Precycle: DIY lemon twist with items from the reuse center

One of the cool things about camping is the mindset of doing with what you have on hand. Forgot to pack a can opener? If you can't borrow one from a neighboring site, then beat the can of beans open with a rock and unleash your inner neanderthal! Well, it wasn't quite like that. We were able to borrow and puncture it with a church key, making a lovely star out of the top. Don't have a tampon? Fashion a sanitary napkin from leaves (not the poison oak!), pine cones and grass! Well, not really. But we got a lot of joke mileage out of that one. And sharing a Diva Cup would have crossed the ecofreak line. Let's just say there are some things you really can't do without and might necessitate a drive back to the nearest store. Speaking of fairly unmentionables, don't ask me what I did with Heather's steaming pot of hot-dog water. Some things that happen camping need to stay in the campground...

So while most of the kids happily whizzed around the camp site on their bikes, a few were doing jump rope and lemon twist, chanting things that made all the moms nostalgic: "Cinderella dressed in yella..." Three days ago I could not have said what a lemon twist was, but Heather, the keeper of all trivial childhood knowledge, enlightened me: it's that looped rope and ball that goes around your ankle that you twirl and jump over with the other leg, and it's got a bell and ball hanging on the end to make it more fun. Pretty wordy and hard to market, so I can see why they called it the 'lemon twist'

By the end of the camp weekend, both my kids were expanding their skills by working the lemon twist and we decided we had to have one when we got home. But being the ecofreak I am, I wasn't going to just go to a store and buy one! Nooooooo! I decided to make one with items of negligible value that we already have at home. If you happened by this morning, that's why you would have found me taking a box cutter to a yogurt tub lid, braiding together plastic newspaper bags, and trying to figure out a way to attach the braid to an old, flat tennis ball.

Here are my reuse items:

Here's the DIY lemon twist 1.0: