Choosing Fabrics And Colors
plus some lip balm math
I have been going through my fabric for reupholstering choices. I don't have enough of any wool besides this pretty orange to recover my couch. This (as some of you may remember) was supposed to be my new winter coat. That never got made. Sometimes you have to make some hard choices like- do I pay my electricity bill so it doesn't get turned off today or do I pay my mortgage...do I recover my couch in my winter coat fabric so I won't be depressed sitting in my living room or get depressed making a cute coat that I'm too big to look cute in?Seems impossible to decide sometimes. However, I can probably make a winter coat out of some of the other wool I found. The flower fabric is what I'm thinking about using for the arm chair. It does occur to me that it may give a slightly British chintzy look to my living room but it matches the orange for the couch perfectly. I will have to investigate my stores of fabric just a little more. Most of the fabric I buy is suitable for aprons and quilts and cute projects and not really for a big armchair.
If I use the orange for the couch I think I'll be using the "fern shoot" green for the walls as we did in our last living room. I had finally decided on an antique yellow color but I don't want lots of orange with yellow. Orange with green is much nicer I think. Mixing cool with warm. Balance.
Meanwhile our main computer has a virus. So I'm doing everything on the laptop. Not particularly ideal. But it makes one terribly thankful to have a laptop at all at a time like this. I'm wondering if I should have Philip install InDesign on this dinky machine and work on the magazine from it or wait until the main computer is cleaned up? I'm afraid my magazine launch keeps getting pushed to later and later. I hope you'll all still be interested if it takes another couple of months to get the first one out. I bet most of you don't even think I'll do it. I don't blame you. Personally I think it was a little over enthusiastic to think I could produce something in one month using a program I don't understand.
I have today off. Having at least one day a week off from work is pretty nice. I could get used to this. I can do whatever I want!
What I'm working on right now is making lip balm. I am also preparing oils for using in solid deodorant. If you want to learn how to make both I'm definitely going to tell you here eventually. What you should be doing is saving your used up lip balm tubes and tins, clean them out using the tip of a knife, then a q-tip and/or a paper towel. If you feel more comfortable disinfecting them before using again- wipe them down with rubbing alcohol. For the deodorant, save your tubes because you can use them for your home made version, clean out the residue in the same way you do with the lip balm tubes. This way you don't have to buy containers for this project and you keep some plastic out of the landfill a little longer.
I've been saving up lip balm tubes for a while. I think I've mentioned here before that I go into a full panic attack if I go anywhere without a tube of it. I have a tube of lip balm on me at all times. And OF COURSE I'm very picky about what lip balm I use. I don't like it to be too slick. I don't like the slick sensation (which is why I hate it when magazines say punchy little things like "...with a slick of lipstick on her lips..." Dude. Gross.) The perfect lip balm is the regular Burt's Bees lip balm. It's usually $2.79 a tube around here. I buy lip balm fairly often. I mean every couple of months I buy a couple of tubes. That may not seem like much but think about it: I spend about $16.74 a year on lip balm. That means I also toss out at least six tubes of it a year.
I know what you're thinking: that is so insignificant it doesn't matter.
You're wrong. (if that's what you were actually thinking)
Just think: If only half of the US population uses lip balm (150 million people) and each of them only used and tossed out one tube of lip balm a year, that means that every year 150 million plastic lip balm tubes get tossed onto the landfills every year. But then you have to multiply that number by the probable number of years we're all tossing empty lip balm containers in the garbage, most of us are lucky and get to be adults for at least twenty years. Twenty years have already gone by that I have been using up lip balm and throwing the empties away.
That means that I have already thrown away 120 tubes of lip balm and spent approximately $334 dollars on that product. See how such a tiny little thing can add up?
So if even half of the adults who use lip balm in this country live as long as I have so far there have been about 180 million plastic tubes of lip balm tossed onto the landfills.
I'm being conservative on purpose. Most people who use lip balm probably use more than one tube a year. Can you imagine what 150 million tubes of used up plastic lip balm containers looks like in one heap? Huge. That's how the little things add up. Fast. It's not just you in this country doing whatever you're doing. There are about 305 million people in the United States. So whatever you're using up is being used up by millions of other people too.
But I can't control what other people do. Maybe my desire to reuse lip balm and deodorant containers and make my own sounds insignificant, but every tube of lip balm I don't throw on the heap is one less thing that will take a million years to decompose.
The thing is, it's cheap and easy to make your own lip balm. Obviously that's what I'm going to show you. It's not complicated and doesn't take much time. Plus, you get to have complete control of what goes into it and what it tastes like. It's also cheaper than buying it. I promise, it's cheaper.
Math is so cool.
I know what you're thinking: that is so insignificant it doesn't matter.
You're wrong. (if that's what you were actually thinking)
Just think: If only half of the US population uses lip balm (150 million people) and each of them only used and tossed out one tube of lip balm a year, that means that every year 150 million plastic lip balm tubes get tossed onto the landfills every year. But then you have to multiply that number by the probable number of years we're all tossing empty lip balm containers in the garbage, most of us are lucky and get to be adults for at least twenty years. Twenty years have already gone by that I have been using up lip balm and throwing the empties away.
That means that I have already thrown away 120 tubes of lip balm and spent approximately $334 dollars on that product. See how such a tiny little thing can add up?
So if even half of the adults who use lip balm in this country live as long as I have so far there have been about 180 million plastic tubes of lip balm tossed onto the landfills.
I'm being conservative on purpose. Most people who use lip balm probably use more than one tube a year. Can you imagine what 150 million tubes of used up plastic lip balm containers looks like in one heap? Huge. That's how the little things add up. Fast. It's not just you in this country doing whatever you're doing. There are about 305 million people in the United States. So whatever you're using up is being used up by millions of other people too.
But I can't control what other people do. Maybe my desire to reuse lip balm and deodorant containers and make my own sounds insignificant, but every tube of lip balm I don't throw on the heap is one less thing that will take a million years to decompose.
The thing is, it's cheap and easy to make your own lip balm. Obviously that's what I'm going to show you. It's not complicated and doesn't take much time. Plus, you get to have complete control of what goes into it and what it tastes like. It's also cheaper than buying it. I promise, it's cheaper.
Math is so cool.