Waste Not, Want Not

She grew up in the country with very little, but there are no complaints from 88 year old Betty Greenfield.

“We treasured everything we had,” Mrs Greenfield said.

It is a habit she has carried with her throughout her years as a Hawkesbury resident. A nice dress that has outlived its usefulness will be redesigned into a beautiful skirt. She undoes old knitted and crocheted items and reknits or crochets the wool.

Mrs Greenfield also reorganises silk flowers and repots or gives away cuttings. This creative woman has knitted teddy bears and decorated boxes with pictures, photos and all sorts of flowers as gifts for her many grandchildren and two great, great grandchildren from Nanna Betty or great, great Nanna Betty.

“I don’t waste anything,” Mrs Greenfield said.

“I learned to crochet when I was a little girl with a match. Dad didn’t have the money to spend on a crochet hook, so he let me use the matches for hooks, but only after they had been used. They’d only last one row, if it lasted that long.

“I would knit with orange nails. We never had much. I had a beautiful family life, though. My mum used to have concerts. She taught us all to tap dance and sing.Mum called them pantomimes. They all had stories behind them, like Jack and the Beanstalk and White Christmas.”

She was just four years old when she performed her first solo, and she remembers exactly what she was wearing - black pants, black shoes, black jacket, white shirt, black bowtie and a black top hat that her mother made. She also carried a black walking stick, the type they had at the Hawkesbury Show years ago.

“I took my high hat off and bowed to the audience,” Mrs Greenfield said. “I won a nice blue hat and a new walking stick.”

She has a photo of that time that she has created her own frame for, using cardboard and flowers.

“It looks a million dollars,” she said.

Mrs Greenfield had some wool she wanted to get rid of, but instead of throwing it out, she painstakingly cut all the wool into two-inch pieces to use on the latchhook canvas her daughter had given her, designed her own pattern and made a rug that now sits on her floor.

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