For the first time, I’m participating in the Green Moms Carnival, home to a group of women I really enjoy reading. I’m so happy to join the party!

This month, the topic is gratitude/name three most favorite green things ever, which is exciting but so hard to narrow down to just three things!

1. The eco-friendly cleaning wonders of Borax and vinegar. I’m working on a Borax tutorial post for BeCentsAble so I won’t go into to too much detail, but really, what *can’t* these two things do? Just this week, I ran out of Seventh Generation dishwashing powder and made a substitute on the fly from Borax and baking soda. For $3, you can get a huge box of Borax and a 2 gallon jug of white vinegar at just about any supermarket in America. It’s an easy way to go green that’s soft on your pocketbook and gentle to your family and household items.
2. Perhaps a stock answer, but how about the internet? We don’t have to buy magazines or cookbooks anymore for recipes, design ideas, or parenting tricks. Email is more efficient than snail mail or faxes. More importantly, we have more venues for selling or swapping items before they hit the landfill and more easy access to information about green options. Better information enables us all to do more with less and make choices kinder to the earth.
3. “Knit an x into a y” patterns: knit plastic bags into a new tote, t-shirts into a dish scrubber, I’m a sucker for these upcycling, utilitarian patterns. I love to knit but can’t get bogged down with something complicated or using a lot of pricey yarn. Knitting up a potholder from an old sweater over the course of a weekend is just my kind of thing.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year, my expanding green network just one of them. If this is your first time stopping by sage, I’ll hope you’ll be back to visit again!

I’ve never quite assuaged my guilt about not using reusable cloth wipes any of our kids, but this how-to for wipes (via Ohdeeoh) that using recycled paper towels sounds doable and is at least a slight improvement over the store-bought versions (Made of polyester? Who knew?). A few other recent how-tos I really liked were the kid’s shoe box to cool craft holder and the dinosaur play mat.

1001 tips for vinegar as a household cleaner and otherwise? Great resource!

We’re on vacation right now (hooray for beach house internet connections), but when I return and my paper sorter has arrived, it’s time to tackle the office/sunroom reorganization once and for all. See, our sunroom, which is also the entrance to our house, has 6 huge windows, and is totally visible from the street, is now my supply, eBay selling, freepeats listing, and crafting domain. But I still want it to look like a sunroom! It’s full of all of the outgrown triplet clothes, diapers and gear, plus all of my creative enterprises, and it’s 10×10. It’s a mess! I’m hoping this Real Simple organizational guide can help me a little.

Lynn at OrganicMania links to several of her more useful and popular posts about green and organic savings tips — my favorite kind!!!