Our mothers and/or grandmothers grew up in a time when money and resources were scarce. That scarcity forced people to really make the most of the few resources they had at their disposal. But our foremothers were as savvy as they come, and they truly mastered the art of reusing and repurposing!
There’s a lot we can learn from the way Grandma lived. Finding ways to reuse things maximize to your resources can help you stretch a limited budget. And on a larger scale, global climate change and other environmental issues have made resourcefulness and waste reduction more important than ever!
In today’s post, we’ll be following in our grandmothers’ footsteps by exploring 9 things they never threw away, so that we can learn how to reuse those things too! With the help of these simple tips, we can all work toward living a less wasteful and more resourceful life in the coming year!
9 Things Grandma Never Threw Away
1. Worn out Fabrics
Grandma was a real pro when it came to reusing fabric. If Grandpa’s suit started to fall apart, she would hack it up and turn it into something new! You can apply this “make-do” mentality by finding ways to fix or reuse old clothes, towels, and bedsheets.
You might be able to salvage your favorite pair of jeans with a new zipper! That old sweater may look as good as new after a good de-pilling session. Or you can cut up a hole-ridden towel to use as dish cloths. Even an old sheet can be used as a drop cloth!
Related: 17 New Ways to Use Old Bed Sheets
2. Aluminum Foil
Depending on how you used a piece of aluminum foil the first time, you may be able to rinse it off and use it again! Reuse foil to cover up leftovers, or ball it up and use it to scrub stubborn messes out of your pots and pans.
You can also use foil to sharpen scissors! Just fold a piece of foil up a few times, then cut across it several times with your scissors.
Related: 15 Brilliant Uses for Aluminum Foil That Will Save You Time
3. Shirt Buttons
Grandma would never have let good shirt buttons go to waste! If an old shirt starts to fall apart, reuse the fabric (see #1 above) and put the buttons aside somewhere safe. Use your stashed buttons to replace missing buttons on other pieces of clothing, or on clothes you make from scratch! You can make a lot of crafts and toys from old buttons, too.
4. Jars, Jugs, Boxes, & Other Containers
Many food items come in plastic or glass containers, and those containers can all be reused in hundreds of ways! Use larger jars to store bulk ingredients in your pantry or homemade spice mixes, and smaller jars to keep track of screws or nails in the garage.
You can even remove the labels from your containers to make them look a little nicer. (Check out the link below for details!)
Related: 12 Ways to Remove Stubborn Stickers Easily
5. Food Scraps & Bones
Grandma would never throw out perfectly good chicken carcasses, fatty bits of meat, or the tops and bottoms of veggies, because all of those things can be used to make delicious homemade broths and stocks! Whenever you have these types of scraps after preparing a meal, add them to a ziplock freezer bag and keep it in your freezer.
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Once the bag is full, dump it into your Instant Pot with a few cups of water and your favorite seasonings. After an hour or two of pressure cooking, you’ll have a delicious stock that’s ready to strain and use in all your favorite recipes!
6. Eggshells
Instead of tossing your eggshells in the trash, save them! After washing and drying them, you can use them for all sorts of things. They make a great fertilizer for your garden while also deterring pests. Check out the link below to learn much more about reusing eggshells.
Related: 8 Smart Reasons You Should Be Keeping Your Eggshells
7. Bacon Fat
Cooking oils and fats cost money to buy at the store, so why get rid of perfectly good bacon fat? You can use it in place of butter or oil while making gravy, soups, cornbread, potato salad, and more! Keep bacon fat in an airtight container in your fridge, and it will stay good for about a month.
8. Newspaper
Grandma had no shortage of ways to reuse newspapers and newsprint. Use it to wrap gifts and packages, clean glass and windows, cushion fragile items in storage, line pet cages, or start a fire! They also make quick and easy “sit upons” — just put several sections of newspaper in an old pillowcase – aim for about an inch thick pile of newspaper. Kids love to “sit upon” these outdoors!
9. Soap Scraps
When you use up a bar of soap, you usually end up with a little sliver that is too small to use functionally. Instead of tossing it out, tuck those soap scraps into a worn out stocking (or one leg of a worn pair of pantyhose) for safe keeping.
Once you have a good amount of soap slivers saved up, tie off the stocking and trim the excess material away. Then you’ll have a perfectly good soap pouch to use in the shower or at the sink for washing up!
What sorts of items do you reuse and repurpose at home?
NEW! Can you guess the 5-letter word related to today’s post?
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-I buy huge, heavy boxes of dishwasher soap at the box store, and pour some into an empty, 20 oz. coffee creamer bottle for filling the dishwasher dispenser. Also use for your dry homemade recipes, etc. No scrubbing labels off, either.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.-I’m saving all my milk and vinegar jugs for winter sowing of seeds for the garden (google winter sowing). This worked great last year, but this year I’ll start earlier, like March. I’ll also make the newspaper seed starters (see youtube) to put in my jugs, to make transferring small plants to the garden easier, as my soil was too loose & fell away, last year (most still grew, tho). I don’t buy much soda, but the liter bottles work great, too.
-I love empty, plastic peanut butter bottles to store everything under the sun, since they don’t break and I can see what’s in them. Also, no scrubbing labels off.
Plastic jars will degrade over time but until then, they’re great!
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Great tips – thanks Kathryn!
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Thank you, Catcook!!!
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Kathryn Simkins… I do too…they work great for so many things. I usually use them for dish sponges or dish pads..
Please log in or create a free account to comment.I remember y mother,grandmother,aunt ..having tons of buttons..They would cut them off of clothing that was no longer worn or too raggy to wear.Also,my aunt and grandmother had a rag bag..any clothing that was not fit to wear or not fit to pass down was cut up and used for dusting..or the men would use as rags when workig on cars..
Please log in or create a free account to comment.I guess I am telling my age here :), but our fabrics have many, many lives in our house. A new t-shirt when stretched out get cut up into rags as you said. When those are too small or thin to use for anything else, we make sure they are clean and use them to wrap things like Christmas ornaments in. Not so much to the landfill that way. :)
Please log in or create a free account to comment.We would buy new jeans for our 4 kids in the fall. By spring they were high water jeans. So I would cut the ends of to make long shorts for my kids. And use the bottoms for sewing. I’ve used the ends for quilts and ice packs with rice in them.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Especially great that I could control the length of the shorts to stay in compliance with school rules.
we also use old cloth for braided rugs.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Coming from New England we learned how to braid and LACE wool for the rugs I have 70 years later. It was a very valuable technique when I taught my daughters how to braid horse manes.
We used very heavy cotton twine to lace the braids together. As time went on my trademark was “The Wool Gatherer”. Now in Florida there is little need for scrap wool. .
What a lovely gift to have shared with your children. Certainly has stood the test of time. I bet the rugs are beautiful.
I think she must mean the egg cartons. That was my guess
Please log in or create a free account to comment.I use the leftover aluminum foil to sharpen my cricut cutters and sewing needles. I have also used soap to help sewing needles slide through fabric easier. Like most have commented about slivers of soap I also wet them and put them on new soap. You can also keep them and when u have enough put them in the blender with some water and you have liquid soap. I’ve never tried this but I do know several people who do it.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.I would like to learn how to make stock. I don’t have an Instant Pot. Nor does Grandma. I’m sure there is an old fashioned way to make it, right?
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Just put all the scraps and. Bones in a pot on the stove, add spices and seasonings you like, cover all with water , bring to boil and turn the heat down and simmer. It for a couple or more hours. Some Boone broth recipes call for simmering them u to 18 hours and I do it in my crockpot. Have fun and it is real easy. Enjoy
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Of course! Essentially, you’ll just simmer all your meat, veggie and herb scraps for a few hours. Here are some more details: https://jillee.co/2HCvFXs
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Deborah, I just use a large cooking pot on top of the stove to make whatever stock I’m making at the time—beef— chicken— veggie— whatever
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Add water and Cook at a medium to simmer until you get all or most of the flavor out of the “leftovers or scraps”. Then, strain it and dispose of waste and freeze the liquid. If freezing in jars, be sure to allow head room. Mark the jars as to kind and enjoy using it in so many things. If you’re not needing to beware of salt, saving the liquids from canned veggies is also a frugal move.
If you moisten both the old sliver of soap and the new bar of soap and press tightly together, they will stick just fine!
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Yes! I’m all for the less complicated reuse.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.I just remembered my Youngest sister had a bunch of T-shirts from her years of doing high school sports that my mom helped her turn into a quilt. We also have an old rag rug that my grandma made using old clothes scraps. I heard a few years back that these are actually worth a lot of money.Its kind of a lost art.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.I keep all of the little packets that come in products to keep the moisture out. I put them in a sealed container with real flowers to make dried flowers. This works great. The flower I will use to decorate things around the house and sometimes even make a wreath out of them.
I also distribute those packets around the house in drawers, containers, etc. to keep moisture out. They are great for the camper, moisture is more of a problem there.
When I feel like they need a “recharge”, I put them in my dehydrator for a few hours.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.If you use the little silicone packets to keep moisture out of things and places, be aware that they are harmful if eaten. Curious animals may think they are edible bugs or toys; small children may confuse them with gum or candy. Either situation will not end well.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Great idea Lisa!
Please log in or create a free account to comment.I simply store these same little moisture absorbing packets in a shallow container in my linen cupboard…They keep out the moisture build up and no musty smells of mould… (I live in the tropics)
Please log in or create a free account to comment.For the little soap slivers, I melt them onto a new bar of soap. I wet the new bar of soap, lather up, then press the sliver into the new bar. No waste!
Please log in or create a free account to comment.We used to use brown paper bags or newspaper to line the kitchen or other trash cans. Heck there was no such thing as plastic trash can bags. But I never liked having to scrub them.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.my mom and grandma used the brown paper bags to put cookies on fresh from the cookie sheet. Also, to wrap gifts in,then decorated with leftover bits of ribbon from other things. Cookies never taste as good to me put on a wire cooling rack as those did.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.We have used newspapers and brown bags for use in the garden. We put them down on top of the dirt, then put shredded cedar over them. We did that three years ago and we have not noticed any weeds sprouting until just recently. That saved quite a lot of back breaking work pulling weeds. And we did not have to buy ground cover.
Growing up my mother always used paper bags to sort the recycling in. It makes it sooooo much easier. They sell bins but we can’t afford them and we only need to use 1 for the city to pick it up so 1 city bin and several paper bags. Works great! Then if anything gets icky use it in the flower bed!
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Thanks for the post Jillee as always informative and useful to many.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.My husband and I have ‘made do and mend’ as well as squirreling away items that we think, ‘hmm, that will be useful someday’ for decades; we were both very close to our grandparents and learnt many things but not everyone is so fortunate.
It is not just about having this mindset if you are going through tight financial times hut makes sense in not wasting this planet’s resources, they are not infinate! If you caught the interview with Prince William and Sir David Attenborough he was explaining what happens if we plunder this beautiful planet to extinction – it results in killing ourselves; it is imperative (and has been for decades) that everyone has to work at saving the planet and everything on it.
There are hundreds of ideas on Pinterest for ‘make do and mend’ if your readers want more suggestions.
I take those slivers of soap, let them dry, and put them with my sewing stuff. They make great “markers” for fabric and wash right out.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.What a clever idea!
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Slithers of soap stored in the linen cupboard, wardrobes, clothing, especially (underware drawers) and shoe boxes; keeps out moths, silverfish and smelly odours. Plus they add a clean perfume to wherever they are stored.
Please log in or create a free account to comment.So i am a real Grand Ma now. Only thing is your house is full of that kind of stuff ;-)
Please log in or create a free account to comment.Here in Europe IKEA recycles the little aluminium tealights… so if I have clean foil left I toss that in too (it cannot go with recycled tins as it is too thin so it burns instead of melting in the ovens.
I am with you all the way! Thanks for the reminder.
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