Did Your Grandma Save Tin Foil?
Sometimes I will post a short entry like this one because I would like to have a question answered. I am in the process of asking my grandparents these very same questions, but I like to compare and contrast their answers with the stories you share. So it is time for another What Would Grandma Do? question.
My grandparents saved everything out of necessity. I do not have to. At this point, I have the privilege of choosing to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.
On Monday, I took on the Grandma Challenge of using all-natural bar soap because it helps me reduce my use of packaging along with a few chemicals I think I am better off without.
Today, I tried to wash a piece of tin foil so I could reuse it. I do not think it is going to make it past a second use. Either modern tin foil is too flimsy to reuse or I need to buy some heavy duty foil. Perhaps I simply need to live without it.
What did your grandparents save for reuse? What do you save for reuse today?
You bet she saved tin foil! They also made do and fixed many things with bailing twine. I’ve seen doors hung with the stuff, and it turned into curtain rods.
My Grandma saved the selvage off of new fabrac and used it like string, and made quilts out of the old coats and blankets.
I don’t know if my grandma did, but I do. I wrap my sandwich in the heavy duty kind, and I just wipe it with a towel afterwards. It lasts for over a week for me.
My mother (and probably my grandmothers, too!) saved tin foil, plastic bags, and tea bags, all for re-use! She would get multiples uses out of all of these items. I used to think my parents were just cheap; I now know that they were cheap and GREEN!
OK, so this is where I have to confess that I HATE saving baggies, foil, etc., etc. And the reason I hate it, is because they tend to lay around on the counters and clutter my house. I think about washing baggies and then I don’t because they don’t get cleaned right and then take forever to dry in our dishrack. My mother-in-law saves everything: tin-foil, bread tags, twist ties, tea bags, etc., etc. and her counters are so cluttered. On the rare occasion that I’m at her house and washing dishes, I subtlely throw all of that stuff in the garbage just to make things neat and then claim ignorance. I’m just not sure I’m up to this challenge . . .
Oh yes, twist ties! I noticed that my mom keeps twist ties all neatly standing up in a juice glass in the cupboard, so I’ve taken to doing the same.
I wash the baggies in the soapy dish water and then hang them open on a decoration in the windowseal to dry. They are dry with the rest of the dishes in the morning and get put away in the drawer.
I guess I don’t tend to use tin foil. I put left overs in glass bowls covered with a glass plate.
I save those plastic bags from the grocery store for my cheap version of a diaper genie; when I have a collection of “enough” of them, I use my cloth tote bags at the store and request they use paper bags. I save them and use the paper bags to hold our newspaper recycling. Another thing I have done with paper grocery bags is to use the blank side as wrapping paper, having my kids decorate it up. Or simply tie a (clearance after Christmas) cloth ribbon around it. The ribbon can be reused too.
I admit I don’t reuse the foil. However, I do reuse our produce bags. Then again, I feel like we HAVE to because we invested in a bunch of the Evert Frest bags (http://www.reusablebags.com/store/evertfresh-green-bags-pack-medium-p-27.html?osCsid=8a07bcf5ee20d20128938d7e1e3af581). Hey, they work and my veggies don’t go to rot as quickly…
It’s kind of humourous to see them standing up on the counters like little green ghosts after they’ve been washed and are air drying. LOL
Anyhow, I don’t know if using them really impacts my family’s carbon footprint or not, but I’m glad to have produce that lasts longer. That must count for something, right? (Certainly my end budget and that’s worth a lot to me.)
I feel privileged that we have to save out of necessity. I don’t know if I would have saved to the extent that I do if we would not have lived in Nigeria 7 years ago. We adapted some lessons into our American life when we moved back to Michigan. It was still easy to dump when we moved back, but the lessons learned from those two years really stuck. Now living in Nigeria again, we save and reuse everything we can. I dumped our first ziplock bag just yesterday…the first in a year. I will admit that I despise washing the things, but it feel so good putting them back on the shelf after they are cleaned and dried.
We try to use our tinfoil, wrapping paper, bows, etc. When they are out of functional use for me, I add things to the kids’ craft box. Tin foil can be awesome on a collage! Especially the caramel Hershey kiss wrapper! Twine is a great addition to the juice box cars our neighbors make daily. An expired extension card became a swing one day. And a plastic bag coupled with a piece of straw became a kite. Like I said, it’s a privilege to be forced to expand my practices of saving here. I can’t imagine i would be making kites out of bags and straw if I were still living in Michigan.
Buying greeting cards is very expensive out here. (I only do it for special friends.) ; ) I save all of the greeting cards that are sent to use so that I can clip out images and words to reuse in my own creation. It’s the green version of card making! Honestly, I find it a redemptive process, taking the old and making something new. It’s a therapeutic process as I cut and clip out the worthless pieces and make a beautiful creation with the useful parts. Gives me a lot to ponder as I relate to what God does to my own life on a daily basis.
Your comments have been very helpful. I will write a follow up post in the near future summarizing your suggestions. I think “saving” is a great Grandma Challenge. Keep your ideas coming!
Alright April, it has been a month to the day when you wrote this article pertaining to what my grandma saved and I think I have my thoughts coherently thunked out. (?) Unlike yourself, I had the fortune of having older parents (that sounds kind of wierd), what I mean to say is that my dad and mom were 45 and 43 respectively when I was born (1970). Doing the math, you may realize that my parents grew up in Depression. I have heard plenty of the “When I was a kid…” So in relation to what you asked of what was saved the three things that jumped (over this past month) to my mind were plastic breadbags (for the galoshes), string from the bakery (for whatever), and “drum roll please” bacon grease (which was stored in an empty frozen orange juice concentrate can). Maybe I can count that as four things. Some of you reading this may be asking, why bacon grease? They mainly used it in the fry pan when they fried eggs for its flavor and non-stick qualities.
There I got it off my chest! I’ll have another response ready in about a month. Until then, get your apple picking skills ready!
Jim
Thanks for your emails yesterday.
I’m really enjoying making my way through your blog as I get caught up to where you are now. I keep forgetting how long ago you posted these. 
My mother still saves her tin foil. She mostly uses it when she bakes cookies. We* only have 2 cookie sheets each, but a batch of cookies usually takes up three sheets. I learned to put a sheet of tin foil down on a cookie sheet, and put the balls of cookie dough on that. We can prepare a second sheet while the first is in the oven. Then we can pull the first one out, carefully pull or shake the tin foil onto a cooling rack, and once the cookie sheet is cool enough to put down on the table, we load it up with another set of tin foil and cookies. When we’re all finished, the cookie sheets only need to be wiped off with a cloth and they can be put away. Then Mom scrubs down the tin foil - flattening it out again as she washes it, lets it dry, and then folds it and puts it back in the cabinet. That same foil gets used the next time she bakes cookies.
I have tried, but I haven’t been successful yet. Mom doesn’t have a dishwasher, and she does have this lovely drainboard that is built into the sink, which makes washing a lot of large and awkwardly shaped things easier (and I want one). I just make a sloppy, soapy mess at my house. :p Then I haven’t figured out where to keep the used foil, and I just got married and haven’t convinced my husband that it’s worthwhile yet. (Neither one of us likes to wash dishes, but I also hate the dishwasher. He won’t wash pots and pans or the foil. Nice conundrum, huh?
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I also learned from my mother to save twist ties. We keep them in an old jelly or peanut butter jar, with a lid. Now I chew out my husband for bringing more home from the store, because we already have too many to use. Hehe
We reuse junk mail, too. The blank back side of letters is great for drawing paper, and the blank-sided envelopes make awesome to-do and shopping lists. We can put coupons in them when we go to the store, too.
Mom reuses bread bags. She rinses them out and stands them up in the drain basket to dry, then bundles them together and they go in the cabinet with the tin foil. She uses them for: homemade bread, freezing half-loafs of bread, any other kind of bread product - and really anything else that needs a bag of that particular shape and size. They don’t often get reused more than once, unless they had another bread product in them.
I’m sure I’ll come up with more as we go along, but for now, this one comment has become rather long. Thanks again for sharing this experiment with us.
*If I say ‘we’ do something, then that means that we both do it the same way. Unfortunately, being 1300 miles apart right now means that we can’t do things together.