The Whole Story

Here's the part of the website where, if you want, you can read my long-winded musings of how the Rainbow Strings project came to be!

As a person who often has about 500 thoughts going in their head at once, I find it fascinating and soothing, in a way, to think about all the coincidences that have led up to the current moment. We are all a product of our experiences, and often of circumstances beyond our control. Everything about us, from our core values and beliefs, our personalities, the way we interact with the world, down to our preference in food or music or the way we like to dress, has somehow been shaped by things that were set in motion long before we were born. As children we don’t choose our parents, our families, when or where we’re born, the behaviors modeled to us, how we’re raised, what sorts of foods we are served or the quality of nutrition we receive, what type of, or how much, exposure we have to music and art, or books, tv, movies, religion, conversations, etc. Whether we have positive, negative, or neutral feelings about any one of a million possible variations in our lives, will have an effect on what we proactively seek out to avoid, change, or continue in our lives as we grow and gain more control over our choices. Even those experiences and their outcomes, which also have factors beyond our control, will continue to shape our future decisions. It’s all connected, from the big important stuff down to the minute details. We are all connected to an inconceivably vast culmination of events that have led to the current moment. When I think about all the circumstances (that I am aware of) that led up to the Rainbow Strings project and where things stand right now, there are several things that come to mind, both big and small. The first thing I want to say is, I am not a perfect environmentalist! The world desperately needs more imperfect environmentalists. We need to accept each other and empower each other to do what we can, when we can. What we don't need is to feel shamed into immobility because being a perfect environmentalist feels so far out of reach. Similarly, so many people say "I could be a vegetarian if it werent for ____." Well guess what! You can be! Even if only for a day, a week, a month. Everyone making small, manageable improvements will have far greater impact on the planet than trying to convince (and only being successful with a handful) everyone to make massive, permanent changes to their lives. The same idea goes for SO MANY things in life. Small manageable changes bring out much greater benefit than being overwhelmed into immobility and not changing anything.

My oldest son attended preschool at the Lawrence Arts Center. In their classroom they had the “Junque Box” which was a collection of recycling type materials that the kids could use to create… whatever they could think of. I thought it was super fun and started saving all our plastic lids for the Junque Box. Soon he aged out of the Arts Center, but we had some family friends with younger kids who still attended, so I kept saving our lids and passing them on. On my younger son’s second birthday, my mom bought him a massive collection of Play Doh. When I cleaned out that huge Play Doh collection a year or so later, my younger son was not attending the Arts Center, but I was still saving lids. I looked at all those colorful Play Doh lids and thought to myself that I was going to make something with them. I ended up sort of melting holes in the sides of the lids, stringing them up on some old fishing line, and hanging them in the tree in our front yard. I loved how colorful it was, and how it spun in the breeze.

Several years before all of this, a friend and I liked to publish together a weekly series on facebook that we called Folklore Fridays. It was nothing fancy, mostly just copied and pasted info about different folklore stories from around the world. But in January of 2020 one of the Folklore Friday memories popped up in my timeline. It was about Tsukumogami, the Japanese belief that objects that have reached their 100th birthday will become sentient and gain a soul. If they are in good repair and well taken care of they will be benevolent, but if in a state of disrepair they can become ill-mannered troublemakers. I had also recently come across a National Geographic article about the problems with plastic recycling. Up until that point, I had not realized that plastic can only be recycled a few times at best, and often not at all. It talked about how a lot of countries used to buy plastic waste from the U.S. but were no longer doing so. How facilities that could even process anything besides #1 or #2 plastics are uncommon because they're not profitable. How most of the plastic “recycling” ends up in the landfill, where it doesn’t degrade for hundreds, or some scientists think thousands, of years. In short, it sounded like a nightmare. I had also done some google sleuthing and found that plastic did not even begin to be mass-produced until the 1960’s and 70’s. I shared the Folklore Friday memory to my facebook page, with the comment “I was just imagining all the plastic in our landfills becoming vengeful, murderous tsukumogami at their 100 year mark.”

A few months after that, the pandemic arrived. With the pandemic came a lot more free time for me, as a stay at home parent. I don’t think I had realized how much time in our lives was taken up with school pickups and dropoffs, activities, outings, errands, etc. I also had been an avid crocheter up until that point, so any free time I did manage to carve out for myself I usually spent crocheting. But I guess because of the stress of everything I just couldn’t stay focused on it. One thing I did to fill my pandemic free time was making recycled paper beads. I just kept making more. I decided I was going to make a bead curtain and I started putting them together in long strings. After I had made enough beads to finish my bead curtain, I even taught an online class about them through the library for the Mindful Crafting event series. At some point during all that, I also looked at our overflowing tubs of plastic lids, and decided I needed to do something with them. I had recently stumbled across a conversation on social media where people were discussing whether or not we were supposed to put our lids in the recycling. The consensus was unclear, at best. Some lids are supposed to be on the bottle, some lids can’t be on the bottle, putting lids loose in the recycling can cause problems with sorting machinery, some lids are made from different plastics, a whole batch of recycled plastic can be ruined if contaminated with the wrong type of plastic, etc. I decided I couldn’t in good conscience put all those lids in the recycling, but I was definitely not going to trash them, either. I was going to make more colorful strings to hang in our tree.

In 1991, shortly after my sixth birthday, we moved across town from our old falling apart house in Old West Lawrence. I was devastated. One of the things I was heartbroken about leaving was my rainbow-themed room. I had purple walls and rainbow border wallpaper. One comfort to me was that at our new house, I still had my familiar rainbow blanket crocheted by my grandma, my rainbow bedspread, and rainbow pillow cases. As long as I can remember, my favorite color has been “rainbow.” I am also a member of the LGBTQ community and avid supporter of LGBTQ rights. So of course when I started stringing up all those lids, I chose to put them in rainbow order.

At first my husband, who is a carpenter, drilled all the lids for me. I had always said I was averse to using power tools and I had zero desire to do it myself. Eventually I had about a dozen rainbow strings hanging in our tree out front. I remember at the beginning of the pandemic it was amazing how many people were out for walks. We would sit on our front porch and my husband would drill while I strung lids, and passersby would compliment our rainbow tree and tell us how much it cheered them up to see it. Several people asked if I was selling them, or suggested I sell them at the Farmer’s Market. My initial reaction was first, no way would people really want to buy strings of trash, and second, as much time and effort as they took to make I didn’t think that people would be willing to pay enough to make it “worth it.” Then, I ran out of lids. I still wanted to make more rainbow strings. There are several active Lawrence-based communities on social media, as well as local Buy Nothing and Freecycle-type groups. I started sharing pictures of our rainbow tree and asking if anyone had lids to contribute. A lot of people did. I was picking up bags of lids (getting a much needed break from being home all the time with two young kids), bringing them home, and washing them in our bathtub. Eventually I even worked up the courage to start drilling the lids myself, and it wasn’t so bad.

I kept thinking about that whole idea of selling the strings. We are a single income family, not because we can really afford to be, but because we are fortunate enough that my parents are willing to share their home with me, my husband, and our two kids, so we can survive on a single income. So, we didn’t have extra money, but I kept seeing so many ways I wished I could help. I posted around in some social media groups, asking if people would like to donate $10 for a rainbow string and I would give the money to a good cause. I was thinking of all our local non-profits that were probably hurting because, with people unsure about income and the economy due to the pandemic, people were holding off on their regular donations. It turns out a lot of people liked the idea, and soon I had my first $100 collected, which I gave to a fundraiser for summer activities for kids whose families were receiving assistance through the Lawrence Community Shelter.

Around this time was when George Floyd was murdered, when word started to get out about the killing of Breonna Taylor, and the Black Lives Matter protests were really gaining momentum. The next $100 I collected went to Lawrence Mutual Aid Network in an effort to support our local BLM movement. Then there was Ladybird Diner, because they were handing out free sack lunches every day to help people affected by the pandemic. I just kept giving away rainbow strings and collecting money and giving it to places that needed funding to help others. A neighbor called the Lawrence Journal World and told them about what I was doing. They came to interview me and when I realized I was going to need a way for people to get in touch with me, I decided to make a facebook page so I wouldn’t have to give out my personal contact information. I couldn’t think of a better name than Rainbow Strings for the Lawrence Community, so that’s what I went with.

Eventually I started asking people to make their donations directly to certain causes. I started making big rainbow starbursts in addition to rainbow strings when a person who had donated for several strings asked if I might be able to come up with some sort of recycled plastic rainbow star shape to put at the top of her rainbow string-bedecked evergreen tree in her front yard. I also started making “icicle strings” and “snowflakes” with white, blue, grey, silver, and clear lids, for the winter months, and Halloween strings as well.

Everything about this whole project has just sort of fallen into place. I don’t have a concrete plan in mind, I just keep doing what seems to be the next “right” thing to do. In November of 2021 I started selling rainbow strings (and other artwork) to try to help contribute financially to my own family. I sold at Art Emergency’s November art market, and donated 25% of my sales to 100 Good Women, to help with their holiday assistance programming. I would really like to find a way to balance helping our community with helping my own family, as well. At the beginning of 2022 I had the idea to give elementary teachers in USD 497 the opportunity to request DIY rainbow string classroom packs so they could put together rainbow strings with their students to help celebrate Earth Day. I asked private individuals and businesses if they would be willing to sponsor these classroom packs, and I had a great response. I was able to put together and deliver 322 DIY rainbow string kits to 15 different teachers at 12 different schools. Best of all, this was a free resource for teachers, an opportunity for kids to learn about the problems with single use plastics, to make something beautiful out of an unexpected source, AND I was able to find sponsors for every single kit, so I wasn't working for free. Over the summer I went on to make rainbow strings with several hundred girls scouts and kids participating in our library's summer reading program.

Other ways I have tried to do as much good as possible with this project include hosting a few food drives on my 36th and 37th birthdays (I made rainbow strings and asked people to drop off food donations on my front porch and/or donate money and grab a rainbow string while they were here), making starbursts for local art auctions, as well as raffles, to benefit non-profits in our community, and also making a plastic lid rainbow tree for Lawrence Festival of Trees. I have also spoken over zoom and in person about the project with a few groups of kids participating in programming through the Lawrence Public Library. It would be a dream come true for me to continue this project and help my community, while also being able to help provide financial support for my family. I will continue to look for that balance, going forward.