Just passing the word around – if you need paint or woodstain, and don’t want to shell out loads of money, or want to use something that would otherwise be wasted, get down to your local Tip now! At ours and others nearby, paint is FREE and most of the time they have a huge choice, from almost-full giant tubs to tiny sample pots in a vast range of colours; we picked up a virtually-full large tin of Farrow & Ball a couple of weeks ago. And most of the paint we found to use in our kitchen is low-VOC, so you may well find suitable paint for households with asthmatics/young children too. If you only need a little, it saves you having to buy a bigger pot than you need. There’s woodstain too; my bantam hutch is done out in a fetching shade of Woodland Green, having found a half-pot down there, which was all I needed, so the only thing that cost me any money at all was the hinges. They can’t advertise, for commercial reasons, so please make it your first port-of-call when you’re looking for paint; then tell all your friends, and point out that it’s the environmentally-sound thing to do!
recycling
Black gold…
Picture the scene: a green English country lane, dozing gently in the weak spring sunshine. Buds on the trees, but no leaves yet to impede the birdsong flooding down from the trees and cascading over the ebullient roadside daffodils. And along drifts a big Japanese car, slowly, erratically, pausing at every gateway. The driver looks quizzically at the front-seat passenger; she shakes her head sorrowfully and on they go. Then feverish excitement breaks out; there’s the object of their quest, just visible tucked in beside the next gateway. The car draws up and out they tumble, bags in hand. Eagerly they approach their objective, and the transfer takes place; empty bags are tucked underneath the waiting brick, and full bags placed reverently onto an old rug in the back of the car. The car backs up & swings round, then off they go, faster now, conveying their precious cargo back home to the waiting beneficiaries… happy roses, plump beans, glowing red & blackcurrants! Black gold, well-rotted horsemuck…
So you can imagine how happy I was to find a box full of plastic compost sacks down at the Tip late last week. I didn’t take them all, just enough to fill my boot up one more time, which should, mixed with my homemade compost, fill my motley assortment of containers, ranging from builder’s bags and gigantic Woolworths plastic tubs to aged terracotta flowerpots. And that will give us vegetables, saladings and even some flowers this summer, given a little sunshine! I have been mending the plastic “walk-in growhouse” and we’ve planted lots of seeds in well re-used trays and pots; tomato seedlings are already showing their heads in my secondhand propagator.
Inside, as well as trying my hand at spinning mohair, I’ve been planning my charkha. I found a box that used to hold projector slides, and some usable bits from a tiny old Saxonia sewing machine that was far beyond hope of resurrection. Add some old cotton reels, a knitting needle, and the gadget that turns the belt of an electric sewing machine, and it’s beginning to look like this is do-able… I shall need to cut a plywood circle and somehow attach two CDs to it to make the big half of the accelerator wheel, and work out what I’m looking for to use for drive bands, but can I have it finished before the end of this week? Watch this space…
What a week for wombling in Wimborne!
An excellent haul…
For a long time, we’ve needed a pair of bi-fold doors to fit across the opening from our tiny living room into our rather large conservatory. Single doors would have taken up too much living space, whichever way they opened. But I’d found it very hard to find readymade doors that fitted in with the style of the house, and bespoke doors were horrendously expensive. But bless their cotton socks, those fine gentlemen at Wimborne Household Recycling centre have done it again! There, before my very eyes on Monday, were a matched pair of sturdy pine bifold doors, with glassed-in uppers so we won’t lose too much light. I’m not too struck on the pattern on the glass, but it’s liveable and the girls actually like it. And it might be removeable, or we could just replace it altogether if it really grates. So all we need now is the hanging kit, which is a little more than £20 at B&Q – much more manageable than the £400 we thought we were going to have to save up. They need painting, to blend in with our decor and add to the (entirely theoretical) impression of space; I will post a pic when they’re done & up. Next cold snap, we’ll be laughing…
As I was clucking happily over the doors, someone offloaded a tent and drove off. Recognising the colours and the style of the bag, I inspected more closely; it was a Khyam Ultradome. Probably a couple of years younger than our old, much-loved Megadome but not as hard-used, it looked to be in decent shape so was popped into the capacious back of my Toyota Emina along with the lovely convertible (treadle/electric) Singer 201K in its oak cabinet. The Singer will be going off to Africa with TWAM, as will the almost-identical one picked up from a goodhearted Freecycler earlier on today. The Khyam will be going off to Devon with us inside! It’s a whole lot smaller & lighter than our big Gelert tunnel tent to transport, without being much smaller inside, and very much easier to pitch.
I have had it up in the garden for a closer look today, and apart from a small, easily mended rip on the porch, it’s in pretty good shape. The original guy ropes are gone, but we have a set of proper Khyam guys & pegs from our faithful old friend the Megadome. I shan’t feel so bad about taking that apart now, as it will be helping this one give many more years of service, and since one leg strut got snapped by someone who didn’t understand how to pop them down, it really is past it now. I’ll use some fabric from it to mend that rip, and take the integral groundsheet out to use in the living area of the Ultradome, which didn’t come with one. That’s one reason why we bought the Mega rather than the Ultradome, 13 years ago – you had to buy it seperately if you wanted one, and the tent cost well over £400 to start with…
So I’m happy with that, and with the biggish enamel saucepan (with lid) I kidnapped for dyeing in, the two little mesh windows from someone’s larder which will make fabulous deckles for papermaking & the little old ratchet screwdriver that ought to go off to Africa but which seems to have slipped somehow into my sewing machine tool box and obviously feels quite at home.
And I’m definitely beginning to get the hang of spinning now, and am turning out skeins of yarn that I actually want to work with. The dyeing & spinning experiments are going to be made into a “Granny Square” jumper – will I have it finshed in time to wear it next winter? Or will I be distracted by 101 other irresistible projects, like making myself a charkha out of a small, rescued box and parts from an old Saxonia sewing machine that really was at the end of its useful life? Watch this space for regular updates…
Have I gone too far this time?
On our way to pick up next winter’s egg supply today (as day-old chicks, to pop under my broody Pekin bantams) I spotted a dead pheasant at the side of the road. Nothing unusual at this time of year in the Dorset countryside, but this one was at the end of a layby, so would be easily reachable without danger from speeding traffic. I said to the girls, “If he’s still there on the way back, he’d make a good supper tonight…” Cue squawks of teenage horror…
Much to my surprise, he was still there, so I pulled into the layby, nipped out and had a quick look. Well dead, but still warm; no signs of decomposition or illness. So into the boot of the car he went…
And indeed he has made the most delicious meal, in a home-made Chasseur sauce, with baked potatos, bulgur wheat and stir-fried kale. But half the family, the male half at that, are being exceptionally fussy and refusing to eat him.
It’s not as if it’ll make any difference to him now, is it? He very clearly died of colliding with a car, nothing more sinister or infectious than that, and he’s been well-cooked to be on the safe side. My Other Half maintains that his mortal remains would have fed umpteen small creatures of the night, but I suspect they would instead have been a deathtrap for them, lying in the path of on oncoming traffic in the dark. I for one am grateful for his little life and untimely death; his bones are boiling for stock right now and his glorious feathers will adorn some of our textile projects. And it’s not as if we killed him ourselves…
Anyway, I’m proud of my daughters, for helping to prepare him without a fuss in the end. And I don’t really mind my fusspot males not eating; all the more for us tomorrow!
Everything comes to she who waits…
I popped into the Tip this morning to see whether any sewing machines had come in over the weekend; with the economic downturn, the flood of old beauties has slowed to a trickle as people begin to realise that they may actually still be useful. Lee greeted me with, “I’ve found something for you! Look behind the Metal bin!” And there, to my great delight, was the exact size of grill needed to restore our firepit to full functionality. Not that we’ll be eating out in the garden for a few weeks, but as this season’s seeds start to go in, winter’s cool grey chill is starting to recede and there’s suddenly so much to look forward to, in the house, in the garden and out in our beautiful countryside…
Not that I’ve been idle in the dark evenings. I asked everyone to give me money for my birthday and Christmas presents, and put it towards a very secondhand Louet S20 spinning wheel, which has been helping me make a small dent in the huge pile of Freecycled fleeces in our porch. I’m rather pleased with the resulting yarn, though I’ve yet to put it to good use and actually make something with it. I’ve joined our local Spinners & Weavers Guild, as they do lots of other things I’m interested in too, like Kumihimo, rag rugs and felting. We’re experimenting with dyeing, both chemical and natural, as part of the girls’ educational adventures this term, and some of the shorter fibres are going into felt. So this is how I’ve spent some of my evenings this week:
They’re made from felted Dorset Down fleece, lined with leftover polar fleece, soled with suede from the Scrapstore and stitched, firstly by machine on a rescued “Light Industrial” Singer 15 from 1895 using Scrapstore upholstery thread, then Dorset Featherstitched by hand with hand-dyed thread recycled from a gone-wrong jewellery project. Didn’t cost a penny!
Wrong planet…
??? Why are people so proud of not having the time or patience to learn how to do things ???
I’ve recently rescued a small 1980s handheld, handpowered knitting machine from the tip, luckily complete with instructions. I’m no good with two needles (I’m always dropping one needle, or the stitches, or the cat that inevitably attached itself to the ball of wool. Or my glass…) but this little beastie has genuinely made the whole ghastly process easier, and I mastered the basic stitch within a couple of hours. It’s small enough to take into work with me and as the place runs down there’s nothing much else for me to do, so I was sitting knitting a lacy shawl (for a Christmas present) in the office this morning. And one by one, my remaining tenants trotted in and said, “Ooooh, aren’t you good? I wouldn’t have the patience to do that/learn to do that…” Bless their cotton socks, they say this every time I take any kind of project in, and they’re not the only ones. And there’s definitely a little element of “I’m too busy/important/got better things to do with my time…” with some of them. As the tenants are all OAPs, mostly this something better consists of sitting in a traffic jam outside our local Shopping Experience, queueing for somewhere to park before battling through the crowds to buy something identical to everyone else’s for 100 times what some poor slave-child was actually paid to make it…
I do know that many people of that age group see having to make your own stuff as a sign of poverty & failure. As a result of which there’s an entire generation growing up who can’t make anything for themselves because their parents & grandparents looked down on people who could & did. This includes skills as basic as cookery; most of my friends think I’m “good” (or possibly just daft) for cooking nearly everything from scratch. And craft is just an activity for tiny children, before they get on with the real business of formal learning, aged 4…
I’ve just been round our local market’s “craft” hall and was dismayed to find it nearly all just “handmade” (i.e. embellishments stuck haphazardly onto blanks) cards, with two shining exceptions, a woodturner and two ladies who were spinning their own wool & trying to sell nice chunky knitted & handwoven items. People were happily snapping up the cards, squawking, “Oooh look! This one looks just like one you’d buy in a shop!” and paying well over the odds for them, but hardly anyone was even looking at the lovely, inexpensive handmade wooden & woollen stuff.
I think I’m on the wrong planet sometimes…
In a ferment…
Useful things, jars. Sadly it’s a bit too easy to come by them at the moment, and thus to take them for granted and send them off for recycling, or even just throw them away. More than once I’ve had to run out at the last moment & buy preserving jars to make jam, because Him Indoors has happily decluttered my unruly hoard. For jam you need lots of small jars, but some of the other things I like to make need larger jars, and they are surprisingly difficult to track down as “there’s no call for them any more…” So whenever anyone has any, there’s a queue for them! I was delighted to find several very large glass jars, with lids, at the Tip a few weeks ago. One has gone to my neighbour to house a Kombucha SCOBY that I passed onto her so that she can make her own Kombucha tea. One’s been filled with home-made Kimchi, a Korean version of Sauerkraut, which is providing a delicious accompaniment to my lunch every day, though sadly I can’t persuade anyone else to try it. And one has just been filled up with onions which I hope will pickle gently in good time for Christmas. The Kimchi recipe has worked really well, much better than the last one I tried, and the result is not only tasty but crunchy too, so I thought I’d try making pickled onions by lacto-fermentation this time, rather than by vinegar pickling. And a couple of mid-sized jars and a kindhearted fellow-Freecycler have allowed me to restart my adventures & experiments with Kefir; there’s cheese a-making even as I type…
And then there’s bottles. I’m still hoping to acquire more swing-cap bottles, but they’re fiendishly expensive to buy new. I have enough for most of the Kombucha, but sadly my ginger beer is having to ripen in plastic bottles for now. Ah well, at least they are being re-used, and it only tends to stay in the bottles for long enough to become drinkable.
For some reason, this house is good at fermentation – perhaps because there’s always something more interesting to do than clean it! I noticed years ago that if I left a saucer of milk down overnight for the cats, in the morning I’d have a saucer of yogurt. No effort needed on my part at all, no scalding or sterilising, and it never seemed to be “off” milk, just nice thick creamy yogurt which the cats enjoyed hugely. When I tried making a sourdough starter, it started to bubble gently within a day. But it’s not popular with the family, so mostly I don’t bother, but it’s nice to know I can make bread with no hi-tech ingredients if I ever need to.
I remember one of my friends laughing gently at me at the school gates a few years back, and saying, “Oh come on! Life’s too short to make your own marmalade, when you can just go out & buy it!” Well, where’s the fun in that?
And bagged again…
Bagged!
- Blissful – bagging in the sunshine…
Well, that was good fun! Jo & I set up our stall in the glorious garden of the Priest’s House Museum, on our one & only sunny summer’s day, and bagged to our hearts’ content. We gave away 30+ bags and made another 14, with assistance from various members of the public, as you can see. In fact, pleased as people were to be given a free, sturdy re-usable shopping bag made from reclaimed fabric, the machines themselves attracted a lot of interest and several people couldn’t resist having a go themselves. Which was exactly what I’d hoped for… I’ve offered to do another upcoming event down in Bournemouth, and been accepted with alacrity. So I’m cautiously hoping that this will prove to be a good way of catching people’s interest and getting the message across that something that has no value to you as it is shouldn’t just be thrown into landfill… Maybe you yourself can re-use it, with a bit of imagination, but if you can’t, someone else somewhere almost certainly can!
Half the family are away in Wales at the moment so last night’s supper was cooked on the potbellied BBQ. Apart from realising that we need some kind of a guard around it to keep the assorted livestock from immolating themselves trying to get at our food, this was a great success; sausages and burgers cooked to perfection, followed by windfall apples baked under the tree they’d been growing on a few hours earlier. Sadly, though, finding an unopened packet of fondue forks at the Tip yesterday meant that toasted marshmallows were inevitable, and my skirt seems alarmingly tight this morning…
And Freecycle triumphs over Ebay, yet again. I missed out on an industrial sewing machine on Ebay at the weekend; I need one for the tough bits of my quilted bags as my dear old Jones zigzag is in serious danger of shaking itself to pieces every time I make one. I just forgot about bidding and it sold well within my upper limit. Kickself-worthy… but DH took the boys to the Bournemouth Air Show, and picked up two Freecycled machines en route. Blow me down, one turned out to be an early Singer 15, which is undoubtedly some kind of light industrial sub-model, built for strength rather than speed like the other two that have passed through my hands. Sometimes I marvel at how these things work out; I didn’t have to spend any money at all, the item I needed has found its way into my hands for free instead of being dumped! Many thanks to Tara, the donor, who nearly threw it out thinking no-one would want it as it isn’t exactly pretty, and DH for fetching it.
Just goes to show; one person’s “clutter” is another person’s opportunity…
Going public…
This Saturday (30th August) I’m taking part in a public event under the Morsbags aegis. I will be taking my rescued Singer 201K treadle to the Priest’s House Museum and making Morsbags in situ. I’m also taking along a couple of handcranks, probably Singer 99s, & pre-cut & ironed bags so that people can have a go at making one themselves. So eldest daughter and I are crouched over my latest carbon-burning extravagance – a powered cutting knife – and churning out Morsbags for dear life this week. The lads at the Tip have been magnificently helpful, hauling out vast acreages of “blokey” curtains from the fabric skip so that not all the bags are flowery!
But that’s not all they’ve found for me. My sister-in-law will be gobsmacked to be told that she is now the proud owner of two large blue cast-iron casseroles, which will go nicely with her set of rescued saucepans. Different make, Nomar rather than Le Creuset, but it works… I’m keeping the other two, as they fit nicely side by side in my oven, whilst being bigger than my two orange ones! I can’t help wondering about the story behind them; who buys four big, matching cast-iron casserole dishes, which aren’t cheap, even if you bring them back from France, then chucks them out whilst there’s still plenty of useful life left in them? Possibly someone who’s raised a big family but is downsizing now… but I do wish they’d heard of Freecycle or Waste Not Want Not, our local recycle/loan group. There were good sharp cooking knives and other stainless steel utensils down in the skip beyond my reach, too; I could run an entire shop on what people throw out, if retail premises weren’t so expensive here. Although I have heard that our Chamber of Commerce aren’t very encouraging to that kind of enterprise; they feel it’s the wrong kind of “image” for our town… so somehow they have to be brought from seeing reclaimed stuff as “secondhand & seedy” to “cutting edge/environmentally responsible/high moral ground!” Or is that, and price, the basic difference between a junk shop & an Antique Emporium? Anyway, I could, and did, rescue a very nice butcher’s block, and a big Pyrex mixing bowl, which have both gone straight back into service in my nicely old-fashioned, workable kitchen. There were proper weighing scales, too, but only a few weights. I have two sets, so let them go to an older gentleman who, like me, was fed up with buying electronic plastic scales which become useless after a year if you’re weighing anything more weighty than slimmer’s portions.
I also splashed out 99p on a rather nice little Singer 128K on Ebay locally. On going to pick it up, and mentioning that it would probably be going off to Uganda with Tools With A Mission, the vendor happily presented me with a free 99K too! What a lovely lass… Not to mention the two that I’ve “won” on Freecycle this week, too… But I can’t quite bring myself to hand over the 320K, complete with all its attachments, that turned up a couple of weeks ago. Now it’s dried out, I’m having quite a lot of fun with that and all the pockets of my children’s worn-out jeans… I’ll post a pic when it’s finished!
A recycled lifestyle... 