Scrap Happy October – Lint
Huge Quince
Jane was a little daunted by the size and number of quinces this year, not to mention the urgency of dealing with them…after a sudden heavy rain, much of the fruit has swelled and split!
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Doll-sized Quince
The humans are busy making jam, Tarte Tatin, Ginger wine-poached quinces, and membrillo… and also a doll-sized quince for Jane!
I mended a doll with epoxy recently, and after a mending job there is always leftover epoxy. I try and do something useful with the excess…like making dollhouse food out of it!
I moulded the current scrap of epoxy into a quince shape (a bit like a pear) and stuck a bit of toothpick into the top for a stem.
When the epoxy was dry, I painted the fruit yellowish green, and the stem brown…but I needed some fuzz because Quinces are fuzzier than peaches, (though the fuzz polishes off when they are ripe).
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Lint
Fortunately I had some home made lint.
I had been going to offer a class at a historic house near me, called Rags to Riches – Recycling Fabric in the Nineteenth Century…but the class was cancelled because of Covid-19. in the 19th Century, lint was one of the useful materials in a household first aid kit, made by scraping scraps of linen or cotton with a sharp knife and collecting the fuzz.
I painted the surface of the little quince with clear matte medium, and rolled it in the lint while still wet…
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Fuzz!
…and voila – fuzzy Quince!!
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Hmmm
Jane is reconsidering – she could make lots more jam with a bigger fruit…
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ScrapHappy is a group of bloggers using up scraps of anything – no new materials…Anything made of genuine scraps is eligible, and posts come out once a month on the 15th!
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Here are the links for the ScrapHappy people – headed by Kate and Gun, who devised and run the group. This is my seventh Scrap Happy post – Yay!
Kate (me!), Gun, Titti, Heléne, Eva, Sue, Lynn, Lynda,
Birthe, Turid, Susan, Cathy, Tracy, Jill, Claire, Jan,
Moira, Sandra, Linda, Chris, Nancy, Alys, Kerry, Claire, Jean,
Joanne, Jon, Hayley, Dawn, Gwen, Connie, Bekki, Pauline,
Sue L, Sunny, Kjerstin, Vera, and Nanette
Quimper Hittys 
How very frugal, Kjerstin! I like what you did in making the doll quince and your added touch of the lint-genius!
I have my own little lint story. When I was much younger, my mother belonged to the missionary society at our church. The ladies there would collect the lint from their dryers and use it to “roll bandages” for whatever service they were helping. This was in the late 1950s, early 1960s that I recall that taking place.
That’s an interesting story about dryer lint! The Quince needed fuzz, I was racking my brains, and coincidentally putting away the materials I had been gathering for the cancelled workshop…serendipity!
Jane’s Hitty sized quince looks picture perfect. Your skills are endless and so interesting. Thank you for sharing.
You are welcome! Jane and the rest of the Hittys have various fruits and veg and I like to think they like to work alongside the humans in the various activities we get subsumed in – they keep me amused!
well, you gave me the laugh of the day – as if you have nothing better to do than make homemade lint!! Jane looks delighted with her quince. I’ve had a quince tree for years but it has never had any fruit, must be doing something wrong.
I am glad you laughed – I thought that sentence was funny when I wrote it down…home made lint sounds so odd to us now, but it was a required substance in the days of yore!
Now that is a really very clever and realistic fruit! These days, of course, we’d use dryer lint, perhaps not as historically authentic as your scraped linen but it would have been just as useful…
Dryer lint from drying whites would work, but I fear that most other dryer lint is too grey for flocking a Hitty quince. Medically speaking I believe that modern clothing (and “dryer sheets”) result in synthetic microfibres, which might be an issue. In any case there are more modern wound care materials…
I agree, I’d only use lint from my sheets and towels, which are both white and pure cotton. And besides, how many quinces does a Hitty need…?
How very clever to make the little quince! And the use of the lint…brilliant!! Hope that you are not exhausted from all your quince projects!
The big quinces all need dealing with at once! Luckily, if we feel like needing reviving, we have jam on toast to sustain us, and Jane is glad to help out!!
that’s brilliant. When we had our huge Quince harvest last year, we ended up wrapping all the best in newspaper, and boxing and then I made more Membrillo with it later in the season, when I had more time. In fact, it might have been after Christmas. Surprisingly few went bad in the box. I ended up baking the membrillo, rather than just boiling it because of the huge length of time it takes on the stove top, it was much less work to do that. Really love the fuzz.
That’s a good tip – I am planning to pick the last few off the tree today…baked membrillo sounds like a good plan for next year!
So creative!
That’s so interesting about the lint. I had heard mention of it in first aid boxes, but wasn’t quite sure what it was. I still think I’d rather have a band-aid, but that wouldn’t have worked for your fruit!
nowadays there are those dratted stickers on fruit…as bad as a band-aid, I think!