Recreational Recreation

If you are a regular reader of this blog, or know me personally, you know that words are a source of endless fascination for me. The word that I've been playing with since I got home from my very awesome Knowledge Commons DC class at SCRAP DC last night is "recreation."

SCRAP DC is a non-profit organization up in Brookland that takes donations of creative materials that would otherwise end up in a landfill and provides them to artists and other members of the community at very low cost. There are stacks of vintage wrapping paper, unwanted fabric, bags of bottle caps and buttons, piles of old costume jewelry, a metric ton of crayons, and balls and balls of yarn, not to mention some of the more interesting one-off pieces. Walking into the SCRAP store is like walking into an I SPY book: controlled chaos, stuff everywhere, but it's all very interesting to look at, and everything has the potential to be turned into something else. 

Which brings me back to "recreation." Recreation, as a noun, has two basic meanings: the first is that of an activity done for enjoyment, while the second is the act of creating something again. In the act of taking something that would have become part of the landfill and making it into something new, I was fusing the two meanings and participating in recreational recreation. In my case, the act of recreational recreation was making a basket out of vintage wrapping paper and some old fabric ribbon. Others in my class made baskets out of office paper, VHS tape, 8mm film, shopping bags, yarn, old maps, food wrappers, and receipts. 

KCDC's "Basketweaving from Scratch with Scraps" Basket
May 14, 2014 -- Not too shabby for a first try, huh?

Out of a bunch of trash came a bunch of things if not useful, then beautiful. And it was fun. 

I left the evening with my basket in hand, a few new acquaintances that I hope to see again, and thinking about how I could bring more recreational recreation into my life and relationships.