As some of you may remember (if you’ve been with me that long), I was a gyn nurse for the last several years of my “career”. The last year I worked in the gyn residency clinic in which the 2nd through 4th year gyn residents have their “clinic days” in rotation all week. When we moved to new quarters a lot of new instruments were ordered. Some of these were cervical dilators. They came in a nice canvas case, kind of like this:

Well, we of course couldn’t leave them in that nice case because they had to be individually packaged and autoclaved. You don’t autoclave things as a set unless you want to consider the whole package unsterile as soon as you use one instrument. Wasteful.

Anyway.

So here we had a nice canvas case that was ready for the garbage. I couldn’t stand it. It looked so useful. Useful for what I didn’t know, but useful for something. I took it home.

One day I was hunting for yet another crochet hook, rattling through a drawer of various small items. I was getting irritated because I hadn’t yet found a good way to keep them all together. Then I had this fantastic idea. Yep, you guessed it.

Use the canvas case.

Ok, it’s rather crammed right now…

It worked beautifully. Because the little spaces were different sizes to hold the different diameter dilators (say that three times fast), they easily held crochet hooks and knitting needles of all sizes. The knitting needles stick out a bit, but hey, nothing’s perfect.

And, it’s portable! Heading to Dallas with me tomorrow. (c;

I don’t know if you can call this “thrifting” exactly, but I did reuse and recycle!