anti-consumerism – A recycled lifestyle…

In the spirit of Thrift…

January 13, 2021thriftwizard4 Comments

A long time ago, I discovered that the word “Thrift” doesn’t quite mean what people generally think. (Although there is an element of words eventually coming to mean what people think they mean, rather than what they originally meant. Just don’t tell Humpty Dumpty.) It didn’t, and shouldn’t, mean penny-pinching miserliness; it came from the same root as “thrive”, just as “frugal” originally meant much the same as “fruitful”. Once I’d wrapped my head around the idea of thrift as something positive, it put a different slant on my attempts to live within our means as we raised our biggish family on one-and-a-little-bit incomes whilst paying a fairly hefty mortgage to afford a home big enough for us not to actually fall over each other. It became a challenge to get the very best out of the resources actually available to us, rather than to become bitter & envious, and strive after ever more money and ever more stuff.

There are all sorts of interesting thoughts hovering around this; why are we continually encouraged to buy, buy, buy; to upgrade things that aren’t broken, to cook with fresh ingredients from the other side of the planet, to constantly change our clothes & decor at the whim of fashion editors & celebrities, to replace rather than repair? Is this a sane way to try to run the world? Why is our own time rarely recognised as an important resource, only time that someone else pays you for? However, the central fact is that, given that you actually do have enough (a key concept) of everything vital, it’s an interesting challenge to see what more you can do with the resources, of any sort, that do come your way.

Hence my determination not to just throw away (and where exactly is away?) the little strips of not-so-usable fabric that resulted from demolishing 20-something shirts, some old jeans, and a couple of skirts for free or very-inexpensive fabric. The hems, side-seams & plackets, mostly; I have another project or two in mind for the collars and cuffs. And thanks to lockdown 3 here in the UK, I have plenty of time to put my plans into action for a while. So, here’s the finished hem-and-seam rug:

*Rug in twined-weave, made from seams, hems & plackets of old shirts, jeans & skirts, plus an old duvet cover.*

I do know how very lucky I am, to have the time and the space to make things, but something inside me won’t let me not make things, and of course there are plenty of other things I should probably be doing, like housework. The things I make may be simple & easy, and I really don’t need another rug, but it’s given me great pleasure to turn some things that under other circumstances could be seen as “waste” into something genuinely useful and colourful.

For the next few days, I need to concentrate on getting a few seeds started, and a part-done cot quilt that needs finishing before the “user” arrives! But then – where next with my massive “to do” pile and my random assortment of “resources”…?

Something somewhere isn’t right…

December 18, 2017thriftwizard2 Comments

I had to run up to the supermarket on Saturday afternoon, having muddled up what should go into the freezer and what should go into the fridge after doing my market shop on Friday. (Excuse: I’d had a streaming cold since the start of the week.) I could hear carols floating over the allotments from one of the churches as I went up our road, and more carols floating over the green from the direction of the Square. The Christmas lights were flashing frantically, cars were circling the car park like hungry sharks, waiting to pounce on a space, and the supermarket was thronged with customers pushing overloaded trolleys stuffed with cheese dartboards and gallons of wine. Snatches of irritated conversations drifted past my ears…

“No, that was for Christmas Eve, dear. The cream is for Boxing Day!”

“Not that one, you know Jessica’s allergic to red colourants!”

“No, no, the Heston, not the Jamie!”

“Sorry, sir, we’ve sold right out of those now.”

I felt as if I’d landed on the wrong planet, not for the first time in the last few weeks. There was still more than a week to go until Christmas, but the good citizens of East Dorset are stocking up in good time, and by the looks of their trolleys they are all entertaining at least 20 people they desperately need to impress. Me, I’m just feeding 9, with mostly cooked-from-scratch-by-us food, some of it even grown-by-us. It’ll be a joint enterprise, and we’ll have a laugh as we prepare it together and try to cram 9 seats into our kitchen; the conservatory, which is much bigger, would be too cold for my 91 y.o. mother.

I’ve also had occasion to enter that great temple of Mammon, the Giant Shopping Centre in the big city 30 miles east. More flashing lights, lots of must-haves, more eye-watering prices for things that no-one needs, which might just raise a slight smile before ending up in a charity shop or possibly even the bin. Somehow it just all felt utterly surreal, absolutely divorced from any vestige of reality. No hint of midwinter magic, no connection to the Reason for the Season, not a glimmer of anything in any way genuine or personal. All that pressure to spend, spend, spend; all that glitter, no real gold.

We visited a new Scandinavian shop. There were some nice things, some of them definitely referencing genuine Scandinavian Christmas/Yule/midwinter traditions. But mostly, alas, just more plastic tat. I did buy a couple of items, one of them edible, one that will replace something that broke last year. But I can’t shake off a feeling that something underneath all this glitter and fake bonhomie and enforced generosity is terribly, horribly wrong… That this celebration really shouldn’t be all about greed, or even misplaced generosity. In all Northern Hemisphere traditions, it’s a celebration of the return of Light to the world, a promise that the darkness will be vanquished and growth will return. In the Christian tradition, a feast and a gift-giving to celebrate God’s gift to us.

I’ve been reading up about Christmas traditions all around the world. It seems that most people in most countries don’t put up their trees or decorate their houses until about the 23rd or 24th of December, which is how it was in the home I grew up in, in the dim & distant past. In many countries, the main meal & present-giving is actually on the evening of Christmas Eve, with Christmas Day being reserved for church and family visits. Boxing Day is livelier, with sport & dancing back on the menu, but still very sociable & family-based, rather than a rush to spend yet more money at the “sales”. In some countries, gift-giving doesn’t happen until Epiphany, or 6th January, tying in with the visit of the Kings to the baby Jesus, with their gifts of gold, frankincense & myrrh.

I particularly love the Icelandic idea of the jólabókaflóð, or Yule Book Flood, where everyone receives at least one book on Christmas Eve, then retires to bed with chocolate to read it. Of course, by then they’ve done the big meal and the gift-giving, but how much more relaxed & sane than my usual frantic last-minute Christmas Eve scrambles does that sound?!

I suspect we could learn a lot from countries that take a more laid-back & sociable approach to Christmas. Somehow we’ve been railroaded into the spend, spend, spend mentality & the one with the lowest credit card bill is a loser. Not a game I want to play any longer… judging by people’s anxious faces in the mall, I’m not alone.

So I think I’m going to re-think Christmas-yet-to-come (again!) and take a leaf out of other books from all over the world. We’ll start low, just with an Advent wreath at the start of the month, and build up slowly; the tree certainly can, and should, wait until 23rd at the earliest. I shall insist on at least one book all round for Christmas, too, although retiring to bed with it and a box of chocs probably isn’t practical until Boxing Day evening. It’s important to me that we don’t feel “all Christmassed out” by the 26th, as we so often have done; that there’s time for calm reflection, and there are genuine moments of holiness and sheer magic. Time to listen to the rhythms of the earth and sky, hear the birds sing and the bells ring out.

And of course, time to wish all my friends “out there” a genuinely happy and peaceful Christmas – or whatever midwinter festival speaks best to you.

Daft not to…

January 22, 2016January 22, 2016thriftwizardLeave a comment

There it was, just lying in the gutter, all alone… an enormous potato! A bit scuffed, and now a bit grubby too, it must have fallen out of someone’s shopping bag. It was there when I went to the market; it was still there when I was walking home half an hour later. So I picked it up & brought it home. Whyever not?

I rinsed it, cut off the scuffed side, cut it into slim-ish slices & added it to the contents of my “Peely” bin, which made a good casserole-full altogether. This is now, after boiling up for 10 minutes, in my Wonderbag, a present from a friend who volunteers in a charity shop. She rescued it from a swift entry into the rag-bag; other volunteers thought it unlikely to sell, despite being brand new, still with labels attached. Who’d use one, nowadays? But she knew that I would… So my peelings, cores and any other edible odds & sods get cooked up, at least once a week, overnight, in my Wonderbag to make a breakfast treat for my chickens. They adore it. I’m recycling scraps we can’t – or won’t – use into eggs.

But all the way home, a little voice at the back of my head was telling me why I shouldn’t have picked the potato up.

You don’t know where it’s been or how it got there! Well, I can hazard a good guess.
There may be germs… It’s going to be thoroughly cooked.
The real owner may come back for it! I think they already would have, if they were going to.
Just LEAVE IT ALONE! This is sooo embarrassing… But that would be very wasteful, and there’s no-one else about in the rain. Not to mention, it’d have blocked the drain it was on its way to washing down.

I’m still feeling slightly guilty, for no reason that my logical mind can discern. But really, it would have been daft not to…

Thereby hangs another tale. A couple of weeks ago, when I took my mother back to her own home, I’d promised her a roast chicken dinner. So I went off to her local upmarket supermarket to find a small one. The only one they had out at that time was reduced to £2 and was on its sell-by date; ah well, I thought, it’s still actually in date, and it’s going straight into the oven.

But when I got it back to the flat & opened the packaging, the smell was indescribably awful. So I ran back to the supermarket, luckily not far away, with it, and gasped out an explanation. To their everlasting credit, they instantly gave me a double refund, and in the meantime they’d put out a fresh batch of little chickens. Costing £4… so in effect, we got a fresh one for half the normal price! When I unwrapped it, I saw on the package the words, “Serves two”…

Well, it gave us a good roast dinner. Mum (89) doesn’t usually eat as much as a “normal” adult now, but somehow she managed. It also gave us three servings of Chicken Jalfrezi the next day, one each and one for her freezer, plus two good portions to be eaten cold with salad, and I brought the carcass & scraps home to boil up into a hearty soup. Some of which went back to Mum, for easy suppers. In effect, that “serves two” little bird gave seven good portions, plus plenty of soup. And yet, there’s still that little voice in my head that thinks I may have done something naughty, stretching a “Serves two” into seven-plus servings!

How much money are they making out of us, when people take that “Serves two” seriously…? Or when people leave perfectly good food to lie in gutters?

wonderbag — Wonderbag – with extra insulation!

And another one…

January 10, 2016January 10, 2016thriftwizard2 Comments

fabricmuddle

…another resolution, that is.

Yesterday Dear Son no. 3 and I swapped him from one of the bigger upstair bedrooms back into the smallest one, the same one he had for a number of years before he went off to university. As he said, it made sense because he’s a minimalist and doesn’t have much “stuff” – oh, and it’s also a fair bit warmer, too!

Whereas I do have rather a lot of stuff… I’d been attempting to use that little room (9′ x 10′ but irregularly shaped) as a guest bedroom, a drying area, and a sewing studio, which had resulted in more or less complete chaos on the sewing side, although it was – just – functional. The drying rack & clean laundry could be swept up & re-deployed at a moment’s notice whenever DS1 came home for the weekend; not so the sewing bench and the vast accumulations of fabric, patterns & notions. To be fair, a large amount of these were things intended for re-sale, that had been deposited in there as a “safe” area to store them in. But they’d got hopelessly muddled up with the bits that I’m actually using or have realistically-achievable plans for…

So now the bigger, cooler room is piled high with bags of fabric, patterns, notions, lace, ribbons, paper etc. I was too tired to try to sort it out, after dismantling two beds, locating a third, and re-building two of them again as well as hauling all the stuff around so it’s still more or less as it was last night; tomorrow I will try to sort out a working area for the big Pfaff, the overlocker and the embellisher, and possibly even add a picture, if I’m brave enough. There are still several trunks full of DD2 & DS2’s belongings in there, too, as well as a “dead” wardrobe (unwanted and unduly rickety now) and the spare bedding! All of which apparently have to go somewhere…

The point of mentioning all this is to say that I have resolved that this will be the year when I buy NO new craft materials or fabric; I already have more than enough, and enough to keep the stall stocked for several months, too. I’m excepting specialist materials like interfacing – although I have a whole roll of heavy sew-in interfacing, found at the Tip late last year – or 505 spray where they’re really needed to do a specific job that actually needs doing & I don’t already have something that I can make do. But no impulse buys, not even when they’re really, really good bargains…

I think this may be harder than it sounds…

A cautionary tale…

January 16, 2015January 16, 2015thriftwizard6 Comments

…copied over from a post I wrote elsewhere:

Earlier this week, I was further down the West Country with Elder Daughter for a couple of days. We’d planned to do some serious walking, but the weather was foul on the first day, so we visited some new-to-her towns instead, and bought some bits & bobs for our respective market stalls/online shop. The first town we visited was one I knew well as a child & teenager, back in the Dark Ages. It used to be very posh & prosperous, with a long twisty high street wending its way down a steep hill; my grandfather’s tailor was at the top and his cobbler/bootmaker halfway down. It’s very different now.

A big modern shopping development has been built alongside the High Street. It has several stories of car parking, topped by two more of big High Street “names” – all the biggies are there, in large, clean modern units. It was hardly bustling but there were plenty of people wandering aimlessly about, a few toting branded bags. And it’s completely sucked the life out of the old High Street; every second little shop was empty, and there were beggars sitting in the doorways, empty hats on the pavement, staring hopelessly out, poor souls. Hardly anyone was passing that way to see them.

Admittedly the big local industry has also withered away and died, but it was very clear that the shopping centre had completely replaced the High Street for day-to-day stuff. So all the money spent in that town is draining away to shareholders in London & further afield, instead of helping local people prosper. If it’s anything like this little town, the advent of the shopping centre will have pushed up the High Street rents beyond anything a genuine local small business start-up can afford, too. Although there were some very good bargains in the two local charity shops we eventually stumbled across, shopping in that town was a depressing & draining experience.

We then visited two smaller towns nearby, also favourite haunts of my youth. The only big name shops were those that had been there for many years, in little eccentric premises with tiled doorways and uneven floors. Both towns were bustling, with people carrying baskets or pulling trolleys, cheerily greeting each other and stopping to chat or go for a cuppa in one of the pretty little independent, reasonably-priced cafes. We found some excellent bargains and enjoyed our time there hugely.

Next day, after a bracing walk on the coastal path, we called in to a little seaside town that has attracted a lot of attention from a TV chef. We found the interesting-looking little shops clustered around the harbour were nearly all branches of big-name clothes shops, exactly the same ones that infest our own small but upmarket town. We were actually looking for a butchers or (sensible) fishmongers, but the lass in the tiny convenience store told us that “the big T&sco up top of the hill” had “done for” anything like that. So most of the money being spent there by the hordes of wealthy tourists who flock to this town is draining straight off upcountry again, and the locals have virtually no choice where to buy their groceries any longer. And their money is also trickling away from their community.

The moral of this story being, if you are lucky enough to still have small family-run shops where you are, please support them, even if things cost a little bit more. That’s your own friends & neighbours you’re supporting. And if you have any say in these matters, resist the siren voices that tell you that big new shopping centres & supermarkets will attract more business; maybe they will, but only to themselves.

Mmmm – why Pinterest?

November 7, 2014November 8, 2014thriftwizardLeave a comment

I can spend hours poking around Pinterest; who can’t? And whenever I Google just about anything, images or pages from Pinterest will appear on the first page, and, oh dear! That’s me gone for ages, browsing around other people’s collections of images of things they like & admire, maybe adding a few to my own, wishing I had good taste & a sense of style like everyone else on there seems to, and just a little more money so I could buy all the things I love… HANG ON A MINUTE! I smell a rat…

Something tells me that it’s no coincidence that for days afterwards, little ads will pop up on other pages that I visit, showing things just like the ones I looked at. The same thing happens with things I look at on elsewhere too, which sometimes leads to hilarious results, particularly when I misspell something. And sometimes it’s quite informative as to what other people have been browsing on the family computer. But I’m pretty immune to pop-up adverts and sites very obviously trying to sell me stuff; it’s so unsubtle it’s a complete turn-off, like a desperate double-glazing or energy salesman, and makes me want to run away from whatever they’re offering.

Yet nothing can make me feel quite so quietly inadequate as Pinterest, and in my book that makes it rather dangerous; surely everyone creative uses it, it’s just like an ideas/story board, just an electronic pinboard of good ideas, excellent design, all the things I’d like to aspire to – and quite a lot of things I didn’t even know I desired until I saw them…?

Surely just a few pounds spent on nice things here & there wouldn’t hurt? And isn’t it a good way of keeping track of trends? Hmmmm – it might even be quite a good way of creating trends too. And if I’ve thought of that, you can bet the people who own & run it have, too. I have a suspicion that they might just be paying for all that server space & web traffic for their own benefit, rather than mine. But at the end of the day, it’s just a tool; I can use it for my own benefit, or I can let it use me. And if you think about it, and realise that it’s not there for our benefit, but for the benefit of the people who created it, own it & use it to market things to us – jolly clever they are, too! – then there’s no problem, is there? I’m sure everyone else has thought of that, too…