Necessity is the Mother of Invention, but who's the Mother of Necessity?

You've probably all heard the adage, "Waste not. Want not," right?


It's an awesome saying, and a wonderful way to live. That is, if you're not me. From the time I could remember, I have felt a moral obligation to not waste stuff - to find a use for anything that had any use left in it. I think I can squeeze use out of things that really have none left, and seeing the potential for practically everything is really cluttering to the mind.


I'm sure part of it came from growing up in a large family with not a lot of extra to go around. And I'm sure the fact that we've always been a single income family has played a role as well. But I think it's deeper than that. I think it's part of who I am to the core. Part of where I came from...


My grandparents raised their family during the Great Depression. Times were so incredibly tough then. At a time in history when women just didn't work outside the home, my grandmother cleaned the schoolhouse after hours to help make ends meet. I've heard stories all my life about how ingenuous she was. She absolutely amazed me my entire life. I adored her.


One of the things Mom has told me many times, is how Grammy would pick up left over construction paper off the floors when she was cleaning. Because this was during the Great Depression,every inch of available paper was used by someone. Nothing went to waste. The pieces of construction paper were often just slivers, but no piece was too small. She gathered them religiously.


Money was so incredibly tight during the Great Depression, that Mom and her brothers and sisters got one new pair of shoes a year. By the time the school year was over, the shoes no longer fit or had huge holes in them. They were all but abandoned, but that never seemed to be too much of a problem, for summer had arrived, and the kids would run around barefoot. 


Shoes weren't the only luxury for my mom's during the Great Depression. Clothes were, too. Grammy made most of the clothes for the entire family. Socks were darned until they were so well used they were literally falling apart. Clothes were handed down from the older kids to the younger until some clothes were worn by every child in the family, regardless of their gender. Like many women raising families during the Great Depression, my grandmother used feed sacks and flour and sugar sacks for fabric to make dresses for the girls and dress shirts for the boys.


But that wasn't enough for Grammy. She wanted to take away the sting of poverty. In spite of the fact that the girls knew their dresses were made from feed and flour sacks, Grammy wanted to make them special. She wanted her girls to know how much they meant to her. To know that they were more than their current economic status. So she got creative. 


When it was time to make dresses for her daughters, she would painstakingly separate the colors of construction paper and put them in a large vat of boiling water on the stove. She would then add the flour sacks that she'd thoroughly washed beforehand to the water.  Once the sacks, which had been opened at the seams to make a flat piece of fabric, had boiled long enough, she would rinse them and hang them to dry. Then she would get busy cutting out dress patterns on beautifully colored fabric and start sewing.


By the time Grammy was done, the girls would each have a beautiful new dress. Mom said it made her feel so incredibly special, that Grammy would go to all that trouble for them. It would be apt to say in this case that necessity truly was the mother of invention!


However, things have changed. Drastically. Overall, Americans today don't know what it truly means to need something. I know it's not the steadfast rule, but even in these rough economic times, the vast majority of homes have at least one computer, one cell phone and one car, if not two or more of each, plus cable or satellite television. We just have access to an overabundance of stuff - especially clothing. We can buy at thrift stores, garage sales or from the clearance racks for just pennies on the dollar, and that doesn't even count the bags and bags of clothing people give away every day on Craigslist or the different online free groups that are out there.


Unfortunately, hoarding and overabundance go hand in hand. Sort of like the Titanic and icebergs. It definitely makes the waters a little rougher for me to navigate. It doesn't mean I can't or won't be able to keep my head above water.


It just means I have to learn how to swim.

Boopada ba ba ba ba boo. Boopada ba ba ba ba boo.

I'm punch drunk tonight. Too much caffeine today. Too little rest. Too much coughing. Too little sounding like myself and a little too much resemblance to the great Louis Armstrong. And for whatever reason, with my gravely, raw voice, I find that I cannot stop singing scat. At one point on the phone with my daughter tonight, she asked me to please stop, or she would have to hang up. :::sigh::: I get no respect.

But you know...it's not often that I have a voice that sounds like Mr. Armstrong. And not often that I'm punch drunk enough to not be able to stop. Oh well. I may as well go with the flow and enjoy myself.

I was not able to finish the insurance paperwork today. With the hubby being at work, the middle daughter hounded me. She believed I spent enough time taking my test and I should be done. I did make plenty of progress today. I just didn't finish.

I have to make a couple of phone calls tomorrow for last minute price checks. I only have to figure out the claims for 6 things. Well, sort of. One of those 6 things are adorable things that the kids made in school and brought home. Their masterpieces. And how am I possibly going to assess a value to them? They're irreplaceable.

I did take pictures of each individual one, so I have the memory. Unfortunately, the memory now includes the mildew, mold and water damage on these priceless works of art. I'm hoping I can use some photo editing software and cover the mildew somehow. Eventually, I'd love to put all the pictures in an electronic picture frame, so we can enjoy them whenever we want. Still. It won't be the same, and I have no idea how to calculate what they're worth.

One of my favorite things that was destroyed I had every intention of hanging on the wall for eternity. I just hadn't gotten around to it. When our oldest was about 9, she had to make a family tree with her parents. We spent hours on it, and it turned out beautifully. It was a huge tree, because I come from a very large family, and by the time both mine and hubby's families were combined on the board, it was hard to fit everyone on there.

After cutting out several individual leaves and making the background for the tree, she cut out roughly 60 hearts. They each hung from a small piece of yarn like apples waiting to be plucked. Each heart had a different name on it. From her grandparents on down. All of her aunts and uncles and cousins and sisters were on this big, beautiful family tree. She was so proud of it. We were so proud of her. She worked so hard on it!

I loved the fact that she chose to put hearts on it instead of apples. That she wanted everyone to know that family symbolized love to her.

How do I possibly put a price tag on something that beautiful?

Creativitity can be a curse!

Years ago, I was at a friend's house. We were talking as she was vacuuming the kids' bedroom. I was shocked as she vacuumed up loose change, Legos, other small toys, and trash with a canister vac. Ok. The fact she was vacuuming up trash didn't shock me at all, but the fact that she vacuumed up things of value did. The difference was that those things had value to me, but not to her. I still have a really hard time vacuuming up little things - even rubber bands and paperclips.

I see the value in minute things. Things that most others see as trash I see as what I can turn it into. In many ways, it's been good, because it's saved us money over the years - money we didn't have, because I couldn't work outside the home due to our children's health issues. In other ways, it's been nothing less than disastrous.

It's obvious that my creativity is in overdrive whenever I see a situation that needs a solution. Here's an example that happened today:

Our daughter came home from school. Her coat had ripped out when she tried to unzip it. I'm not sure how it happened, but she's stronger than the average girl, and I think she got frustrated and put a little too much strength into it. At any rate, she tore the seam in the lining, and the innards were showing.

She was quite upset, so the first thing I did was told her where to find the other coat just like it. It still had the tags on it. I'd gotten it for 75% off a couple of years ago several months after we bought the one she's been wearing. I was going to sell it on eBay, but I was very thankful I hadn't taken the time to put it up for auction yet. So she was very relieved when she knew she'd have a coat for school tomorrow, and we wouldn't have to go out to buy one tonight!

Next, I took a look at the damaged coat to see, if it could be mended. It could. Normally, I would not have tried to mend it immediately. I would have put it off, but I am really wanting to change things, so I mended it with some fusible tape, and I had her try it on again. The mending was fine on it, but the zipper was shot. At this point, I had a decision to make.

I know most people would just automatically toss it in the trash, but I'm not most people. I had to weigh the options. Because I can use a sewing machine fairly well, I knew I could replace the zipper, if I wanted. I also knew that I'd likely never get around to it, as can my mending pile from over 20 years ago attest! Yes. I still have some mending from over 20 years ago. I don't know where it is, but I have it. I couldn't bring myself to throw out something that was perfectly usable, if I only took the time to fix it. Somehow, I thought I'd have more time than I do.

Next, I thought about how I could make a pillow out of it for her. She really would love it, and it would be soft, plus it would have her team's logo on it. I got stuck here in this thought process for awhile. I mean..she really would like a pillow made out of it. No doubt about it! It would be very easy to do. I could give myself a time by which to have it sewn, and get it done, but I know me. If I didn't have it sewn by the deadline, I'd probably extend the time limit I'd given myself, and it would live somewhere in our house for several years.

A couple of weeks ago, I'd have probably saved the coat to make a pillow. But would I actually make it? I don't want to see it days, weeks, years from now calling my name and making me feel guilty. "Hey Judy! Didn't you promise to make me into something usable? Why do you go back on your word like that? Why are you so worthless? You always make promises to yourself you can't keep! What a loser!!"

I have a lot of things calling my name. A lot of things calling me "loser".

I'm done. I'm worth more than the junk I have accumulated in my house.

I threw the coat away.