bargains

A point of view…

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Went carboot-cruising with DD1 this morning, and came home with a very respectable haul from the bootsale area of our local market, I’m delighted to say, despite the fact that probably more than half of the sellers there are actually regular traders rather than people emptying their attics. But then I went on to another sale elsewhere; I knew it was likely to be more upmarket than the other one because of the “posh” venue, but some of the prices were eyewatering! I’d halfway expected to find people packing up as I was so late, but most of the stalls were still laden. Which isn’t surprising, when one of the vendors was charging £16 for a small rectangle of fabric, just big enough to scrape a cushion out of. Yes, it was nice Sanderson fabric, and probably half of what she’d paid for it new, but that is NOT a boot-sale price. If I want to pay half the new price for posh fabric, I’ll wait for a sale in at our very-good local interior designers & have a choice of fabrics.

And as for the gentleman who happily sold me a lovely ebony glove-stretcher for 50p, a matching ebony & ivory clothes brush also for 50p, and then spoilt it all by asking £5 for a white enamel milk jug with cracks, that someone at some point had filled with orange paint, which was thickly plastered inside & splashed all over the outside, oh dear…

I’m not daft, I know enamel is hot just now. But that poor jug was past it before the paint incident; you might have got some daft banker-on-secondment to pay £5 for it with cracked enamel. But liberally plastered with well-dried-on orange paint, too? I think not… but I’m very happy with the glove-stretcher & the clothes brush anyway. They’re beautiful, if not currently fashionable, and have true & lasting value.

I go out to boot & jumble sales with a change-purse filled with £20 of small change. I may or may not have more money with me, and if I saw something that I knew to be a real bargain – a Timbertops spinning wheel, say – I might dig into other resources. But mostly I manage to keep well within what’s in my purse. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not intending to be mean, and I don’t begrudge a decent price for a decent article, and yes, I do know what it’s like to crawl out of bed on a freezing morning to try to earn a few extra pennies to keep the wolf from the door because I cut my teeth on car boot sales, but if you want to do well at car-booting, don’t charge too much!

I found one of my friends there, and she’d done well & enjoyed herself, by charging between 50p – £2 for good quality, serviceable clothes. The guy selling healthy, well-grown, unusual perennial plants like Saponaria for £1 each had clearly done well too, and deservedly so, and I was happy to add to his profits. And the lady selling delicious home-made fudge deserved every penny of her earnings. But charging nearly as much for everyday things as they cost new, or as much for stuff that really is past its best as you’d pay for top-quality items in an antique shop, is a sure-fire recipe for going home with a car full of unwanted items you brought with you. If you have something of real value to sell, chances are that a car boot sale isn’t the best place to sell it.

Yes, I mostly buy with a view to selling on. But I will have put work into the items that go onto my stall; every handcranked or treadled sewing machine & spinning wheel will have been serviced & supplied with instructions, feet, needles, & bobbins. Fabric, clothing & table linen has usually been washed, mended & starched if appropriate, pressed, trimmed & measured for pricing. Patterns have been checked; some of the older ones have up to 20 fragile pieces to identify & smooth out. Books are checked for defaced & missing pages, and so on & so forth. So if you want the same price as I’m likely to get for it, I’m not going to buy it from you! (Although, of course, someone else may.) And if you want more than I’d get for it, you’re probably not being realistic.

It’ll be a while before I have a chance to do a car-boot sale or something similar myself. But I have a garage full of assorted non-vintage clutter that I need to dispose of; let’s see if I can take my own advice when the time comes & let it go at a price that people are happy to pay!

 

Phew!

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I don’t think I’ve ever been so exhausted in my life. But we did it! DS3 is home safe & sound, we’ve celebrated this in style, and somehow we managed to get our stall at Molly’s Den ready for the Grand Opening as well.

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I really didn’t know what to expect; I felt that due to time constraints, we’d only managed to get half of what I’d planned done, sorted out, prepared & over there. But it did look kind of like I wanted it to, sort of slightly olde-worldy farmhousey, cosy & comfortable. And hopefully intriguing… Some of the other stalls are gorgeous, stuff to die for, so I wasn’t really expecting too much to start with, until I’d got it straight. But this was the same stall today, after two visits to tidy up & bring other bits & bobs in…

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The chair has gone. The sewing machine, the little table, the Laura Ashley curtains, some of the kitchenalia, the old saucepans, and a couple of rugs have also gone. I think some books may have trotted off to pastures new too. So I am rather pleased! I have lots more stock, more coming in all the time, and lots of bits I can mend, alter & make anew to try out down there too. Let’s see if I can keep it up…

And now I finally have ten minutes to stop & think, I’m going to have a go at this too: 30 Ways To Save £1 so watch this space for my entry, hopefully very soon!

Might be a bit quiet for a week or two…

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… because 1) DS3 is coming home – hip-hip-hooray! – from his 9 months studying in Chile, and 2) I’m going to have some “premises” again, for a while at least. I’ve taken a small stall at Molly’s Den, a nearby vintage/retro warehouse, where I hope to have some of my less-portable wares on offer 7 days a week, without tying myself up in knots trying to run a shop, restock it and run workshops too! So I’ll be tied up with sorting, pricing & preparing the space for a bit. I’ll see how it goes, but it will cost me just £5 a month more than a storage container, with the benefit that my stuff will not just be dry & safe & out from under everybody’s feet here, but it’ll actually be on sale too, and potential customers will be able to try things out.

To celebrate, I think I might organise a bit of a giveaway, inspired by Frugal Queen’s Bank Holiday giveaway; it won’t be as big as hers, but I do have rather a lot of small, interesting bits & bobs in need of a good home that isn’t shared with 4-6 other people & 3 cats! So, watch this space…

 

Leftovers…

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One way in which I keep our family food budget as low as I can without compromising on food quality, is by using up leftovers. With our young people at the ages & stages that they are, we don’t always know how many people will be eating any given meal. So I tend to over-cater rather than be caught short; OH usually takes a portion in to reheat at work the next day, but there’ll nearly always be some left over.  Sometimes there’s a lot and sometimes there’s a little… A few of the cheaper things I cook really don’t reheat well & go to the chickens next morning (please don’t tell DEFRA!) but at least we get some return on those in the form of lots of lovely eggs & excellent compost. But most leftovers can be reused if they are chilled as soon as they’ve cooled down & stored properly.

In the last week or so, we have polished off the remains of a spaghetti bolognaise, cunningly disguised in a lasagne along with a light cheese sauce & layers of (cheap) courgettes. And the lamb left from Sunday last week’s roast went into a lamb tagine. Thus there were meat meals on two days that I didn’t have to buy anything for. There was a little of the tagine left, which went into the freezer as soon as it was cooled, which will be added to some leftover lamb shoulder from tonight & made into a slightly spicy moussaka tomorrow. We often seem to have pies towards the end of the week, filled with whatever hasn’t vanished into other dishes. And I’ve been rediscovering 1970s cuisine, happily reinventing the classic recipes like goulash, bourguinon, chasseur & stroganoff by using leftovers rather than buying fresh new meat to make them. But it’s definitely better to find & use an authentic 70s recipe book, rather than using celebrity chef versions; the 70s recipes use fewer exotic (and expensive) ingredients, and the tastes are all the sharper & clearer for that!

As customers sadly seem to be deserting our local market, I’ve also been able to pick up some exceptionally cheap vegetables lately, and on Friday I got 3 big aubergines for just £1 to go into tomorrow’s moussaka. I usually can’t get down to the market before noon on a Sunday, by which time the stallholders are packing up to go home and veg is down to 50p for a pot of anything that won’t last until next Friday. See what £4.50 bought me yesterday…

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Those carrots are enormous, by the way, at least 30cm long each, and very tasty; the cucumber is a perfectly normal size! And last week I was given a carrier bag full of tomatoes which wouldn’t last, which made a huge pot of delicious tomato soup that made lovely lunches for all of us who study or work from home, all week.

The interesting thing is that last year, when I was running the shop, I couldn’t summon up the energy or imagination to use up leftovers or gluts and sadly a fair bit went to waste, or at least to the chickens. And I found myself wandering helplessly round the supermarket after work, unable to think straight, fair game to pick up whatever they were pushing and feed it to the ravening hordes. Though technically the shop did make a small profit, I rather think that was cancelled out by the extra I spent on food. I don’t think my dehydrator went on for a whole year – that’s what I’ll do with most of the Scotch Bonnet chillies, by the way; even this household can’t get through that many in a week – and hardly any jam or jelly got made. Which was OK, as we already had a garageful to see us through, but made me rather miserable when I realised that I’d completely missed the chance.

Not a day goes by when I don’t thank Someone Up There that I’m lucky enough to be in a situation where we can afford for me not to work full time, so that I have the time & energy left over to save money…

Ideas, ideas…

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I’ve spent several happy hours hacking up 99p charity shop shirts over the last few weeks, with another quilt in mind, and will be posting a tutorial soon on how to cut up & re-use a shirt with least possible waste, along with some ideas for the “what-on-Earth-can-I-do-with-this?” bits. But some of the last batch were made from such pretty fabrics that one or two other ideas started to creep into my mind. However I’ll need all the shirts I’ve currently got, and more, to complete the current quilt top, so I went looking for more, but sadly it seems that the gods of charity shopping are not currently viewing this project with favour – there were no 99p rails out anywhere and precious few shirts under £3.99. So I started looking at other potential sources of inexpensive fabric. Not that there are many left now, sadly…

Anyway, most shops still seem to let unmatched pillowcases go for 50p, provided they put them out at all – oddments like that don’t fit with the High Street ethos, really – and some of them, usually the older ones, are made from fairly decent & attractive fabric, even if many are terylene/cotton mixes. So I dismembered a couple to see what I’d got. They are usually cut from one wide strip of sheeting fabric, selvedge to selvedge, overlocked along both long sides. If you’ve ever tried to unpick a 4-thread overlock, you’ll know it takes hours and there isn’t much fabric under there anyway, unlike a stitched seam. So I just cut the seams off, very close to the stitching, and ironed them flat. Then I kind of got to wondering whether there might be enough fabric there to make little pinafores… and the answer is, that provided you don’t mind about matching the pattern, or need them to flare out much, then yes, there is. This is my first effort, yet to be tried out on a real child; I suspect I haven’t made the armhole deep enough but that’s easily rectified next time around. In theory it’ll fit a 3-4 year old, but whether one would be seen dead in it remains to be seen! I will report back once I’ve pressganged a passing child, and if it’s a moderate success, I’ll post a tutorial as I make up the next one! And if that’s of much interest to anyone, I might just make up a few in kit form, and see if anyone would actually buy them…

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In praise of soup…

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On my hob, two pots are simmering gently. One contains a nice easy soup; the remains of yesterday’s turkey-stock-based gravy with leftover vegetables (sweet potato, parsnip, onion, sprouts, carrots & leeks) just dropped in & stick-blended. Took seconds, tastes gooooood; real comfort food for a lazy Boxing Day. The other has the skin & bones of the goose, picked clean of flesh, broken up & boiling away with some herbs, seasoning, roughly-chopped onion, carrot & celery. The veg were bought cheaply as our weekend market closed a couple of weeks back; they’re the biggest, toughest & leafiest ones that more discerning shoppers evidently didn’t want, & they’ll be full of overwhelming flavour. You wouldn’t want them in a salad but they’ll be adding plenty of body to my stock; peelings will go to the rabbit with her breakfast tomorrow. (She seems to do all right on them, before anyone tells me she shouldn’t have them, as she’s nearly 7 now.) The fat will be skimmed off, chilled to solidify, lifted off any remaining stock, heated up again & strained to render down into a pure white  substance to keep in the fridge, which will make the nicest, crispiest roast potatoes well into 2013. The turkey remains will be demolished later; most of the meat will be made into a curry supper for tonight and tomorrow that carcass too will be in the stockpot. Most of the stock will be frozen in batches, to be defrosted & used in soups for weeks to come, and small scraps of meat will be frozen in little containers to give those a bit of body.

Why do people turn their noses up at soup, or view it just as a starter for a “real” meal? And why do some of the most impecunious people I know just throw their festive leftovers away? There’s so much taste & goodness left in there; you’re only getting about a quarter of the value you could be getting out of your money (and that creature’s sacrifice) if you just throw it away after one meal, when you’ve eaten the “best” bits! We normally have a roast on a Sunday, then (time allowing) leftovers of whatever sort, apart from those destined to be made into another main meal, will be made into a big pot of soup on Monday morning, by whichever method is most appropriate, but usually involving the stockpot or the slow cooker. Those of us who work from home will have this for lunch well into the week. When I had my shop, I took flasks of soup in for lunch most days.

Soup is Bibilical – mess of pottage, anyone? – a well-known restorative for invalids & convalescents, and historically a mainstay of peasant diets, though of course, sometimes there just plain weren’t any other options. The best soups are seasonal, delicious, and all round good for you. It’s easy to add in foraged goodies like fresh young nettle leaves or garlic mustard without anyone with delicate sensibilities noticing. It’s even possible that they eat it on other planets – anyone else remember the Soup Dragon from The Clangers?! And what could be more heartwarming than knowing it’s filling your stomach with goodness without emptying your purse?

Catching up…

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Sometimes you just need a few quiet days to catch up with stuff… it’s amazing how much chaos can vanish, given a few hours to tackle your UFOs. A UFO, for those of you who are more organised than I can pretend to be, is an UnFinished Object. At any given time I will have several hanging around, waiting for an unbroken run of time & inspiration to get them done & off my back. One of these has now been done and another is well underway, and would have been finished last night if my treadle belt hadn’t broken just as darkness fell.

A minor UFO!

This quilt came to me in two pieces; I found it in a local charity shop (henceforth referred to as CSs) just after I’d promised a young friend a quilt for their birthday. It’s a commercially-made one, although it’s hand-pieced, probably in India, and had been cut in half & hemmed to make two small singles, probably for two small boys. The two halves were being sold for dog blankets at £2.50 each… just so happened that I was cutting up a pile of blue 99p CS shirts to make patchwork pieces, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to “cheat” and try to join it back up again; couldn’t help thinking it would be rather wasted on your average pooch. I doubt I could have done it invisibly and actually I didn’t even want to try; every quilt tells a story, as they say, and being divided & joined back up again is part of this quilt’s tale. It lies flatter than it looks on the washing line!

The other project that’s awaiting some concentration-time is the blind for DS2’s window, which is half-finished, but I hope to have done by the end of today. This time I did buy the main fabric new & complete, to fit in with his colour scheme, but everything else is reclaimed, and much of it from the same old blind that I made DS3’s one from. Leftover fabric will be made into cushions; I found two brand-new cushion pads at the Tip a couple of weeks ago, still with their price tags on.

In the meantime, I’m continuing to try to dispose of more stuff than I bring back; a large load went off with the jumble collectors yesterday, and a boot-load of genuine rubbish went off to the Tip. And I only brought one small item back; a little vintage wind-up travel alarm clock. If it doesn’t work properly, I’ll cannibalise it for steampunk-style jewellery, but so far, it does, and very well too, so I might just have to sell it on as is…

And editing to add: treadle belt changed, blind finished & hung, and one cushion completed. The other may take some time; the front will be the same, but the back will have to be painstakingly pieced out of about 8 tiny leftover scraps…

A major UFO – adding a touch of warmth to a very masculine icebox-bedroom!

Let it rain!

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Because my chickens now have a roof over their heads again… I spent yesterday re-roofing their run. They’ve been paddling in the mud for long enough! And what’s more, thanks to Freecycle and a very kind lady down in Poole, I have two more of them, and I’m getting beautiful multi-coloured eggs again.

When we first started keeping backyard birds, one of my great joys was collecting the deep brown, pink, blue & white eggs from our much-loved Marans, Faverolles, Araucana & Hamburgh chickens. But over the years the laying flock had dwindled down to 3, two Warren-type hybrids laying perfectly pleasant but very ordinary light-brown eggs, and one gigantic Buff Orpington laying “tinted” (pinkish) eggs when she isn’t broody. There are just two Pekins left, also laying little pinkish eggs, but one of them is raising chicks just now. 2-3 (and possibly a half) eggs a day doesn’t go far between 7 of us! I’d meant to do something about it early this summer, but missed the boat; I wanted a couple of “Chalkhill Blue” day-olds, but didn’t have a broody when they were hatching, and when I did, they’d finished hatching for the year, so she had to make do with some Freecycled eggs and now has two Polish X Frizzle chicks, one of which may not be male.

Anyway, a dear friend had to move earlier this summer & gave me her solitary surviving Marans, Mollie, who lays splendid deep-brown eggs; she was the only survivor of a dog attack. Then a couple of days ago there was an advert on Freecycle from someone desperate to rehome her flock as she’s about to have a serious operation & won’t be able to care for them. I didn’t see the advert until 6 hours after it was posted, so didn’t hold out much hope, but to my delight she contacted me the next morning & said I’d be welcome to take on a couple of them, including – a Chalkhill Blue! So that evening I hurtled down to town & collected two baffled chooks – the other one is a White Star – who now rejoice in the names Faye & Bianca. As my separate accomodation is already occupied by the broody, I had to pop them onto the roost with the others; I was expecting trouble next morning, but I didn’t get it. The new girls were a bit shy to start with, and there was a little bit of posturing, but within an hour they were all dustbathing together and by the end of the day I had two light-brown, one pinkish, one blue and one pearly white egg! And they now have a run that should keep the worst of the weather off their feathers, and a shed that’s stopped letting in water now I’ve revamped the roof. Amusingly, the inside is lined with a red vinyl poster announcing “VIP Marquee” courtesy of the Dorset Scrapstore…

Glorious technicolour eggs!

But it can rain with impunity now for other reasons too. I’ve had a couple of influxes of goodies; one from the local charity shop that sells me the craft-related things they have’t been able to move on themselves, and some interesting items from the tip, as well as some lovely 1950s curtains from the 50p house-clearance stall on the market. I’m going to be busy for days next week, sorting things into saleable & usable, washing things & Freecycling the bits I can’t use. And then there was the very successful raid on the charity shops down in the conurbation, where they evidently do still believe in 99p or £1 rails for the stuff that hasn’t sold; I picked up 9 100% cotton striped gents shirts to slice up for quilting & other fabric projects. So I’d be glad to have an excuse to spend some time indoors; I could even possibly use some of the beautiful threads that were muddled up in the “unsaleable” batch from the local charity shop (pictured below) and the wonderful vintage needles (with decent sized eyes!) that came in a box from the Tip… I may be gone for some time!

Even more technicolour threads!

A little lament for The Ottoman Of Doom…

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Last week younger daughter suddenly took it into her head to “tidy” her room. At 17, she still had virtually everything she’s ever owned stuffed into corners, under the bed, and heaped over her exercise bicycle, but something suddenly clicked inside her head & she, like me, realised that you can indeed have too much of good things, and that actually it’s rather nice not to have to scramble precariously around umpteen piles of junk in your own bedroom.

Which explains what I was doing down at the Tip on Tuesday; I took down a car full to the brim of childhood & teenage detritus, most of it completely un-re-usable in any way shape or form. Needless to say, the car didn’t come back empty… sitting in the re-use area was the most relentlessly cheery & twee piece of furniture I have ever seen;  a large ottoman covered in a white plastic quilted-effect fabric dotted with little red & yellow rosebuds, complete with shadow-rosebuds in some kind of silvery-shiny substance. The whole artfully trimmed with gold braid, with brass-effect handles & hinges to finish it off. I took one look at it & knew that this piece of heroic kitsch really, really needed a trip to Boscombe on Saturday… My middle son took one look at it in the boot of the car and panicked mightily, basically saying that if it, or indeed anything remotely resembling it, ever entered our household, he was leaving via the nearest exit! So it acquired the nickname The Ottoman Of Doom, and stayed safely in the boot of the car for the rest of the week.

There were other good things down there too; a nice little 50s-style vanity case, a grubby but promising quilt and an interesting modern original acrylic-on-board painting, which gently suggests sailboats in what looks very much like a bluey-purple Aegean sunset. The vanity case also went down to Boscombe with us and sold within minutes of the market opening, for the same price that I’d paid for all four items. The painting is now adorning younger daughter’s suddenly sophisticated & miraculously-coordinated  bedroom, and the quilt washed up a treat and has been “spoken for” by elder daughter. And the Ottoman Of Doom? It sold towards the end of the market; I didn’t price it very high, for the same reason that although a treadle sewing machine is the best of both worlds and the ultimate stitching experience, I can’t expect to get very much money for them; most people just don’t have the room for such large items, no matter how useful. A lot of people stopped  to coo with delight over the ottoman, but then worked out that they didn’t have any way of transporting it, never mind anywhere to put it; luckily it found its new owner at last.

Although ottomans are very useful on the stall, and indeed I have one in the shed that I’ve had for months, full of vintage curtains, that just needs to be unloaded from the car, wheeled down to our pitch & opened to display our wares perfectly effectively, I was glad I didn’t have to bring the big one home again as I haven’t a clue where I would have stashed it! But I do kind of regret not having taken a photo of it; I wonder if such a determinedly-cheerful & outrageously OTT piece of furniture will ever come my way again?

So you’ll have to make do with a pic of one of my latest efforts instead; last autumn a collection of random handmade needle-rolls (complete with vintage cottons) sold well on my stall, mostly snapped up for thoughtful Christmas presents for fellow-stitchers, so this year I’m making some myself from some iconic 1970s curtain fabric. I’m also planning to do some crochet-hook & knitting needle rolls from the same fabric (previously 5 pelmets) and other vintage leftovers. And there’ll be some new ear-rings from elder daughter, now trading herself under the name “Pippin Run Wild” and all the usual indispensable Vintage Craft Stuff – I’m looking forward to November’s Boscombe Vintage Market already! I wonder what other whacky & wonderful treasures will come my way before then?

Needle rolls from 70s pelmets

The final curtain!

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Sorry, but I’m not actually going to shut up yet… really it’s now the final curtains,  the last one from the Laura Ashley set, lengthened with the strip cut from the conservatory ones & made into a pair for the front door. It all looks rather posh now! I’m amazed how quickly it all happened; it’s almost as if they wanted to be used rather than being sent off for ragging, because despite the sheer weight of the fabric and the fact that half the time I was finger-pressing rather than doing a proper job with the iron, somehow I hardly put a stitch wrong & my quick-unpick was only used to remove the header tape, which was then re-used. So now I have three pairs of matching warm, lined curtains, which kind of fit nicely in a house this age & size, for the princely sum of £3.50 – one of the 50p curtains poles was not needed so went off with a friend, but I had to buy a few more pin-hooks to hang the last set as the rings on that pole are metal. One reason why the old curtains looked so tatty was probably that one of them only had two pin-hooks left; the rest of the rings were attached with a motley selection of safety pins!

I have a feeling it’ll take me a while to get round to doing the cushions, though – there are other projects crying out to be done, and I need to find, and I do mean find , some suitably eclectic fabrics to patch them with!