Preparedness for when

thriftwizard

MrsLW, for a small handful of undies, you can use a sturdy salad spinner. I have one specially for spinning handsful of wool for spinning, but have also used it for DS2's footy socks from time to time with no harm done!

ETA: Congratulations, Siegemode!

mardatha

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lost-Voices-Edwardians-1901-1910-Their/dp/0007216149

Am reading this and it's really heavy going, really sad. makes you appreciate how easy we have it.

metherer

Just a quick message.

Popped into Yorkshire Trading Co this afternoon, and picked up two tubes of glow sticks. They are in for Halloween.

15 x bracelet sized glow sticks, with connecting tubes, for £1. They can be linked up to create a long rope of them.

I snapped one to see how they are, and it is quite a strong glow.

ETA, I'm thinking in a powercut I could set one off at bedtime and wrap it round the top of the bannister, so that we can see where the stairs are. (My bedroom door is just off the top of the stairs, so if I were to go to the loo in the middle of the night with no light, I could quite easily end up at the bottom of the stairs)

BitterAndTwisted

ALIBOBSY wrote: »

I agree about the washing, with 4 kids, so 6 of us there is no way we can wash everything everyday. I often sponge off cardies and jumpers and they use them over the week.

A long time ago I was a live-out nanny for a family with three kids under 6 and I was the one doing all of the family's laundry . The family were millionaires so their clothes were all of exceptional quality and I hand-washed their jumpers or cardis very rarely because the damned things needed to be dried flat. I was the sponging-and-airing-queen. If they got very dirty I was known to only wash the cuffs. Same for the adults' knitwear, nothing bad happened except they got a lot more wear out of them and they kept looking brand-new for an awful lot longer.

About the three-day week: there was only power for three days but we went in for all five. Doing accounts work by portable gas-lights on no-power-days. It was unthinkable to not go in on the days when there was no leccy. Back in the day managing on three days' pay would have been impossible even if you managed to hold onto your job by skiving for the other two! Those were the days when female employees weren't allowed to wear trousers to work either. Seems like a lifetime ago now. Oh! It was.

[Deleted User]

THRIFTWIZARD that is a most brilliant and O/S idea, verily, thou are a genuis!!!!! Thank you so much you clever thing you, Cheers Lyn xxx.

RAS

Possession wrote: »

Just in case this is of interest to anyone, some recipes for a solar oven:
http://ecofootprintsa.blogspot.co.uk/p/solar-oven-recipes.html

You can make a very basic solar cooker from a large cardboard box and aluminium foil (for when we have sun shine).

Cut three sides of the box diagonally, so that you end up with one corner and three triangular sides.

Cover the inside of the three triangles with foil (glue).

Position so that the sun lands on the point at the junction of the triangles, Place the item to cook just in front of the junction, perhaps raised a little on a trivet.

We cooked a small cake in about as much time as required in an oven.

You do need to track the sun if cooking things that take time.

Hard_Up_Hester

I worked all 5 days through the 3 day week, I also froze as I wasn't allowed to wear trousers. I had a twin tub up until the late 80's.
I got married in 1976, the big drought, we had hose from the bath to the veg plot in the garden. We also had mostly 2nd hand furniture for years and when I look around my house now I still have loads of 2nd hand stuff.
Nearly the same as drying clothes in the oven, my DD frequently has children dropped of by social services in filthy clothes and with no other clothes, mostly she has time to go shopping that evening but one child arrived asleep and filthy at 10:30 at night and was told child had to go to school the following day. DD washed the clothes and ended up microwaving them to get them dry, she claims it's a trick she got from watching Uncle Buck!
Hester

GreyQueen

siegemode, I did try to warn people that The Government Can is catchy.......:rotfl:I love it. Just as well as I can't get it out of my head, either.

Glad I'm not the only one with oven-dried childhood laundry. The microwave is a nice spin on the trick. I do have to advise that Mum also tried to dry socks under the grill. White knee socks made from either mostly or exclusively synthetics.

You can get scorch marks on your socks like the griddle lines on a steak. I don't recommend grilling your smalls.

Re the poster who had housemates who used to handwash their smalls, they're quite right. It is better to handwash the delicates. A lot of people don't know that fabric conditioner is destructive to elastane and elastic (Lycra and Spandex are elastane brands).

I think we're been so terrorised into the idea that anything other than clean clothes daily, from undies outwards, and the daily bath or shower, is to fail to keep the minimum acceptable standards for polite society and that anything else is hopelessly manky.

I adjust the laundry interval of garments according to what I have been doing in them. If I've been working on the allotment in the heat of summer, and the dust has been blowing, I come home very grimy and will put myself in the shower and the clothes in the washer, to run next time there is a full load.

If it's a workday, and I work part-time at a desk job, I dress just before leaving the house and change once I get home, hanging up my clothes, often with an open window to air them out. I aim to get another day out of blouses, and another day or two out of trousers. I don't usually wear the same top two days running in case people would notice and pass comment, but I would wear it again later in the week. My work trousers are identical so the issue doesn't arise with them.

I think we need to look at laundry habits for a variety of reasons. Home laundry is one of the biggest energy and water hogs in the home. We also wear out clothes more rapidly; we say that things are worn out but it's often the laundering rather than the use that they've been put to, so it would be more correct to say that they are washed out. Plus the tumble-drier, if applicable, scalps clothes; that's what's your dryer lint is; the goodness from the fabric.

So with careful use of clothes, choosing the levels appropriate to the task (French women are apparently very much for changing out of their good clothes as soon as possible after coming home). Hanging things up, preferably in a flow of fresh air, getting one or more than one extra use before laundering, and then you have less laundry and less work to do.

And more time to play with stoves, KKs and any number of other preptastic things. Or laying on the sofa reading novels and eating bon-bons, if that's what floats your boat.

thriftwizard

Now I need to get DS2 and his girlfriend to read this, about the washing; they're horrified that I keep insisting that things aren't usually dirty after one use (footy kit excepted) and when they can finally afford a place of their own, I am confident that my laundry bill will at least halve! Not to mention the time spent...

Possession

I didn't know the bon bons one was an option GQ or I'd definitely have gone for that.