February 12
Today I made hankies, started a hanky box, and filled two hanky tins!
I love hankies, but my husband doesn’t. Neither do our boys. So the men in my family go through lots of tissues.
Today I decided to pull out all the scrap fabric I had around the house and tackle two issues at once … the huge number of tissues the family uses and discards, and the problem of textile waste.
My grandmother lived through the war and was extremely careful to not waste anything. I still have her little rolled up ends of fabric that she kept whenever she finished a sewing project. I also have a few of our old cotton sheets that had worn out and ripped.
The thing my husband doesn’t like about hankies is the expectation that you blow your nose into them, then put them back into your pocket to use again later.
So today I set to work to make as many hankies as I could so that they could become as ubiquitous as tissues in our household.
My goal is to have hanky tins, or hanky boxes, in every room, so that there are enough for my husband to use them just once – as he would with tissues. The only difference being that the hankies get rewashed instead of thrown into the bin; AND my scrap fabric is saved from landfill.
I made 12 hankies today, out of the old sheet and my Grandmother’s dressmaking scraps, and then I went through my dresser and found lots of gorgeous old fabric serviettes that we simply never use (we have beautiful linen ones we DO use a lot). These serviettes are perfect to use as hankies.
I found two tins to put them in, and started papier mache-ing a hanky box for when I sew some more.
While a tissue box has around 120 tissues, my boxes each only have twelve hankies … but it’s a start. I have plenty of fabric scraps but I’ll try him on the first two hanky boxes and see how he goes – one for his bedroom and one for his office.
I so rarely sew, but today was just lovely because it felt as though I was spending the day with my grandmother again.
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