I suppose I should explain the title I chose for my blog! It’s hard to corral my interests into a single neat box, or even a dozen unruly ones ... but a lot of my projects have to do with “urban scavenging”. (Okay, it was that or call it "My First Blog" ...)

When I moved back to the States from Belize, many things amazed me, most good; but one thing I’d forgotten is the sheer volume of waste here. It’s incredible! Not just that we Americans are throwing away perfectly good stuff, but also that it’s impossible to buy anything that isn't larded with excess packaging: swaddlings of cardboard boxes, plastic blister packs, Styrofoam peanuts, acres of bubble wrap, miles of packing tape ... you know what I mean.

The good news is that lots of folks are trying to do something about it. In my rural area outside Albuquerque, we directly pay for trash pickup. The more trash you produce, the more you pay … so most all of us consciously try to reduce the throw-aways headed to the landfill.

(In Belize, very little is wasted, but of course there is no formal recycling. And the interpretation of “wasted” stretches to include, say, a plastic lawn chair that you aren’t sitting in at the exact moment that a would-be “recycler” strolls by to liberate it.)

Anyway, here there are a number of creative recycling options for used furniture, clothing and household goods that keep stuff in the use stream. In Albuquerque, and to an extent here in the East Mountains as well, there are scads of thrift stores, used book stores, garage sales, estate sales, auctions, and scratch ‘n dent sales. And that’s where we hang out! We happily dig through piles of vintage books at auction, and luxuriate in hoards of craft materials released whenever someone is “de-stashing” her fiber arts collection.

This is what I mean by “urban scavenging”: on any pretty weekend, we print out the estate sale ads, grab a map, and set off on a glorious scavenger hunt!

This is how I first got interested in collecting vintage cookbooks, for example. I buy boxes of old cookbooks, save some for myself and sell the rest on Amazon or eBay (you can visit my eBay Cookbook Department here). I got so hooked, I even wrote an eBay guide to collecting cookbooks, called How We Ate: Collecting Vintage American Cookbooks.

My latest amazing find was a church cookbook that once was the property of one of Albuquerque's best-loved mayors, Harry Kinney ... take a look here.

Then, when I learned to knit this past winter at my local yarn store – Good Fibrations in Edgewood – back I went to the estate sales in search of vintage yarns and patterns to augment the stash I started with GF. (Good Fibrations is currently hosting their annual “Christmas in July” sale, by the way, with 20% off all the yarn in the store, yikes!)

One of the Uncensored Knitters also admits to hunting through the flea markets in Munich for what she indelicately calls “dead lady’s yarn”. Ugh, sounds heartless and awful, but the truth is, lots of ladies have accumulated a lifetime’s worth of wonderful yarns and they do downsize from time to time as their circumstances change. Doesn’t necessarily mean they died, right? Might mean they moved to a condo in Arizona! I’d rather think good thoughts about it … and I fully expect my own stash to find a new home when I leave it behind.

So, as with the vintage cookbooks, I apply what I indelicately call “drug-dealer math” to my fiber addiction: I buy yarn lots at auction and estate sales, keep what I can and sell the rest to finance my next buy!

I just sent some wonderful lots to auction at eBay, including 2 pounds of chenille in colors I didn’t need, 5 skeins of a super, slubby Norwegian cotton in firecracker red, and a dozen or so skein-ends of wildly colored eyelash yarns. The metallic eyelash yarns sold, and but to my surprise the rest didn’t, which I believe is just due to eBay’s annual summer slowdown. So -- hah! -- that means the yarn's mine, at least for a while. 

 Sooo .... I’ve started knitting a teddy bear with some of the chenille, in a rusty chestnut color that’s just perfect for a bear. I’m making the “Beginner Bear” from Sandra Polley’s Knitted Teddy Bear book,
 


which also includes instructions for a recycled yarn bear, made from picking apart a Goodwill sweater! And I found a "Very Easy Vogue" pattern at a yard sale for a short-sleeve, scoopneck pullover that I think will look wondrous in the red Norwegian cotton.

Whatever yarn’s left by the end of August will head back to eBay for another shot at auction … round ‘n round it goes!

Happy Scavenging,

--Margaret, a.k.a. MaggieBelize

P.S. It dawned on me that until I get around to writing that darned Bio, I can send you to my eBay About Me page instead. How's that for another bit 'o recycling?