There is a joke about an old woman, of a thrifty disposition, whose children find an envelope after her death that is labeled "bits of thread, too small to use".
I think about that when I am debating whether to keep something or to throw it out. Yes, perhaps I can find a use for twist ties, bread clips, plastic bags, toilet paper tubes, and tiny scraps of fabric. But I could also end up buried in piles of crap I'm saving in an effort to not waste.
In my living room there is an old dresser (very old - and very broken - but it's been in the family forever) in the corner that I use to store my fabric stash. I tell myself, at the point I can't fit anything else in there, that's when I need to make some tough choices. And when it got to that point again last month, I found a pile of old Tshirt strips. I had taken these old stained, ripped, unusable shirts and cut them into strips, and then stored them.
Could I be that old lady someday, and when they are cleaning out my stuff they say "why did she keep these rags all these years?"
With the specter of Hoarders hanging over my head I have been busy actually using those scraps - sew them together into long rolls, then braid them together. It will be a rag rug.
What do you keep, and hope to actually use some day? Bottle caps? The fortune strips out of fortune cookies? Aluminum foil?
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