… to get my shop stocked up & the shopping cart “live” though I’m still awaiting one vital piece of info from my bank. So far I’ve photographed, weighed (for postage) priced & uploaded 30+ items; just another 170 or so to go! So I haven’t had a lot of time to spare for recreational recycling in the last week or two. Though I have picked up some classic books at the Minster Fair and at the charity market during the Folk Festival, most of which will be offered in the shop, but some are just too interesting to part with! I look forward to the opportunity to investigate further…
I’ve also picked up several pairs of jeans to make some more “Jeans Pockets” aprons. Every time I go out Morsbagging or car booting in the one I made for myself, I’m asked, “Where can I get one of those? I need one…!” so I shall make a few up to test-market. There’s a craft fair coming up in the middle of August that’s very generously offering FREE stalls to local crafters, so I’m putting my name down for that, and I’ll see how they go there. It will be a fine line whether I can charge enough to make the time spent on them worthwhile, but how will I know unless I try?
I’ve been enjoying my Spinolution Bee hugely, when I’m just too exhausted to do anything else. I know it’s cheating to buy a new wheel, but I’m still enjoying my secondhand Louet S20 too, especially when Jo steals the Bee to learn on! I’ve found some nice bright cotton items – jumpers, a bag – to unravel so that I can re-spin or weave the yarn into something else, which is rather fun.
And we’ve had guests, so the little pot-bellied BBQ stove has been working overtime on fine evenings. That thing is worth its weight in gold as far as I’m concerned; it goes all evening on a few lumps of dry palletwood, and quite apart from its role as a social focal point, you can actually cook on & in it, not just barbecue. Are they still being made, I wonder? Is it possible to buy one new? Or has it been superseded by the ultra-wasteful patio heater… 😦
There seems to be some movement towards getting a “Transition Town Wimborne” group off the ground – I will post more on this as soon as I know what’s happening & where. Watch this space!
… but my computer was. My “C” drive imploded last week and had to be replaced; we’d had a little warning but I hadn’t quite got round to archiving and preparing for the inevitable. So I was caught on the hop and had to get it professionally replaced & cloned. More expensive than the DIY option, but far cheaper than a new computer & well worthwhile, although I am now left with the job of sorting out all the rubbish that’s accumulated in my Inbox & Documents folder over the last 4-5 years, not to mention all the half-deleted games.
So my online shop still isn’t fully open, which is probably just as well as my bank have yet to divulge my business account number, which is fairly vital. But we have been recycling away in the background, as usual; I’ve just finished planting up my containers & hanging baskets, every one of which is reclaimed from the Tip. Even some of the plants have come from the same source, particularly the fuchsias; last spring I rescued 3 willow baskets full of fuchsias “past their best” which wasn’t surprising as there were up to 8 in each basket! Those that had survived were thinned out, given new soil and replanted in the baskets and elsewhere in the garden, and gave a fine show at the end of summer & up until the first frosts. Some are showing tiny leaves again already, though others seem to have given up the ghost. As they didn’t cost me a penny, it’s easy to see losing a few as part of life’s great cycle.
This year my baskets have been lined with “dag ends” from the Freecycled fleeces I’ve picked up. I haven’t felted them first, & probably should have, but they look amazing, especially the white ones. I gather that the fleece and its contents will nourish the plants, as well as holding moisture, rather than just holding the soil in place like traditional liners. Many of the plants are cuttings from last year’s rescued geraniums, though I have bought some new to give variety, and given some of the cuttings away, as well as growing some from seed.
Hanging baskets are wearing natural wool this year...
And our container kitchen garden is flourishing; some of the potatoes are flowering and will be on our plates before long. They haven’t been earthed-up but have been provided with woolly jumpers from yet more dag ends. There are lots of herbs, and a reclaimed water tank full of beans, which I hope will be well-fed by a whole fleece that was very badly matted; basically it had felted itself on the sheep’s back & wasn’t any use for spinning. I’ve planted out some of LIDL’s “living salads” in lovely wide terracotta pots, which the slugs don’t seem to have discovered yet, unlike my own lettuce seedlings. All is watered by rainwater captured from the kitchen roof in butts rescued from the Tip; we’d like a big rectangular storage tank there, but haven’t found one yet, and I refuse to pay £150-odd for a new one. You can see one last bag of well-rotted horse manure, waiting to feed the autumn crops as the summer ones get harvested & their containers are freed up.
Our container kitchen garden, on the driveway...
We’ve had guests this week and the weather was good, so evenings have been spent in the garden, toastimg marchmallows around the pot-bellied BBQ stove, fed by snippets of pallet and small offcuts gleaned from the Tip. This week I’m sure I’ve taken more down there than I’ve rescued, thanks to two of the boys swapping bedrooms and taking the opportunity to purge years of accumulated schoolwork, guitar strings (you can only re-use so many) deodorant bottles, odd shoes and outgrown holey jeans on the way. The jeans are in the pile for my next denim apron, but I parted with the rest without a backwards glance.
On the Freegan front, I’ve just polished off a plateful of Aubergine bake. Two lovely aubergines with minor dings were nestling in the bag of “unfit for humans” goodies I picked up at the market so they’ve gone into the oven peeled, sliced & layered with sliced onion, covered with a tin of chopped tomatos and a sprinkle of home-grown rosemary & topped with grated cheese and crumbs off the bread board. Scrumptious! There were also three bruised bananas which have made a banana custard for pudding (made with some of our own home-laid eggs) some watercress with little roots on which got popped into the pond and the chickens got the rest. And DH, now recovered from his bout of pneumonia, is happily constructing fences with palletwood, to keep the chickens off his new “Nispero” (loquat) and olive trees, bought with the money we haven’t spent on everyday things, so for the moment our recycling efforts are mostly outdoor – long may it last!
…it’s because I’ve been going flat out trying to get my Web Shop open. I’m not 100% there yet, but I’m very pleased to say that it is now online, at VintageCraftStuff, although there are only about 11 “products” up there so far & you can’t buy anything yet! There’s quite a lot of work left to do; everything has to be weighed & measured for the postage calculator, for example, and I have the best part of 100 books to list, not to mention everything else! But at last I feel I’m getting somewhere. I’d love to open a real shop, but rent & rates round here are too high for the sort of turnover I’d anticipate, and I don’t want to get bogged down with commuting.
Otherwise, there’s been another attack of freegan raspberries, but this time I nearly left them too long (about 10 hours) before picking them over and sadly lost over half to mould, so only ended up with 4 smallish jars of raspberry jam. Last week, I was given a big box of celery, which has kept my dehydrator busy all week and will flavour our soups throughout the winter. We enjoyed our day at the Pavilion hugely and gave away over 50 Morsbags; I came away with lots of ideas and hoping against hope that I might finally be able to do a Permaculture Design Course in the not-too-distant future; there’ll be one running locally before too long. Twice I’ve signed up for them elsewhere, only to have them cancelled when there weren’t enough students.
And I’m over the moon with my latest lovely acquisition from the Tip; I had to part with my lovely Willcox & Gibbs “Silent Automatic” treadle as I didn’t use it enough to justify the floor space it took up. But now I have a handcranked version, even earlier (mid 1880s?) which is tiny so I can keep it! They are really good with “difficult” threads; something to do with the tension mechanism, I suspect, so it is genuinely useful as well as “cute” in Jo’s opinion. I’ll post a pic tomorrow.
And the skein of scrap yarn has become a cosy fingercrochet hat, which I love & will wear. There’ll be more in the pipeline; it’s great fun to spin so I’m on the hunt for genuine scraps now!
A couple of the stalls at our local market are happy to give their “unfit for human consumption” greens away to local pet owners, and I’m a regular beneficiary of this bounty; my chickens eat “freegan” greens for 5 days out of 7, most weeks, and roadside dandelions or allotment weeds for the rest of the time. And once in a while, a little work with a sharp eye and a knife leaves something I’m happy to feed to my kids too; we had a very good stir-fry last weekend that only cost about £3 to feed seven people, thanks to a sack of sweetheart cabbages that weren’t nearly as grotty inside as their outer leaves suggested.
Anyway, today I was given a sack with a load of broccoli on top, some of it clearly still very palateable. I duly thanked them and started home, but something was drippping from the bottom of the sack – red juice. Beetroot, I thought. But when I got home & opened it up, there were hordes of cartons of squished raspberries; there were a few little flecks of mould and quite a few flecks of wandering broccoli, but when I’d sorted through I was left with 1.8Kg of squashy but useable raspberries. Jam time! Luckily I had plenty of sugar in. So out came my carefully-saved jamjars, and my big saucepan, and we now have 6½ jars of delicious homemade raspberry jam! Off now to make the scones, using kefir made with Freecycled grains and stainless steel scone cutters gleaned a couple of years ago from the tip. Time to start saving jars again, and it won’t matter quite so much that most of our homegrown raspberries never make it as far as the kitchen door…
I’m quite proud of it. It’s washed OK, considering the wide variety of fibre types in the weaving, some of them only guessed at, and I found another use for the old picklocks; they are inserted at regular intervals around the edge to stretch it gently into shape as it dries. I have since been out and fingercombed through the fringe, then trimmed it roughly to a manageable length. I’m not giving this one away! It’s a little stiffer, but also warmer, than the first one I wove, completely out of scrap & leftover yarns, but as far as I remember most of that one was acrylic. I’ve done better with the shape of this one; I was more careful with the tension, as far as you can be, but also the loom kept its shape far better than the hardboard did. I was a bit anxious that the wool & other animal fibres would shrink at the fulling stage and distort the shape, but thankfully that doesn’t seem to have happened – everything has tightened & evened up a little, that’s all.
Now I’m looking forwards to wearing it – perhaps at our famous Wimborne Folk Festival next month?
Update: following a couple of requests elsewhere, I’ve added a page describing how I made the loom: see
The last shawl took me months to complete. But this one is nearly done in just over a week; as far as I can work out, the difference has been down to;
1) a longer needle. I don’t know what the technical name is or what it was originally for, but this needle is over 12″ long, straight and quite sturdy with a big eye. I’d have said some kind of knitting implement, maybe? The only problem is that it has a sharp point; a blunt one would have been better for this job. I swapped to a “proper” weaving needle towards the end as the big one was too long for the far corner.
2) the “loom” is much less wobbly than the hardboard square was. It has stood up to the weaving process very well, in fact, and I expect to be able to use it again.
3) not using eyelash yarn – that was a total nightmare to keep track of…
4) moving the loom around to adjust the working height; on the floor when I was working near the top, then steadily moving it up onto first a chair, then on top of the budgies’ cage towards the end. Said budgies went very quiet, though I can’t say the same for the cockatiel, who evidently thought it was all very funny.
It is now finished and off the loom; tomorrow I will “full” it and see how it’s turned out. There’s rather more rescued yarn in there than I realised, too; about half, in the end.
Worth every penny...
The pure new wool hanging down from the top came from a charity stall at the market at the weekend; I only wanted to buy the plain undyed stuff but he insisted I took the whole lot for the same ridiculously-low price. My neighbour trotted off happily with three skeins of black, I kept the three skeins of assorted blues, and we spent a happy afternoon “handpainting” the three plain ones with Kool-Aid sent by kind e-friends in the States. Excellent fun! The blue wool will be appearing in another weaving project soon; not sure what we’ll do with our gloriously-technicolour handpainted wool, but I’ll think of something. Not to mention the three black fleeces I’ve “won” on Freecycle this week and have to pick up at the Market tomorrow…
Trying desperately to justify my extravagance at the Knit, Stitch & Creative Crafts show at the Bath & West showground last week, I took it into my head to create another shawl with the lovely yarns that somehow found their way home with me. The last one I wove was on a 4′ square of hardboard, which sadly has warped so far that there’s no way I can use it again. So I picked up some bits of wooden moulding at the Dorset Scrapstore, and spent a few noisy hours knocking tacks at ½cm intervals down two of them. Then I joined four into a square, using old electric sewing machine drive belts as giant rubber bands to join the corners. A couple of 7′ bamboo canes, tied with an oddment of old shirt, made a crosspiece that has “tied” my improvised loom together, and today I’ve warped it up and started to weave…
<
It’s cheating, really, using new yarns that I haven’t spun myself. But it may take me some time to turn out stuff as lovely as these… And there are some scraps & leftovers in there too; some odd bits of Paton’s Spirit, for example. So it’s not completely out of order. Really…
Next project is a Tri-loom, using more (& sturdier) Scrapstore moulding. And I should be able to finish the Charkha soon, too.
Oh dear. I seem to have caused a bit of upset this afternoon; my older daughter is only just speaking to me again. She talked me into going for a walk; I decided to load up my handcart with all the rubbish from my workshop & drop it off at the Tip, which she was happy with. Not so happy, though, when they told me there was a dressmaker’s dummy waiting round behind the “landfill” skip. It just about fitted into the cart, much to Madame’s evident annoyance. But when I stopped & picked up the lovely sharp old bowsaw too, her annoyance turned to agonised embarassment… all the way back along the riverbank, she was expecting some raincoated detectives to spring from the bushes and arrest me. “You look just like you’re planning a murder, Mother! Why else would you be towing round a dressmaker’s dummy and a very sharp deadly weapon? People get arrested for carrying small knives, let alone that thing!”
You have to see the funny side – which she couldn’t, at the time. The dummy was for a young home-ed friend hoping to do a textile GCSE; new, they cost £140 which is out of the question for most students. And the bowsaw is for cutting branches; we didn’t have one & it’s a far better tool than a pruning saw on thicker branches. Ah well, next time I’m planning a murder, I know who not to take with me…
…to whoever threw out two complete boxes of Edinburgh Crystal white wine glasses this morning. I shall enjoy a glass or two at their expense!
Have to say, I wouldn’t go out of my way to acquire posh glasses. But if they come my way by chance, I’m not going to turn them down. It’s nice to enjoy the odd trapping of success, even if it was someone else’s success. I shall probably end up car-booting them to raise money for my new “travel” spinning wheel, but for a night or two I shall peer at my teenagers over a cut-glass rim. It would amuse me to drink home-made wine from them, but somebody seems to have drunk it all…?
A friend & I “did” a car boot sale last weekend. It’s a vast one that people come to for miles around, and I took stuff that I thought would sell well, but threw a couple of odds & sods in at the last moment. Needless to say, the decent 30s & 50s china didn’t sell, even at 50p per item, no books went at all at 20p, and the old clothes I scooped out of the back of my wardrobe flew off the rail at £1 per item, which was more than I’d paid for a lot of them. I was struck by how things had changed; people used to go to car boot sales for a morning’s entertainment. They’d scoop up a few pretty bits of china for a few pence, treat the family to an ice-cream, hunt out interesting books or hobby items, and everyone would go home happy. Not any more… people were begging us for bedding, cutlery and other essentials. Young parents had spread out blankets behind their cars, trying to sell their sobbing children’s toys. Scary… and I suspect this is only the beginning.
Slipped down to the Tip yesterday in a spare 10 minutes, Monday often being a good day after people have decluttered their attics at the weekend. Nothing obvious, so I climbed up to look in the Metals, and there, not 12″ from my hand, lay a very tatty industrial Singer… naturally it leapt straight into my arms. I could see a gigantic cracked motor and a rusty old footplate, which would be no use to me even if I could have taken them; was there anything else? A few moments anxious scanning revealed a bag of bits including the (broken) bobbin winder, and a thread stand out of reach, which Lee kindly hooked out for me. I grabbed anything else loose that might be vaguely sewing-related, and ran off, a mere 10 minutes late for my next appointment, hyperventilating gently…
It’s a Singer 96KSV7 from 1940. 96s were generally fast tailoring machines, but this one looks as if it’s been adapted (SV meaning Special Variant) to use heavy threads & thick fabrics, as it has a tension knee-lift and a higher shank than the only other 96 that has passed through my hands. There was a bit of very thick strong thread trapped in the shuttle race, and it has a massive needle fitted. Upholstery, maybe? I seem to have picked up most of the correct bits, and a few totally random ones too, but now I will have to find a treadle table to fit her, as I think this might well be the all-round heavy-duty machine I’ve been hunting for for my planned workshop. She stitches beautifully, from fairly-small to a gigantic 4 stitches per inch, and has reverse. I wonder how she’ll like quilting? There’s plenty of room under that massive arm.
When something like this falls into your hands, you know it’s just meant to be. I knew I needed to part with my 1895 Singer 15 Light Industrial (probable) sailmaker, as I know someone who needs it more than I do and will use it regularly to do something well worth doing. I’d been wondering how I was going to replace it for the little heavy-duty stuff I need to do, but someone up there was ahead of me, as usual. Now, what colour do you think she’d like to be next?
A recycled lifestyle... 