Using what you already have

It’s beginning to feel a lot like – a frugal Christmas!

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Once again that certain date is racing up towards us and the bank account is groaning under the strain of buying for a big family. We don’t go over  the top with presents or food, and never have done, but the sheer quantities involved mean there will always be a distinct bulge in the budget at the end of December. And I’ve been sad to read people panicking online this week that they can’t afford to give their loved ones a “real” Christmas, which they seem to imagine looks like the one you see on the adverts, with lots of plastic toys, plastic decorations, plastic-looking food & a plastic-looking family. So a few ideas to cut the cost (and the plastic – horrible stuff!) whilst retaining the joy and good cheer might be timely.

The catering itself isn’t very much different to an average Sunday dinner round here; a few more faces, a few more trimmings and a few more hours with the cooker blasting away, perhaps, but plenty of willing hands to help, too. Good solid food & plenty of it, followed by treats like nuts and a well-chosen cheese board, but no dubious “gourmet” delights that no-one will actually eat, only stuff that can be eaten cold with salad, made into leftover dishes or frozen for later reference. I rarely have to do much shopping after Christmas until well into January, apart from fresh fruit, bread & dairy stuff.

But the setting does need a bit of adjusting, we can’t fit 11 round the kitchen table… however, we can run two market tables end-to-end down our conservatory and use the folding wooden chairs we use for doing the markets. This year’s festive board will be dressed in 5½ yards of pure vintage silk – an elderly & slightly damaged sari, before you panic that I’m about to ruin something priceless – and I’m really rather proud of my planned centrepiece. I came across a handful of mismatched tall crystal glasses at the Tip yesterday, and some old floral decorations; I can just see the glasses lined up down the centre of the table, with tea-lights glowing & twinkling inside, and pale silvery, slightly glittery hellebores laced around the bottom of the stems. Something like the picture below, in fact, but with sparklier glasses & less OTT greenery, when it’s all cleaned up.The china will be my parents’ old China Tree set, I found a set of 12 matching glasses at the Tip recently, and I don’t suppose anyone will even notice if the cutlery doesn’t match; hopefully they’ll be too busy eating, chattering & laughing.

We’ll be using our “fake” tree, acquired at vast expense – part of £1, if I remember correctly – at the Tip some years ago, in about May. It’s a perfectly nice one, even if it doesn’t smell like a real one; then again, it doesn’t make me come out in a rash like a real one does. I’m not quite sure why people find it necessary to buy a new fake tree in the latest “fashionable” colours every year; seems somewhat wasteful to me, but I know they do. And I’m not really happy with the idea of real trees being sacrificed for such trivial reasons, even if they’d never have been grown otherwise, and I’m certainly not happy to pay £35-40 for one. Decorations will be much-loved old favourites, home-made or foraged from the garden & the riverbank; the hallway is always adorned with big star sequins dangling on cotton pinned to the ceiling, which sway & glitter in the breeze whenever anyone walks down there. They cost 50p for a large tub, many years ago; I’d meant to use them for card making, but never did. In amongst them is the odd bigger star, bought for pennies in sales after previous Christmasses, never before. I’m afraid I buy my cards that way too, from charity shops; it’d be nice to give them the full price, but I know they still make a small profit on them half-price & I get to feed my family too!

We’ll be making paper chains for the living room. It’s a small space and big brash tinselly things are far too dominating; chains made from wallpaper samples or free printables from the Web are just right. There’ll also be a garland of evergreens over the fireplace; branches & ivy from the garden & riverbank woven into a tube of old chickenwire & decorated with fir cones, cinnamon sticks and berries from the berberis and cotoneaster bushes. We’re lucky enough to have a female holly tree too so springs of holly will be poked behind all our pictures & mirrors. If I’m organised enough, we may even have home-made crackers; I can do a LOT better for cracker surprises with the cash that one box of bought crackers would cost, never mind two. Paper hats are easy, but sadly the home-made jokes will probably be even worse than usual. I might try decorating the tree with broken bits of junk jewellery this year; single dangly ear-rings & broken glittery & pearly necklaces I have a-plenty & I’ve always thought that might look rather nice. I’ll report back, maybe with a picture. Or not…

For many years we’ve had a strict upper limit on what we can spend on each other in the wider family, and we all stick to it. It’s just plain sensible; Christmas presents are meant to be a token, not to beggar us all. And some of us have agreed not to exchange anything at all now; it doesn’t mean we don’t love & respect each other, but that we all have enough stuff & don’t need or want any more. If money must be spent, let it go to a good cause like Oxfam Unwrapped or Sightsavers, not to buy more stuff to further clutter my home with. Unless, of course, it’s a timeless vintage treasure you simply know I’ll love…

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“Shopping” in your own home…

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I’ve been puzzling over where to put my bread maker. Although my kitchen’s quite big, at 12′ x 15′, I don’t have a lot of worktop. One reason for this is that it’s always covered with clutter, but another reason is that there really isn’t very much, just a 4′ stretch between the cooker & the sink. For many years my trusty breadmaker has shared this with the enormous fruit bowl & the spill-over from my woefully inadequate spice rack; am I the only cook who could do with a full cupboard-sized spice rack? I really do use them all regularly! The breadmaker is in regular, if not constant, use, but I’d become increasingly aware of how much its great white plastic dome intruded on the rustic look of the place, such as it is. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I moved it onto a small table on the other side of the room, where it looked much more at home. The problem was, the rackety little plywood table, with a crumpled, water-damaged top, was a “sacrifice” picked up specifically & needed for its parts; the legs are now installed on a workbox/footstool and the leg connectors have rescued my lovely pink Lloyd Loom chair. But I couldn’t think what else would be the right size; the space isn’t in use for anything else, but it’s pretty small.

Until I noticed my Swedish-made step-stool in the utility room, that is. The top is just the right size & the footprint’s not too big for the space. A good height for a breadmaker, too. But – it’s in constant use, as a step-stool! So I’d made up my mind to pop into my favourite Viking emporium when I go to pick up son no. 3 for a dental appointment next week, and invest a whole £11 in another one.

One of the very minor precautions I took before last week’s storm, which luckily passed us by with very little damage, was to fill both our big camping water containers with tap water in case of any interruption or contamination to the supply; it’s not unknown for our local river to burst its banks. I emptied these early this week, let them dry out & went to replace them in the shed. On – surely, that’s an Ikea step-stool…? I did a proper double-take; I hadn’t a clue I owned two of them! A vague memory surfaced of having picked one up for someone who’d mentioned that they wanted one, but had got one literally the day before I found this one; I must have stuffed it out there soon after & was just using it to keep some camping stuff off the damp concrete floor.

This wasn’t the first instance of finding I’d already got something I thought I needed to go out & buy. It’s always happening with fabric and kitchen utensils – I’ve lost track of the times I’ve spent good money on a modern minor electrical appliance, only to discover that the old hand-operated one was better, quicker & easier both to use and to wash up afterwards – but has also happened this week with lamps and suitcases, oddly enough. I’ve been really busy moving my stall at Molly’s Den into the main warehouse as well as preparing for Boscombe Vintage Market, and didn’t have time to go shopping for things I thought I needed. Which was lucky really, as it turned out I didn’t actually need them, so would have wasted both my time & money. And I do now “shop” my existing wardrobe before even thinking of buying anything new, and look at how I could team things up differently or tweak details to make a “new” outfit. Not just for financial or indeed ethical reasons: I’m an odd shape & when I find something that both fits & suits me, I need to treasure it & hang onto it as long as possible!

I expect most people are much better organised than me, and don’t lose track of their possessions & clothing, but to anyone else whose home resembles the storage area of a secondhand emporium (which in our case it actually is) – don’t wear yourself out running up to town to buy a whatever-you-think-you-need – you’ve almost certainly already got one somewhere!

Steaming mad!

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Yet again, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew 😉  I’ve signed up to do not one, but two stalls at a major festival this summer. All I can say in my defence is that it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I know it will be huge fun. But I really hadn’t thought it through; I need five days worth of stock! And the thing about properly vintage stuff is, they’re not making any more of it.

So, although I’ve had a couple of major haberdashery “finds” lately, I’ve also had to start buying stuff in, sight unseen. And the results have been very variable! The first “job lot”, a sack full of maxi dresses from the 60s & 70s, was utterly delightful; virtually all clothes that I would have loved to have been able to wear back then, if I could have a) afforded them, or b) had the skills to make them (which I’ve painstakingly acquired since) c) had anything to wear them to or d) fitted into them – Twiggy has a lot to answer for! Just one dress made me blench, a salmon-pink nylon extravangza with white lace & ruffles. But maybe someone out there will love it…

The job lot of lurex clothing was a bit hit & miss; I won’t lose out for having bought it, because there are over a hundred items & the vast majority are saleable. Some are absolute treasures, but quite a few don’t really qualify as vintage, as they have holographic sequins, which I’m fairly sure didn’t come into common use until the mid 90s. And two items were not just dubious, but wrecked; a pair of glittery trousers which smelt strongly of smoke also had extensive mouse damage, and a top had been badly hacked off above the waist in an abandoned attempt to make it into a bolero.

But another delight has been the velvet jackets. We lived in velvet jackets from about ’76 to about ’82; I’m pretty sure I had at least three at any given time. All bought in charity shops, needless to say. But they are a bit of a nightmare to clean, so a sack full of crumpled velvet is going to be a bit of a challenge… Luckily I have a steam cleaner, which came to me for free a couple of years ago. I’m still investigating what it can do; I’ve been a bit reluctant to use however many kilowatts it gobbles up, given our ever-escalating fuel prices, but I’m even more reluctant to slosh chemicals around or pay dry-cleaning prices. And I’m thrilled with the results of a few minutes steam on the velvet; it took about two minutes to go from this:

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to this:

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There’s still work to do, not to mention about 20 more jackets to steam, but I’m beginning to believe it’s do-able now. And come to think of it, it might even give me an excuse to hang onto, at least temporarily, the beautiful Lloyd Loom ottoman that came my way last week; the fabric on the top is original & very lovely, but quite badly stained, yet I can’t bear to rip it off & replace it with something more to modern tastes. But it’d be a very good thing to store half a ton of semi-vintage lurex in & sell it from…

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!

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?

Rainy Day Project – Part II

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Well, what can I say? It may have been halfway decent weather elsewhere, but here in East Dorset it has been grey & drizzly ever since I wrote the last post. So I’ve got further, faster, under the stairs, than I thought possible…

From this:

A starting point… you can see what I’m going to do, but it looks like quite a lot of work.

Through this:

Hmm… that wasn’t too bad, didn’t take as long as I thought…

To this:

Well, just about there now! Just the fiddly bits to do…

Not sure I can quite believe it! It’s not “finished” & I’m not sure it ever will be, any more than any room in any living home can be; there’s always something new to accomodate or something different to be done. But when I say “new” it’s a relative term; nothing in there has been bought new, except the network printer (under the embroidery) which we’ve had for nearly a year. Even my Ipad, which has also been with us for a while, was a refurb. And I have stuck to my guns and not spent one single penny; it’s all been done with stuff we already had!

 

 

The Rainy Day Project… Part 1

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You know what I mean by “dead spaces” in the house? Every home has at least one; those little corners that aren’t quite big enough to take a proper piece of furniture, or do anything much in. We’ve had one since we moved in here; the understair cupboard was just exactly big enough for everything to get hopelessly lost & jumbled in, but not big enough for me to get into to find things again. So it got ripped out in the interests of sanity; it’s been curtained off ever since.

Our hallway is long & narrow; it runs the full length of the house from front to back door, straight through the middle, and is very much a passageway in continual use. The stairs run straight up from outside the living room door, near the front door, with no turns. So the area under there is quite a good size, but obviously long & thin, low at one and and high at the other. For many years we had a tall freezer at the high end, near the kitchen door, but some months ago I worked out that half the stuff we were expending electricity on keeping frozen was actually junk. So I replaced it with a worktop-height one; there’s also a big chest freezer out in the garage, so all we needed was a bit of cold storage for frozen veg & ice cream indoors. This opened up some intriguing possibilities; if we could just work out how, the space could probably be put to better use. The rest of it had some freestanding shelves & no obvious function, so had filled up with fairly random & long-forgotten clutter.

There were three possibilities; food storage, laundry sorting & storage, or an office area. All three functions can be carried out elsewhere, to be honest, but the one that really needed a dedicated area of its own was the home-office. We now have a much-improved utility room with a worktop for laundry-sorting, there’s plenty of storage in my kitchen cupboards which just isn’t being used effectively at the moment, and cool storage out in the garage, but at present the official “desk” is shared with the electric sewing machine, working fabric & the dyestuffs, so it doesn’t stand much of a chance!

I sat down & made a list; it turns out that we actually already own virtually everything we need to turn this rather-dispiriting “dead space” into a quirky vintage-style officette. We had a run of worktop left over from the utility room revamp, which is just about exactly the right length. It can sit across the top of the freezer and the top of a useful cupboard “stolen” from DS3’s room. I won two rolls of delightful vintage wallpaper on Ebay some time ago, to finish a project which only took a few inches in the end; there’s plenty for this space there, and I have several rolls of lining paper. When I gave up the shop, the new owner didn’t need the wall-hung shelves from the kitchen, so I have those in there already, and a nicely OTT vintage lamp. There’s still some laminate flooring to match the hallway, and some underlay that turned up with something else. I thought I might need to buy a gang-plug, but it turns out I already had an appropriate one, also left over from the shop. Primer & paint, if we don’t have anything appropriate, can usually be sourced for free at the Tip in smallish quantities, and that’s all I’ll need. And my beloved kneeling chair, which had been banished from the living room as it doesn’t fit in with the look of it at all, slides neatly under the worktop.

But there’s quite a lot of work to do. I need to sand down, prime & paint the underside of the stairs. Then clean, size & line the walls, hang the paper, and lay the flooring. It’s not a big area; each job will probably only take a few hours, but will get in everyone’s way mightily as I’ll have to haul everything out of the space in order to work in it! So in my mind it’s become The Rainy Day project; I will start each “phase” at a time when I’m likely to be able to finish it without being distracted or dragged out to do something more interesting. I’ll be taking photos along the way to document my progress, and my ambition for this project is for it to be 100% “re-purposed” i.e. using stuff that we already have, or other people don’t want, and to complete it without spending any money at all!

There are lots of little details to sort out too; I’ll need to find & install a sliding keyboard shelf as the worktop is a little too high for comfortable typing. A broken computer desk should provide one without too much trouble. I can get quite carried away with vintage fabric & lace, making up a suitable pinboard, not to mention a clipboard, and other useful accessories. I already have some quirky magazine files, but may need to lighten them up a bit. It would be good to run the phone over there too, but how to do that without having dangling cables, OR spending any money?

Anyway, one way or another, I’ll be busy for the next week or two, provided the weather continues in its current gloomy vein. It’s nice to be able to look forward to rainy days! Leave me a comment & tell me what projects you have lined up…