, so it kind of. Well, it’s close, we’ll just say. Closer than just “inspired by”, but not actually really the pattern itself.

Anyway photo behind the cut.

[image description: the author, a large blond white woman with her hair pulled back tighter than she thought it was wow it looks like i’m wearing a skullcap, looking disapprovingly at the camera with her hands on her hips in a bad imitation of a coy pose, wearing a dress made of several curving panels of black and dark gray t-shirt material sewn together with hot pink seams, with a skirt that’s black and has horizontal bands of ribbon across it and is also kind of transparent. incidentally also she is wearing a necklace that is two triceratops skulls staring at one another in profile, and leggings that are slashed to reveal fishnet underneath.]

The t-shirt corset is longer, in the pattern, and extends down over the hips, and I was like, no. Also she wants you to hand-sew it with the seams on the outside, and I decided that since i own a serger and this was the trial run of the pattern, I would instead put embroidery thread in my upper looper and serge the thing, so I did. Maybe I’ll handsew a future version once I’m sure I’ve got the pattern adjusted properly. 

The skirt pattern she uses is a four-gore A-line skirt, but this is an old broomstick tiered skirt from the 90s with a costume petticoat under it. No, the leggings are not upcycled, I bought them like that because Torrid had them on sale and my previous attempt to make my own had not come up with any kind of usable product. 

This is not a *perfect* dress pattern yet; I think I like a more defined waistband or a more substantial fabric. But it’s a good trial run and I’ll have fun wearing it around. Needs pockets though, not sure how to add them to so insubstantial a skirt– maybe, attach them to the shirt, and then down into the skirt but the idea is the weight of what’s in them will mostly pull on the bodice? How to engineer? Must consider.