Enjoy the tid-bits of our everyday life: dairy goats, sheep, poultry, beekeeping, gardening, cheese making, spinning and knitting, quilting, and soap making. We're not experts, but we are willing to give almost anything a try! We're learning something new everyday--drop by once in a while and see what we've learned today!
Saturday I spent a few hours cleaning out the front flower bed. Needless to say, it was full of weeds and dead leaves. I ran out of space in the garbage pail. Hubby would prefer that we throw some weeds away instead of putting them in the garden, and these weeds were not 'goat friendly'.
I was dreading the thought of shoving weeds into the big green plastic garbage bags. It doesn't matter what I do or what I put them in, they get holes and are difficult to move.
Hmmm.... We just brought in a load of grain and alfalfa pellets for the animals. Hubby and Vet2Be just filled all the 55 gallon drums and put the feed bags into the garbage.
I thought those empty feed bags would make much better bags to hold the weeds than the green plastic lawn and leaf bags.
The are!
They don't hold quite as much as the lawn and leaf bags, but they are soooo much sturdier that I can pack them really full!
I've been saving the brown paper Purina bags to put around the vegetable garden plants in the spring. We couldn't think of a good use for the IFA bags, but I think I'll be saving them for a while! They make a much better garbage bag for lawn and garden garbage than the plastic ones.
I was looking up how to cut snowflakes because I couldn't remember quite how to fold them. I have a friend who was never taught how to make them and I thought that it would be fun to show up at her door one day with paper and scissors and just sit and cut!
It occurred to me that I have milk filters, and those might work well for making snowflakes.
I have no idea how I put those milk filters and snowflakes together, but I did. Cross-wired brain, I guess!
I tried washing my milk filters a few months ago. I put them in the dishwasher with plastic clothes clips on them to hold them upright on the cup pegs on the top rack. I set the dishwasher for the sanitize cycle. I don't usually re-use them, but I was down to my last two and I wasn't sure when I was going to get to the farm supply store, so I thought I would give washing them a try. They came out clean and re-usable, and probably more sanitized than when they came out of the box!
Last night I decided to wash a few more, and see if they would work for snowflakes.
Yup! They do!
Milk filter snowflake.
They were easier to cut than paper, which surprised me a little. I'm sure that they will do much better on the windows, too. Our windows tend to collect moisture, and the paper snowflakes get all gloopy. I am almost tempted to try dying them before I cut them with some blue sharpie markers and alcohol, just to see how pretty that might be!
Here's my opened box of milk filters.
I'll be washing milk filters all week to save enough for snowflakes! Then I'll stop by my friends with some scissors and re-cycled milk filters to teach her how to cut snowflakes.
Here's a video that shows how to use Sharpie markers and rubbing alcohol to dye.
I think small hobby farmers are always on the lookout for a way to re-use things that are normally disposable. I don't think we live especially 'green', but I am surprised at how many things we re-use compared to others we know.
