The things you see at markets

I went to a market yesterday and found myself wandering around the stalls looking at the merchandise on display and occasionally chatting with the stall owners about their products.

This particular market has everything from antiques (and I am not referring to the highly valued citizens like myself, wandering about the place, but to the real thing), through jewellery, innovative re-cycling, nick knacks etc, to unusual food choices like an Ethiopian diner.

Innovative re-cycling was, at least for me one of the most interesting features of this show.

Imagine if you will women and the fur coats and stoles that they wear or men and their fur caps.

Have you ever considered what happens to fur coats, shawls, caps and the like when they have served their function and are either getting a little ratty (so to speak) or when they are past their use by date?

One innovative entrepreneur has capitalised on doing something with the remnants and this is what I can honestly refer to as "creative re-cycling".

He has taken bits of fur coats and is making very soft very cuddly and really very beautiful teddy bears from them.

I saw part of a fox stole being reborn into the cutest and softest teddy bear I had ever seem and I wondered, out loud apparently, whether there was anything in mink?

Lo and behold the stall owner paused in the midst of sewing another paw pad onto his latest creation and pointed to a small cute and cuddly animal in the foreground of his exhibits and said

"Have a look at that one - it's mink!"

Sure enough, there it was the ultimate in cuddly toys, a mink teddy bear.

If you are one of the parents who have taken up the Australian Treasurer's exhortation to have one child for mum and one for dad and then one for the country, you may wish to give that new child in your midst an unusual start in life.

"Buy the kid a recycled fur teddy bear!" I thought.

Not only is it rewarding innovative re-cycling, it is a means for creating a font of stories for your child.

Just sit with your child as he/she cuddles up to the new teddy (and yourself of course) and imagine where the animals that have given birth to the toy have come from and what they have gone through in the multiple lives from live organisms through apparel to children's toy. With a little stretch of the imagination you can make up stories for your child about all parts of the world and all sorts of places and people just from having access to a product of creative re-cycling!

When I got home, just for the fun of it, I Googled "mink teddy bear" as a phrase (try it)

There are THOUSANDS of hits on the web about this notion. Indeed people refer to the idea as HEIRLOOM bears where grandma's coat becomes junior's toy!

That folks must be the ultimate hand me down!

It's certainly a first I have seen in Australia, but it appears to be big business elsewhere already!