Getting Crafty

I read a news article a while back that said Cushelle, a premium toilet tissue manufacturer, was going to start making toilet paper rolls without the cardboard tube inside. They claim it will save money, energy, and a lot of trees, so they hope it will become an industry standard.

In response, erstwhile Blue Peter presenter, Peter Purves, called it a “complete catastrophe,” saying it deprives the public of a key component of amateur arts and crafts. I hope he was being facetious because, really, there is no need to panic.

(For you outside the UK: Blue Peter is a long-running children’s show that is heavy in the crafts department and therefore uses a lot of toilet paper rolls.)

Think of how many things we, as kids, used to have at home to make crafty things out of that are no longer to hand. For example, a lot of the crafting I engaged in when I was young involved the use of my dad’s pipe cleaners, but there are very few kids these days who have ready access to them. Ditto for popsicle (UK: Ice Lolly) sticks, empty thread spools (wooden, preferably), and good quality cardboard (kids used to be able to cut up old cereal boxes, but the quality of the packaging these days does not measure up)*.

*I say “Kids used to…” because we never did; my dad worked in a paper mill, and we always had a surplus of cut-offs available.

All of the items listed here are scarcer than they used to be (and more than they should be) but you can still get any of them—including various sizes of cardboard tubing—at your local hobby store.

To the above items I would add:

– buttons: my mom always had a large tin filled with assorted buttons; I don’t believe this is so common these days.

– Wax (or greaseproof) paper: though still available, it is not as commonly found in the kitchen, especially when you need to trace something. (I wrote a whole post on this earlier.)

– Dixie Cups™: there was a tube of them on every kitchen wall when I was a kid, and the diminutive wax paper cups were useful for a lot of things besides drinking Kool-Aid.

– Wire Coat-hangers: unless you routinely take your clothes to the Dry Cleaners, you probably do not have a ready supply of them, which is a shame because they are so handy that the engineer’s motto should be altered to, “If it moves and shouldn’t, use Duct Tape, if it doesn’t move and it should, use WD-40, for anything else, use a wire coat-hanger.”

Granted, they are no longer free, and it involves a journey to the hobby store, and it will likely result in you returning home with more than you went there for (oh yes, you will), but the absence of tubes in toilette paper shouldn’t cause anyone—not even the most fanatical crafter—to lose sleep.

It may, however, make certain toilet roll holders (most likely, ours) obsolete, but I’m willing to take that chance if it means saving a forest or two.