Charity shopping, planting and making – my fun weekend :)

Posted by louisa on Monday 18 April 2011 in charity shopping, growing, making, wood stuff | 4 comments

Last night on Twitter, I asked people to put their hands up if they’d had a lovely afternoon in their garden/at their allotment yesterday and I got a sea of hands waving back – it is really bloody lovely out there at the moment, isn’t it?*

On Saturday, I blew my no spending month thing out of the window by going to a craft sale at Kirkgate Studios in Shipley – well, actually, I only bought two balls of wool and a postcard from there but since I was in Shipley… As with most poorer areas, you’re less likely to find exclusive designer goodies going for £1 but with eight charity shops, there is at least plenty of choice.

I bought 13 books. Thirteen! But 10 of them were (drama) work-related and two Monica Dickens books I’ve been considering buying off Amazon/Abebooks for a couple of months, so it wasn’t all spur-of-the-moment spend-spend-spend. Plus, eight of the books were in a 4-for-£1 offer so all 13 books cost £7.70 in total — not too bad. (And I’ve already found seven books to give away under my “buy 2, get rid of 1 old one” rule.)

I also bought a cute small plate to be our kitchen soap dish for 50p, another little dish for 50p because it was a tourist souvenir from Baghdad (and how often do you see those?) and a fake-patchwork duvet cover for £1.50, which I’ll turn into a cheat quilt like Lynsey’s from SwirlyArts made this time last year — again, something else I’ve been looking out for because I love Lynsey’s quilt so I was very happy to find it :)

Anyway, after all that spendery on Saturday, I declared Sunday would be a day for the garden. I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped (I’ll have to have some time off this week to get the rest finished) but I potted on lots of tomatoes & pumpkins, sowed nearly all my potatoes as well as more lettuce & annual herbs. I also made two new scrap wood planters – not the prettiest but certainly the easiest ones yet.

I believe the sides are old scaffolding planks or similar — John’s dad had a trailer full when we went over the other day. He said “they’ll be great for burning” until he saw me hugging them to my chest and squealing with planter-building delight. They’re about 3ft by 1ft by 8inches deep, with reclaimed decking for the bottom supports. Again, they’ll be lined but I think I’ll see how far I get cleaning them rather than painting them as I like the character of the wood. (Apologies for the somewhat shadowy photo – was in a hurry, camera battery was dying.)

I also made some super quick wire wall mounts for some herb pots in the greenhouse – I’ve run out of room on my staging/the floor at the moment so wanted these little pots (and five with baby sage seedlings in them) out of the way. I’ll have to make sure they don’t dry out too much but they’ll probably be fine for now.

Oh, and I also cleaned the windows for the first time this year on Saturday evening – they were, as you may expect, rather filthy but I did a rather good job, even if I do say so myself – not a single water spot in sight! ;)

* (People in parts of the US still in the soggy tailend of winter and people in the southern hemisphere who are heading into full on winter – sorry to gloat about our sunshine. We’re just not used to this nice weather in the UK and you know, talking about it is our national pastime.)

What did you get up to this weekend? Any frugal fun? Or planting progress?

More scrap wood planters

Posted by louisa on Monday 4 April 2011 in growing, making, wood stuff | 6 comments

These are WIPs rather than finished articles but I wanted to mention them anyway because it’s pretty much all I achieved over the weekend – I had a nice quiet weekend, just not as productive as normal.

On Friday afternoon, I had that “I must make!!” craving so I went to hunt around in the (supposedly for burning) wood store for scraps to planters – I found 30 plank offcuts, roughly the same length (about 25cm/10ins) and width (13cm/5ins) and 12 batten offcuts, about 15mmx30mm. I’d intended to make another long trough but I realised those pieces would make three 25cm/10inch-cubed planters without having to saw anything at all – win!

(I don’t mind sawing now that we have a decent saw that treats everything like butter – but I like to avoid it whenever I can because I’m lazy and always end up with wonky cuts :) )

As with the other planters I’ve made, these aren’t exactly working examples of right angles or beautiful to look at but they’ll do. They’re finished in terms of building but the planks were all untreated and while I’ll line the inside anyway, I think I’m going to have to treat or paint the outside to make them more weather resistant. As we’re painting the bathroom soon, we should have some paint leftover from that which I can use.

The other planter I started yesterday afternoon before I had to rush off to a not-great dress rehearsal. I went down to the bottom of the garden to look for pallets (to make a vertical planter like the one Emma suggested) but the only ones down there are too big/heavy – but I did find some old, weathered fence boards/paling, which John’s dad had salvaged & brought over at some point, so I decided to make another long trough planter from them. I’ve made up the long sides – using a salvaged/scrap 2by4 cut into quarters for the corner supports/feet – but haven’t attached the short sides or base yet. It’s going to be 120cm/4ft by 60cm/2ft when it’s finished so I might end up removing the feet and resting the base on the floor so it doesn’t have to be strong enough to support all that weight. I’m going to enlist John’s help with fixing on the sides – I’m hoping that two of us working together can actually get the angles square for a change!

While I was doing that yesterday, John was at his mum and dad’s house for lunch and his dad excitedly told him about his latest find for us — apparently the sawmill/joinery place he gets a lot of offcuts from had some 5m (16ft) lengths of decking going begging this week – salvaged from a replacement job or something. According to John, his dad now has a crazy idea for us to make some 5m long planters – that might be a little nuts! Perhaps I should work on my sawing skills after all…

January – end of month review

Posted by louisa on Monday 31 January 2011 in goals, less than 12 clothes challenge, meta | 13 comments

Just a quick post reviewing my progress on my various goals/spending, and about tracking other stuff that I may or may not have mentioned.

(I mentioned this on Twitter – I’d had this bunting for a while and John surprised me by putting it up in our dining room. Pretty!)

Goals in 2011 progress

I haven’t really achieved any of my goals for 2011 yet – early days, early cold days. I think we’ve baked something every week so far though and I’ve also started tracking of usage of more consumables (FYI – but possibly TMI too – it takes us 6 days to use a toilet roll), so that’s a start. I also built some things from wood for the garden, which will help me with my piece-of-furniture making goal.

Buy less than 12 items of clothing in 2011

I haven’t bought clothes this month so my tally for the year is still at zero. (More info about the challenge…)

I did look at stuff in the sales online at the start of the year but wasn’t persuaded by anything. And last week, I went into a few shops that sell clothes amongst other things (mostly charity shops) – but I put my blinkers on and went straight for the other stuff – homeware things – instead of looking at clothes. It’s quite a poor area so the vast majority of the clothes are cheap makes – I don’t mind buying some of my items from charity shops but I want to avoid poor quality clothes wherever they are sold.

Growing stuff & the chickens

Since it’s still chilly winter, not much is happening on the growing front. I sowed some winter gem lettuce near the start of the month and they’re still tiny, but getting bigger by the day. We also had some fruit trees delivered – six apples and two pears – and John’s planted those out now. I also bought two blackcurrant bushes – I feel like we’re making good progress in the perennial fruit situation now.

The chickens have enjoyed the factionally longer days and the mostly warmer weather – and the two black rocks both started laying mid-month. Lime is still moulting and Buff is still refusing to give up the goods, but we’ve had a solid five eggs a day from the other five nearly every day for the last fortnight. We’ve had 109 eggs in total for January – not bad going since it was just one or two a day at the start of the month! (Also, in late breaking news, some of the chickens are currently grounded – I let them out to play again yesterday and someone, Ginger I think, led the parade into the wooded bit of our garden – it took me about half an hour to catch them all again!)