Shopping my wardrobe for shirts

Posted by louisa on Friday 15 April 2011 in frugal, less than 12 clothes challenge | 8 comments

Last night, I decided to go shopping in my wardrobe for shirts.

It’s about five months since I bought (or acquired by any means) any items of clothing or related apparel. The less than 12 in 11 challenge has been easier than I thought in many ways and my tally for the year is still zero – but recently I’ve been getting a bit more tempted towards breaking that embargo. After the long winter, I’m a little bored of my warm woollie options (or rather warm cotton hoodie options) and lately I’ve been getting a bit meh about my selection of my Spring-suitable tops too. A couple of weeks ago, I sorted out my chest-of-drawers drawers, which was great for refreshing my memory about my t-shirts and last night it was the shirts in the wardrobe’s turn.

I had 29 shirts & blouses in my wardrobe and another one in the wash. How many of those 30 shirts have I worn in the last month or, hell, the last three months? One. The one that’s in the wash (I’ve worn that all of twice). Admittedly it’s not really been light-cotton-shirt season of late and I don’t have anywhere that requires me to be smartly dressed but still – that’s a lot of shirts for someone who doesn’t wear shirts much. Ten – one-third – of the shirts were solid black from the days when I wore solid black shirts as a work uniform and standard going out wear. No one needs ten black shirts. Last night, I dragged them all down into the living room and tried them all on in turn (giving John a free boob flashing floor show at each iteration).

Of those 30 shirts, 14 straight up didn’t fit. They were either too short (especially as I wear my jeans low) or didn’t come close to closing around the boobs (I’ve got somewhat large sweater cows), or both. I think I’d kept at least half a dozen out of wishful thinking – because I love the patterns so much and won’t be able to replace them. The one at the back of the picture above with green stars on it hasn’t ever been worn because not only was it a little snug upfront, the arm holes were blood-pressure-band tight on me. (Having said that, it’s a lovely, lovely shirt – if anyone wants it, let me know and I’ll post it out. It’s a size 14 and there is a bigger picture here.) Those shirts will go to charity shops or into my crafty fabric stash depending on re-wearability/pattern.

Out of the remaining 16 shirts, two need repairing (button replacements) and five need to be worn over a vest top or under a jumper. Nine – less than a third of my shirt collection – were fine — they fit and I still like them.

Getting rid of nearly half my shirts might not sound like “shopping” but it was really useful to go through them all and remind myself what I have (I’d straight up forgotten about at least three of the keepers), and what they look like/how they can be worn. I think I’d stopped even thinking about wearing shirts because it was depressing to look in my wardrobe and see so many that didn’t fit or couldn’t be worn as they are for whatever reason. Looking at it one way, I’m losing near half my shirt collection; looking at it another way, I just gained nine new shirts ;)

Using our homemade olive oil soap

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 12 April 2011 in making, soap | 9 comments

Last week, we started using our homemade olive oil soap.

You might remember I spent A MILLION HOURS waiting for the damn thing to trace back in February but didn’t think it would work because it was sloppy in the moulds for a few days. Then it started to solidify and I did a happy dance.

So, anyway, after a few more weeks of curing/drying, we started using it last week. I went with one of the 100% olive oil ones, not the one-third olive oil, two-thirds other veg oils (more on those later when we try them).

I was really paranoid at first – worried it would be too caustic or something – so made sure to scrap off the bits of white powder (soda ash) from the edges, rather than just washing it off. Cavitch’s troubleshooting guide says to beware of “excessive” white powder as that can indicate too much lye or hard water has been used – but I don’t think my white powder was “excessive”, just some.

The soap is very pale – almost pure white. Apparently the better quality of olive oil, the paler the resulting soap. My olive oil (which came from Netto) claimed to be extra virgin so this fits. It has quite a neutral smell – slightly olive oil-ish but nowhere near as strong as the olive oil I started with. It’s pretty hard now and doesn’t lather much at all – but that’s expected with pure olive oil soap and the latter isn’t a huge problem as it’s not like we’ll be using it as shaving soap or anything like that.

So anyway, the verdict. It feels nice to use – smooth and silky, and no alkaline burns at all – always a good thing in a soap ;). Because of the play and stuff last week, I haven’t actually got my hands that dirty since we started using the soap so can’t comment on the actual cleaning properties but it leaves my skin feeling clean – and … not “squeaky”. I don’t know how to describe it but whenever I usually use normal bar soap, my skin feels “squeaky” afterwards – presumably either dryness or some sort of residue. That isn’t a problem with our olive oil soap – even when I washed them five times in a row to double-triple-quintiple check that it wasn’t too caustic (yes, really overly paranoid).

As I said explained in my last soap post, we’re not interested in pretty or pleasantly perfumed soaps – we want them to clean us, be long lasting, to have an inoffensive smell, create minimal waste and be frugal. The hardness of this soap means it doesn’t turn to mush in the soap dish and the only waste produced were two plastic bottles (which can be recycled – but one of which was actually reused as a soap mould first).

As for the frugalness, I had used this recipe and method which called for 1 litre of olive oil, 126g of caustic soda and 300g of water. I paid £2.52 for the olive oil from Netto, about £1.50 (I’ve lost the receipt!) for 500g of caustic soda from Wilkinsons (so about 38p for the amount I used) and tap water (which is effectively free), so the consumables cost around £2.90 for the batch. (I did buy a pan and steel dish to use too – but they’ll be used again for soap making and other non-foody pursuits (such as dyeing) so I considered them a general craft supply costs rather than including them in these figures.)

Weighing it just now, I’ve got around 1050g of dried, ready-to-use soap – or 35p per 125g bar — my bars differ in sizes (from about 50g, for the ones from the fruit tray mould – as seen in the pictures – to about 125g for ones shaped in an old mini roaster tray) but that’s the size of a bar of Oliva soap, which is the 100% olive oil soap we’d used previously, so is a good comparison. Oliva usually costs about £1 a bar.

All in all, I’m glad I tried it and I’m very happy with the result – but it was a bit of a faff. I think I did the right thing by processing two loads of soap on the same day so made economies of scale re: faffiness. Hopefully the soap we’ve got now will last us about a year – I’d happily do it once every six months or a year but I couldn’t be bothered doing it much more frequently than that.

March – end of month review

Posted by louisa on Thursday 31 March 2011 in growing, less than 12 clothes challenge, personal finance | 15 comments

March has been a rather expensive and stressful month as we’ve been having our bathroom fitted and a ridiculous amount of things went wrong. But at the same time, we’ve also learnt some new skills and had some lovely Spring days – just how fantastic is it that the world is turning green again?

Goals in 2011 progress

As in February, I’m working towards a few goals if not anywhere near completing them yet. I’ve sown a lot of seeds for veg – unfortunately lost a lot of baby seedlings to damping off and other bad propagator management but I’m learning all the time. We should have our first fully homegrown 2011 salad in the next few weeks.

I’ve not been baking that much but the four loaves we made each on our baking course at the weekend keep up my average ;) They were sourdough loaves and we also now have starters from them – not quite growing one from scratch but I’ll be satisfied if I can keep that alive and bake from it.

We’ve also been on a screenprinting course – which isn’t one of the simple living goals mentioned here but is on my personal goals list – and enjoyed it a lot. We’re booked in for another session the week after next and I’ve already got a few things worked out that I’d like to print.

Buy less than 12 items of clothing in 2011

Even though I thought I’d cave this month, my tally is still at zero. I have been looking at things online but nothing has wowed me enough for me to get out my credit card. I did add some things to basket a couple of weeks ago but deliberately left it overnight to see how I felt about them in the morning – and in the morning, I was indifferent. I quite like that.

I think a Spring jacket may break my embargo – my short woolly swing coat is a little too warm at the moment but my hoodie is at the dog-walking stage of its lifecycle. We’ll see.

One other thing: one day, while putting away laundry, I sorted through all the t-shirts/tops I have in my chest of drawers. I didn’t get rid of anything, just tidied into related piles and refolded – I rediscovered a few tops which got looked over in the usual heap format of my drawers. Shopping your own wardrobe/drawers rules!

Growing stuff and the chickens

As I mentioned above, the growing stuff thing is going well-ish. I might live to regret it if there is a cold spell in the next few weeks but I planted out my broad bean seedlings yesterday. I’ve got two lots of potatoes sown in “bags”. My tomato seedlings – the ones that survived the Great Damping Off Crisis of 2011 – are beautifully leafy. My cucumbers and pumpkins look green and luscious. The chillis & peppers are growing slowly but looking good. The radish seedlings numerous, the cauliflowers hanging in there and various lettuce & salad leaves at varying stages of sprouting but looking very promising. On the fruit front, John B gave us some jostaberry canes so they’re in the ground too now. All our other berry bushes & fruit trees are budding/leafing well (the photo above is one of the apple trees), and the two strawberry runners that I thought had died have proved me wrong. Basically, it’s all go in the garden, greenhouse & propagator!

The chickens are doing well – they’ve met our nephew on a couple of occasions (our 4 year old niece comes to visit sometimes too, and John’s young cousins, but at 13 months old, the ‘phew is their youngest visitor to date) and got an new layer of woodchips to scratch around in. In return, they’ve given us a magnificent 200 eggs exactly (well, exact at this point – if I go down later, there may be another one). That’s an average of 6.45 a day, at a rough average of 8p per egg in consumables (£12 ish of food, and about £4 for straw, shavings, seed treats & powders).

Supplementing our chickens’ feed with free greens?

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 8 March 2011 in chickens, frugal, growing, wild food | 11 comments

We popped to the feed store in Shipley on Saturday to buy another couple of bags of layers pellets for our girls – a sack last them about three weeks these days.

As we were paying, the owner noted that they’d gone up in price “again” – to £8.45 a 25kg bag. It’s still considerably cheaper per kg than when we were getting pellets from a different store (albeit one that delivered) but thanks to my chicken keeping spreadsheets, I know they’ve gone up twice within six months – they were £7.80 a bag when we first bought that brand in September, then £8.00, now £8.45.

Split over price per kilogram or per day of consumption, it’s not that much of a leap – about 2p extra a day, split between 7 of them, averaging just under 6 eggs a day. But it is a worrying trend — part of the general increase of prices and food costs in particular — and it’s got me thinking again about how to supplement their diet for free/very cheap. It’s not just about the money, it’s about food security – if we can find food for them, they’ll provide food for us.

Last summer, they loved the borage I grew and I also foraged random bits for them – plenty of dandelion leaves & wilted nettles as well as bits of fruit (including the dry pulp left after cider or wine making). Over winter, I’d planned to grow lots of kale and spring cabbage to keep them stocked up on greens in this scarce period – but I think I started them too late and then lost most of them to slugs anyway. I also intended to collect acorns (like Kate from Living the Frugal Life) but didn’t get around to it (I just couldn’t work out how to collect them in bulk in the (public but rarely used) areas where they fell, without having to pick them all up individually, then I saw someone had collected them with a rake. Genius.) As a result, their own free “treats” recently have just been occasional kitchen scraps and bundles of nettles that I dried last summer. (They do have handfuls of mixed seeds/corn too – but that’s not free and will be subject to the same price rises as the layers pellets.)

Now it’s the start of the growing & foraging season again and I’m thinking about what I can try this year.

Another scrap wood planter

Posted by louisa on Monday 7 March 2011 in growing, making, wood stuff | 1 comment

It was too nice today to sit inside – a cold, dull start but warmer this afternoon with some lovely soft winter sun lighting up the trees in the wood.

We had a lovely walk in the woods at lunchtime – we took out the neighbours’ year old springer spaniel as well as ten year old Lily, which was a fun change of pace. Sometimes Lily exhausts herself trying to keep up with him but today she was happy for him to run around like a crazy thing while she pottered along. We pottered too – he ran around more than enough for all of us.

After we’d got home from that, I did a quick hours work then headed into the garden to make another scrap wood planter. John’s dad brings us lots of short lengths of scrap timber – the end of planks from a joiners – which aren’t long enough to do much with, but I had an idea the other day for using them to make a planter – and this is the result:

Whenever I’m doing anything with wood, I try to minimise the amount of sawing I have to do because I’m lazy (and have an aversion to sawing after having an awful saw for a long time – the current one is actually really good and easy to use). Conveniently all the flat pieces for the sides and the battens for the bottom were already cut to size – or rather, the sides were all the same size and I let than dictate the height/width of the planter, then found enough suitably sized battens to fit along the bottom. It’s about 1m/3ft long and about 30cm/1ft wide & tall.

Like the other ones I’ve built, it’s made completely from scrap – the short lengths and reusing lengths of structural timber/decking that John’s dad has reclaimed/skip-dived – and I’ll line it with soil bags etc so the only cost are the screws. That was not inconsiderably on this one though – I used a lot of screws! – but at least it’ll double as a really small bomb shelter if we ever have another blitz. ;) If some flat wood – about 1cm by 5cm – turns up, I might use it to make a pretty lip to cover up (and protect) the top rim.

I’m really enjoying making these planters at the moment and hope to get another couple made before I need to start concentrating on planting things in them!