Shrewsbury crafts

Shrewsbury is a little community in northern St. Elizabeth. They have one of the few active 4-H Community Clubs, largely due to their extremely ambitious and motivated leader, Ms. Anderson. She was looking for a project for the clubbites, who are all women. So I brought the 'trash into cash' project where you use plastic bags as crochet 'thread' and make pretty bags, mats, etc. I really like this project because I find that a lot of middle age women already have crochet skills but they feel that the thread and needles are expensive. So instead you use the ubiquitous Jamaican scandal bag (just a black plastic bag). When you go to the supermarket they wrap everything in scandal bags. Even your toilet paper gets its own scandal, inside a larger scandal of course. Here you can see me showing one of the ladies how to cut the bag. You just cut off the top handle section and the bottom part so you get a tube. Then you cut the bag into one long strip. This strip is used as the thread. Some of the women took to this project very quickly. Here is one lady who started to make a mat right away. The largest complaint is that the plastic doesn't move nicely. It is kind of sticky and doesn't have the give that normal thread has. But it's free!! So that's a pretty good trade off. This is the last shot of Guinep's babies. This is brownin and duo. Duo went to Shane and Kae's house last weekend. Khaled had to put him in a box, take him on two taxis, one minibus and a city bus to get him to Portmore for his final home. He made it and now he's living the sweltering life, where the daily temperature surpasses 95 F and when you come home from work in the afternoon the house temp hovers around 110 F. Whoooo!! And they say Santa Cruz is hot as hell. Portmore must be some level of hell, it is way tooo hot. That's mostly because it was built as a scheme and all the trees were cut down.
Looking at this pic I think, ooohhh those babies were so cute. I miss them, but I don't miss the kitty pee on the floor or the price of buying all the extra cat food. I hope they have a good life. Bye-bye Guinep's babies!