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redroanchroniclesToday's horse.hack is going to blow your mind. Seriously. This is my best invention ever.
Are you ready? You'd better be ready for this. Maybe sit down. Brace yourself.
I just oversold it, didn't I? You're going to be disappointed. I take back when I said before.
It is awesome though. I would go so far as to say that on a scale of one to eleventy, this invention scores a perfect super-rad.
Okay, here it is. Really. For real.
If your mind isn't blown yet, it's because you don't yet understand the full scope and wonder if this amazing amazingness. Let me explain. This is an IKEA FRAKTA shopping bag. IKEA is of course that well-known wonderland of attractive and affordable Scandanavian furniture and other housewares, that kingdom of fantastically unpronouncable products and delicious, delicious meatballs.
Instead of plastic bags at the checkout, you can purchase one of these large blue shopping bags with which to haul home your wares. They're very hardy and are basically made of tarp material. (I have a few that I've owned and used on a regular basis for years and they're still going strong... usually the bigger problem is just losing them, or your friends making off with them.) If they get dirty (and they will), you just hose them off and hang to dry. They only cost 59 cents each.
And they are absolutely the perfect size for carrying around loose flakes of hay.
I've typically had the good fortune as a boarder to keep my horse in places where my actual horse and the available hay storage are on opposite ends of the property, so I am a veteran of the hay bag wars. There are bags available commercially, but most of them are either designed for your horse to eat out of in the trailer, or they're designed to hold an entire bale, and either way, they're stupidly expensive just for carrying flakes of hay to and fro. When all you need is to get three or four flakes of hay from point A to point B without losing it in bits and pieces along the way, neither of these options is real swell.
But the IKEA shopping bag -- or as I like to call it, the Magical Blue Bag of Holding -- is perfect for the job. It's fairly water resistant (though I've never actually set it down in a puddle, I doubt it's entirely waterproof). It's super-lightweight. It has a double pair of handles -- the long ones I'm holding in the picture above, and a pair of short ones right at the bag's edge -- which makes it easier to carry varying sizes of load. You can throw a few flakes in the bottom, or you can pack 4-5 into the bag and then stack another 2-3 flakes on top and still be able to carry it by the handles.
It's also great for preventing a mess when you need to transport some hay in a vehicle. When I've moved house with my horse (which happens quite a bit, come to think of it), I usually have my truck's bed full of my possessions, the trailer's tack room full of my horse's possessions, and precious little space for hay storage, since I don't have a hay rack on the trailer. There's nowhere to put a whole bale, not to mention that if I did squeeze one into the tack room, I'd be picking little bits of hay out of everything else in there for the next FOREVER.
So instead, I break up a bale and just double bag it -- hay inside one bag, then another bag over the top to keep the hay from escaping and wreaking havoc. It gives you easily handleable, modular chunks of hay that you can move around as needed, and you can feed one day's hay at a time without dealing with the rest of a loose bale. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but it's freaking genius.
Just slip the second bag over the top, then flip the whole thing over so you've got handles on top, and you're ready to go. You're ready to go forth and be AMAZING and RESOURCEFUL at the same time.
Of course, getting your hands on some IKEA bags can be the impossible part of this plan, unless you live near an IKEA. You can't get them to ship hardly anything from their website, so you pretty much have to find friends who live near an IKEA and are willing to acquire some bags and then mail them to you. I get my supplies from my mom, because what is the beautiful familial bond for if not wheedling until they'll run errands for you? I have her mail dozens at a time to me, so I can supply all the other folks I know who have of course by now become incredibly jealous of my amazing bags. Plus I like to keep at least eight on hand in my own trailer for when I need to pack up an entire bale of hay to transport.
If you need even more space -- like to feed several horses at once -- you can also try this even larger IKEA shopping bag. It unfortunately doesn't seem to be big enough to hold a whole bale, and I'd be interested to see whether the zipper would stand up to the kind of rough use that horse people tend to put their possessions through, so if any of you out there experiment with it, I'd be really interested to hear about it. And do you have other MacGyverish hay bag solutions? Leave a comment! Let us exchange knowledge, and awesomeness!
Are you ready? You'd better be ready for this. Maybe sit down. Brace yourself.
I just oversold it, didn't I? You're going to be disappointed. I take back when I said before.
It is awesome though. I would go so far as to say that on a scale of one to eleventy, this invention scores a perfect super-rad.
Okay, here it is. Really. For real.
If your mind isn't blown yet, it's because you don't yet understand the full scope and wonder if this amazing amazingness. Let me explain. This is an IKEA FRAKTA shopping bag. IKEA is of course that well-known wonderland of attractive and affordable Scandanavian furniture and other housewares, that kingdom of fantastically unpronouncable products and delicious, delicious meatballs.
Instead of plastic bags at the checkout, you can purchase one of these large blue shopping bags with which to haul home your wares. They're very hardy and are basically made of tarp material. (I have a few that I've owned and used on a regular basis for years and they're still going strong... usually the bigger problem is just losing them, or your friends making off with them.) If they get dirty (and they will), you just hose them off and hang to dry. They only cost 59 cents each.
And they are absolutely the perfect size for carrying around loose flakes of hay.
I've typically had the good fortune as a boarder to keep my horse in places where my actual horse and the available hay storage are on opposite ends of the property, so I am a veteran of the hay bag wars. There are bags available commercially, but most of them are either designed for your horse to eat out of in the trailer, or they're designed to hold an entire bale, and either way, they're stupidly expensive just for carrying flakes of hay to and fro. When all you need is to get three or four flakes of hay from point A to point B without losing it in bits and pieces along the way, neither of these options is real swell.
But the IKEA shopping bag -- or as I like to call it, the Magical Blue Bag of Holding -- is perfect for the job. It's fairly water resistant (though I've never actually set it down in a puddle, I doubt it's entirely waterproof). It's super-lightweight. It has a double pair of handles -- the long ones I'm holding in the picture above, and a pair of short ones right at the bag's edge -- which makes it easier to carry varying sizes of load. You can throw a few flakes in the bottom, or you can pack 4-5 into the bag and then stack another 2-3 flakes on top and still be able to carry it by the handles.
It's also great for preventing a mess when you need to transport some hay in a vehicle. When I've moved house with my horse (which happens quite a bit, come to think of it), I usually have my truck's bed full of my possessions, the trailer's tack room full of my horse's possessions, and precious little space for hay storage, since I don't have a hay rack on the trailer. There's nowhere to put a whole bale, not to mention that if I did squeeze one into the tack room, I'd be picking little bits of hay out of everything else in there for the next FOREVER.
So instead, I break up a bale and just double bag it -- hay inside one bag, then another bag over the top to keep the hay from escaping and wreaking havoc. It gives you easily handleable, modular chunks of hay that you can move around as needed, and you can feed one day's hay at a time without dealing with the rest of a loose bale. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but it's freaking genius.
Just slip the second bag over the top, then flip the whole thing over so you've got handles on top, and you're ready to go. You're ready to go forth and be AMAZING and RESOURCEFUL at the same time.
Of course, getting your hands on some IKEA bags can be the impossible part of this plan, unless you live near an IKEA. You can't get them to ship hardly anything from their website, so you pretty much have to find friends who live near an IKEA and are willing to acquire some bags and then mail them to you. I get my supplies from my mom, because what is the beautiful familial bond for if not wheedling until they'll run errands for you? I have her mail dozens at a time to me, so I can supply all the other folks I know who have of course by now become incredibly jealous of my amazing bags. Plus I like to keep at least eight on hand in my own trailer for when I need to pack up an entire bale of hay to transport.
If you need even more space -- like to feed several horses at once -- you can also try this even larger IKEA shopping bag. It unfortunately doesn't seem to be big enough to hold a whole bale, and I'd be interested to see whether the zipper would stand up to the kind of rough use that horse people tend to put their possessions through, so if any of you out there experiment with it, I'd be really interested to hear about it. And do you have other MacGyverish hay bag solutions? Leave a comment! Let us exchange knowledge, and awesomeness!
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-25 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-25 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-27 03:14 pm (UTC):) or :(, I'm not sure.
Great idea, BTW!
no subject
Date: 2011-03-20 08:43 pm (UTC)Seriously, IKEA bags for the win! They're also handy for bringing laundry to the washing machine...
no subject
Date: 2011-03-21 06:43 pm (UTC)