I'm Jumping In

I've decided to go ahead and join the declutter challenge mentioned in my previous post.  If anybody else wants to join in go ahead to Hoof 'n Barrel where I heard about it first or head directly over to the Single Saver blog.  
Around here we have a donation truck that stops by every so often where you can donate items to various causes (veterans, lupus, or the kidney foundation).  You place a bag of items out by your front door, mailbox, garage door or whatever and some time during the scheduled pick up day they come and whisk the bag away leaving you a brand new bag and a thank you  note. Since the goal is to donate 366 items in one year, I'm aiming for 1 item per day.  Which meant that when the truck pulled up to my house this morning I intended to have at least 8 items to give away to the truck.  In my house, 8 items really weren't hard to find and I easily met my goal.  Yay for progress! 

While I'm saving my sanity by clearing some of the clutter in my house I decided to also try to save what's left of my old, worn out furniture and crochet some coasters for the coffee table and end tables.

The picture came out a little dark but I'm to lazy today to try and fix it in photoshop.  You'll just have to imagine it a little brighter.

I had previously thought of buying new coasters until I found out that a set of four, simple, cork coasters cost around $7.50.   Needless to say I was a little appalled by that.  I'm not really a cheapskate or anything but, yeah, there was no way I was going to spend that much money for a few chunks of cork board.  I decided to crochet the coasters instead of simply cutting out cork board circles because I thought it would be a lot prettier and it was a way to use some some of my spare cotton yarn. 

I used regular old Lily Sugar and Cream Cotton yarn in ecru and warm brown.  As I mentioned, I used scrap that I had laying around but I priced them at my local Meijer and brand new they only cost about $1.79 for a 2 oz. skein.  I got 4 coasters and a matching dishcloth out of about 3/4 of a single skein of yarn.  SO, I got all of that for less than $2 and far less than the $7.50 for a new set of store bought coasters.  It pays to make your own.  There are alot of free patterns in the world for crochet coasters so I won't bother typing this one out here.  The basics are just a simple crochet circle to the size you want and then I added a very easy picot edge.  Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.