Tab-tastic!

So, as I was wandering aimlessly around Threadbanger when I stumbled across a contest on Craftstylish to make something recycled. Immediately various ideas zipped through my head as to what to make. It had to include recycled and found objects. Should be easy, right?

..Right! Well, sorta. The idea was easy. The execution was a little experimental. I made a bead curtain! Well, a soda tab curtain, anyways. I ended up using about 35 plastic bags to make plastic yarn which I then chain stitched, inserting a soda tab every fourth stitch.


Soon, however, I was to discover that I didn't have near enough soda tabs for the job at hand.

See?

So! I looked up and visited a recycling drop off center. They were nice enough let me and boyfriend J pick through the cans and pull off the tabs.

Ew.

People, clean your freakin' soda cans before recycling! PLEASE! You never know when college- age innocents (shyeah, ok) are gonna have to pick through them to collect the shiny tabs of awesome for a recycling project contest. The smell coming from that bin was rancid, to say the least. Smells of congealed Coke, sticky fumes of Mountain Dew and an overwhelming cloud of stale Beer smell mingled together to create an odor that could be used as a biochemical war weapon. The kind that could send people running WEEKS in advance just to avoid even the idea of it permeating their town.

Moving on.

After picking through the cans and finding as many a I thought I needed I immediately headed to the recycling facilities facilities (ha!) and poured about half a gallon of peroxide over my black, sticky fingers hoping to kill whatever had, at that point, decided to try to colonize them.

Turns out, though, that the tab harvest wasn't good enough! Luckily, however, a neighbor of the recycling facility had a mountain of tabs he and his wife were getting rid of that I could pick up the next morning. So I did.


Originally I wanted a fallen tree branch or an old wooden broomstick for the base of the curtain, but I found something better-a belt! With two whole rows of holes! One row I tied my strings of plastic and tabs to, but alas! The cursed things wouldn't hang straight! Solution? Rocks! Rocks in little plastic pouches on the ends! MAGIC!! Ok, not really, but it did take a lot of patience, which is about the same thing.After some rock-rehab, the strands finally agreed to keep straight:


And so, the wondrous, tab-tastic curtain of awesome was installed:



Now that's what I call recycling! As far as the contest is concerned, though, I don't really mind losing. It was a fun excuse to finally recycle those bags I have hanging around the apartment and use all the tabs I collected in highschool but was too nostalgic to get rid of. Truth be told, if I even placed I'd like to get one of the third runners up places-you get a lot of yarn for that! First only gets a portable screen printing machine. I have embroidery hoops, modgepodge and nylon fabric for that.. But that's a whole other post, chickies.