When I flew home to Illinois at the end of May, I knew that I was going to have a mission this summer. That mission – get rid of some of the crap that Cody and I had accrued and stored at my mom’s house. I’m sure my mom would tell you that she had a similar goal for this summer. Especially since she’s currently trying to sell my childhood home, and there is literally an entire room in that house that is full of my stuff. Some of it is memorabilia, some is old clothing, some is furniture. There are few things that I actually need to save, but there are definitely some things that I wanted to save. It can be hard to distinguish between the needs and the wants when downsizing though, and I am no stranger to that particular struggle. I think it’s even harder still when you are faced with a literal mountain of stuff.

I decided to start small while weeding through my things, so I started with the t-shirts. T-shirts are easy to part with, right? Wrong. Well, at least I assume that must be what I thought in the past. I had an entire tub with 40+ shirts dating all the way back to elementary school. There were shirts from vacations, shirts from sporting events, shirts from concerts. SO MANY SHIRTS.

I thought about donating them, but many of them were completely full of holes, stained, or had my named on them. I didn’t wan’t to just throw them away though because that seemed wasteful. Now, this is where my friend Sarah, who runs the awesome blog The Blooming Mama, comes into the picture. I’ve known Sarah for many, many years, so naturally we know each other in both real life and on Facebook. One day she posted a Facebook status asking for old t-shirts. I sent her a message letting her know that I had some old shirts that I would be willing to part with, but I was curious what she needed them for.

Well, it turned out that Sarah needed them for her farm stand and homestead. She uses them for everything! Sarah makes reusable produce bags, t-shirt yarn (which she then turns into scarves), she uses them as a substitute for rope to tie-up plants, and she even cuts up strips of fabric for birds to use in their nests. I was definitely excited  to donate my old shirts to such a cool cause.

I spent Tuesday combing through my old shirts and deciding which ones to part with. I ended up parting with all but three, which I felt pretty proud of myself for doing. Inside these three cardboard boxes are 40 shirts, which will then be repurposed into garden/homestead supplies. I’m super excited to see what Sarah does with the shirts, and she’s promised to send me a little surprise using some of the fabric from the shirts. After she gets them and sends something my way, I’ll do an update post to show all of you what she makes. Maybe we can even convince her to come over to this little space and do a guest post about how she makes her creations? I’m very excited for this project!