What Grandma Would tell You To Save!

[jazzy]

this is a pretty neat youtube by a lady covering all sorts of things about saving, reusing, managing household the way her grandparents did thru hard times. she has some really good common sense ideas and some i didnt know. like i knew i could reuse foil but i didnt know i could wash and reuse parchment paper. dang. this is just one of many many videos shes made. i love her tag line:

Remember--squeeze that quarter til it farts a nickle!

 

[dademoss]

I got a strange look yesterday, I had a ziplock bag drying in the dishrack

 

[elkhound]

my grandparents saved everything.

 

[JustMe]

Yes, I love her and her videos, though I haven't watched in quite awhile and wasn't even sure if she was still posting or not. She is responsible for my learning to dehydrate my own eggs into powder for storage. I'm glad to see she's still out there. Thanks for sharing

 

[Woody]

I love those Styrofoam meat trays! I found more uses for them things than I ever would have imagined. Great for sorting seeds. Take that dried lettuce or carrot seed head, crunch it all up on one and you can shake and blow on it to get rid of the chaff. Working on a project where you are taking something apart? Put those smaller nuts/bots or pieces on them. As long as it isn’t outside and windy that is! Lol!! Cutting up some fruit? Have it next to the cutting board. Place the fruit in it so they don’t roll all over on ya. Also just a handy storage ‘thing’ to put stuff in while you are working on projects. Dry herbs and flowers on them. They make good snack trays. I remember finding all sorts of things to use them for.

We don’t buy meat on them now, we go to a butcher, but they were a great thing to wash and save. Ya know… Thinking on it… I actually miss having some around!!!

What I have a bunch of now is little black plastic trays. The woman likes Stouffers mac and cheese single servings. I believe they use the same thing for several of their entrees. They are.. ohh… 4” x 6” or 7” and maybe ¾” deep. Pretty sturdy. I use them for seed storage in the garage. Just pick the seed heads and plop them in. A piece of masking tape on the outside with what it is and the year. Saves me having to pick seed right then and there. They can take their time drying and I can do it later at my leisure during the long, cold winter months. You can even blow chaff from them in them also, but they don’t hold near as much as the meat trays did.

I take them right out in the garden for planting. Put a large heavy washer in them, I guess a nut or bolt would work too. You can grab a few seeds as you go along and not have to tip a package or jar.

 

[LadyLocust]

I got a strange look yesterday, I had a ziplock bag drying in the dishrack

Why? I have 2 clothes pins on the string for the light above the sink that I hang my washed ziploks from. That would tell me you aren't wasteful - kudos!
I try not to acquire plastic in the first place but if one does, at least reusing it saves it from the landfill since it's no longer recyclable.

 

[Neb]

Why? I have 2 clothes pins on the string for the light above the sink that I hang my washed ziploks from. That would tell me you aren't wasteful - kudos!
I try not to acquire plastic in the first place but if one does, at least reusing it saves it from the landfill since it's no longer recyclable.

Zip loc bags get recycled in my shop. No need to wash them out.

Ben

 

[Tommyice]

My grandmother always encouraged me to cannibalize clothing before I threw it away. All the buttons, snaps, hooks and eyes, zippers, sometimes even the elastic all got removed and saved.

 

[Weedygarden]

my grandparents saved everything.

Mine, too. On the ranch, there was a pile of metal that had previously been something else, but was saved for repairs. They did all their own repair work, including welding. All clothing was saved for rags, reworked for new clothing, something. Other grandparents had a woodpile from some building that had been taken down. All letters, cards, mail were saved and stored in boxes, but burned after the last grandparent died. Food scraps were fed to the chickens. I know this still happens for many.

What I have a bunch of now is little black plastic trays. The woman likes Stouffers mac and cheese single servings. I believe they use the same thing for several of their entrees.

We reuse those plastic containers with lids. Make a big meal and put leftovers in them for what I call freezer meals. I like to make more than I know I will eat, just for freezer meals. Thanksgiving leftovers can make a lot of freezer meals. The containers that frozen meals come in now are really nice for the freezing of leftovers.

 

[Weedygarden]

My grandmother always encouraged me to cannibalize clothing before I threw it away. All the buttons, snaps, hooks and eyes, zippers, sometimes even the elastic all got removed and saved.

I still have some of this that was my grandmother's who died in 1981. I inherited her sewing basket. We always took the buttons off of old clothing and it went into a metal cookie tin. I have done this as well, saving buttons, but I save them in small ziplocs so that I have all the same ones together and don't have to search for them in the tin.

 

[Neb]

My grandmother always encouraged me to cannibalize clothing before I threw it away. All the buttons, snaps, hooks and eyes, zippers, sometimes even the elastic all got removed and saved.

That is a good idea! Something my mother did.

I didn't get specific guidance from my grandmothers being an Air Force brat.

When I did come to visit I did see how simple grandparents lived. There was not much packaging back then only butcher's paper and brown paper bags that were saved to wrap packages to mail and book covers. The butcher's paper was burned in the backyard.

My grandfathers taught me about used tools. My father's father was a trash collector in NYC. The apartment building had incinerators so trash wasn't stinky but broken and unwanted stuff. My father spent a week sorting all if the tools my grandfather collected and outfit his work shop with the best tools.

BTW
My father's father had the most amazing collection of wind-up toys. You name it he had it.

My mother's father ran a grader to maintain county roads. Anytime he spotted a tool along the road he would jump out of the cab and add to his collection. Back then there weren't state vehicle inspections so trunks would rot out and tools would fall out on the road.

Between my grandfathers and father I was bred to scavenge from garbage.

So not so much my grandmothers ...

Ben

 

[Weedygarden]

Between my grandfathers and father I was bred to scavenge from garbage.

I have never jumped into a dumpster to dumpster dive, but I have done some alley shopping in my life. Just yesterday I scored one of those stove top popcorn poppers, the kind where you turn the handle and it keeps stirring.

 

[Caribou]

I remember playing with Mom's and Grandma's button collection.

Take a pair of pants, split the seam from the bottom of the zipper to the middle of the back and sew that cut area up on each leg, leaving the top open. You have one rag bag and one grocery store bag bag. Stuff the top and pull from the bottom of the leg. Wife won't let me hang it in the kitchen but I love mine in the shop. The pockets are handy places for marking pens or other items of similar size.

 

[LadyLocust]

My grandmother always encouraged me to cannibalize clothing before I threw it away. All the buttons, snaps, hooks and eyes, zippers, sometimes even the elastic all got removed and saved.

I do this! Hubby goes through shirts. When they "die" I rob the buttons then chop the good parts and make my "paper towels." Haven't purchased paper towels in years.
ETA I have jars of buttons.

 

[Amish Heart]

I save ziplocks, too. At least use them to haul out food scraps for the animals. My button jar has some buttons in it from my childhood. So fun to look at.

 

[Weedygarden]

My grandmother made a quilt that I now have that was made with fabrics from scraps from clothes we made.

 

[JustMe]

My great grandmother saved buttons and every time we'd visit that was the first place I would go to look and fondle all the pretties. I loved the ones with sparkles (rhinestones) and those with the oyster shell look to them??? I don't remember the proper name at the moment. Currently I have a small collection of buttons since most of our clothes don't have them to save from.


I wash & reuse ziplocs for nearly everything. If I find a good sale on bulk meat or larger package than we'd need for a meal, or when I buy whole chickens & cut them up myself......and repack in the ziplocs and put in the freezer. Most of it can fit in the quart sized bags, then I'll put as many as will fit into a gallon bag just to double bag them.


Plastic containers for margarine, cottage cheese or sour cream can be used to store leftovers in the fridge. When I used to use alot of margarine and could buy the larger container (5lb) it was cheaper to buy that, then refill the small containers from it and keep the extras in the freezer.

I have about 3 boxes full of different type containers I've washed & saved.. Peanut butter jars, spice containers, mayo jars, etc. The spice containers I keep in part in the hopes I can grow enough of whatever to refill them with the same. Another plan for them is that one day I hope to find a good spot to store them filled with garden seed, but until I find the right spot my seeds will have to stay in the baggies in the tote.

I love getting the 1 gallon jugs of whatever, and refill them with stuff like powdered & brown sugar, cornmeal, even my egg powder


Speaking of dumpster diving......my ex MIL did that for years. She had a regular route of places, apartments, bars/taverns, even grocery stores where the store would give her the stuff they were going to dump.... and yes, we'd eat it. Perfectly good food that couldn't be sold. Mainly she'd go for bottles & cans that she took to the recycler for $$$, but so many times she'd find other stuff, like brand new clothes with tags still on them, tv's, microwaves, you name it, she'd find it. I went with her once. I didn't mind what she did or that I'd be crawling around in there........but when I lifted the lid on one dumpster, the smell of rotten fish sent me reeling. I didn't know it at the time, but I was pregnant so that just added to the situation,........but I never went again after that.

 

[Tommyice]

@JustMe the oyster shell one was called Mother of Pearl. Funny how we all have memories of the button jar or box. One day I found a beautiful carved wooden box in the basement of the building here. (Backstory--My grandparents built it in 1940. The front downstairs was the butcher shop/grocery (now it's an apartment). They lived upstairs with my great-grandmother.) Brought upstairs to show my aunt to find out if it belonged to her or her mother. Nope. "What's in it?", she asked. Opened to show her about 10 pounds of casesin and bakelite buttons of all colors and sizes. Best we could figure it belonged to my great-grandmother--she was a seamstress.

 

[UrbanHunter]

We strip the buttons and stuff off clothes, I usually wear my grubby shirts till they are transparent, the wife say's they don't make good cleaning rags... We have lots of old towels and washcloths cut up for for cleaning rags, that creates an issue for me because that stringy towel was my favorite one.... We save plastic containers, but for space sake I would prefer to have something that stacks with matching lids... Pet peeve, I don't like containers with "similar" shapes but where the lids are not interchangeable, the time spent looking for the right lid is just a waste and frustration... We do reuse our plastic ziplock bags, especially the big ones, we keep different kinds of cleaned lettuce in them and then the wife chops up lettuce, carrots, and such for our ready made salads. We have one of those faucets that look like an upside J, the wife washes the bag and puts it over the J to dry.

 

[snappy1]

I have never jumped into a dumpster to dumpster dive, but I have done some alley shopping in my life. Just yesterday I scored one of those stove top popcorn poppers, the kind where you turn the handle and it keeps stirring.

DH cracked a rib dumpster diving. It can be rough!

I re-use baggies that have had fruit or veggies in them. Not meat or cheese.

 

[JustMe]

We save plastic containers, but for space sake I would prefer to have something that stacks with matching lids... Pet peeve, I don't like containers with "similar" shapes but where the lids are not interchangeable, the time spent looking for the right lid is just a waste and frustration...

Ya know........that's been the dilemma of probably every house wife (or anyone for that matter) since Tupperware was invented. For some strange reason after the first or second time of using them, the pieces never match up again, EVERRRR

 

[DodgesMamMaw]

I inherited my MamMaws button box. I spent many hours playing in them. We save our plastic containers too. When I use them I label them with a piece of masking tape and a marker. my folks are on Meals on Wheels their meals come on sturdy 3 compartments. Great for leftovers.