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I’ve got one more crafty post before I return to my regularly scheduled food programming…

Oh, the possibilities
If you read yesterday’s post about my daughter’s handmade American Girl feast, then you know I’ve got a girl who can spend hours (days) creating. She often has multiple projects going at once, and this week, home for summer break, she’s been in artsy nirvana. Before entering the world of miniature tacos and corn-on-the-cob, Tess had been building a dollhouse from scratch, designing and constructing the cardboard frame, painting and papering rooms, sewing tiny curtains, making origami furniture. Then today we took a trip to the Recycle Shop, so she could load up on whatever bits and pieces inspired her.
Do those of you in the Rochester area know the Recycle Shop? If not, you should. Its three locations are run as fundraising retail stores by the non-profit Child Care Council Inc. And it’s like walking into the best dumpster ever.
Set up warehouse-style, it’s where local manufacturers donate their over-runs, scrap, retired samples and factory errors (instead of sending them to landfills). Some items are priced individually, like rolls of paper and the Wegmans’ store signs we saw on this trip. (I SO want to figure out a use for those cheese signs.) But most items are priced by the bag: $5 to fill a grocery-size paper bag, down to $1 for a lunch-size sack. Tess bagged a stack of countertop and cabinetry sample pieces, some fun-colored foam, fabric swatches, and a bunch of odd pieces and parts. I can’t wait to see what she does with them.
