Make do, Mend and Minimise in 2015

charlies-aunt

I don't do the sides to middle but I do patch, mend and modify....


I have a stash of old style 100% cotton sheets (obtained from clearing out defunct relatives homes) which I am gradually working my work through - I have some psychedelic 70's floral and candy striped flannelette which I am going to make into quilt covers.

Most of the bed sheets are plain white - any single sheets are paired and sewn together to make a double. Any that are too worn to be turned or patched are turned into pillowcases. Nothing beats climbing into a cool, clean cotton-sheeted bed at the end of a long day!


Old polyester-filled duvets are quartered and covered with oddments to make washable dog beds

Runcorn_Bridge

Another 'sides to middle' make do and mender here.

chickadee

Well done on the bootsale Grey Queen. That sounds like a great day's purchases. It goes to show that preparation is key, if you hadn't had those measurements with you, you could have passed it by or bought something the wrong size. Sides-to-middle tea-towel, now that is hardcore! :rotfl:

I like the dog bed idea Charlie's Aunt. I have two cats that I could use that idea on. I threw out (yes I know ) an old quilt last year but I'm sure there will be another one sooner or later. I know exactly the candy striped sheets you mean, my mum still has some. My DH hates flanelette with a passion. He gets too hot.

I have a phone on fleabay that is ending today. I'm hoping to get over £60 for it, then some of that will go into my bank, and some into the sealed pot for Christmas. I'm determined not to have to fork out for the festive season all in one go this year.

It looks like a nice afternoon and I have three courgette plants to go into the vegetable patch. Surely all the frosts will be over by now? Maybe I'll leave it until tomorrow.

fuddle

Welcome chickadee

We've been using our membership to National Trust again today, this time in our local area. A nice day made all the better with an ice cream from a local farm diary. Lovely

MMM today consists of a tangerine opened and spread around my 'new' herb garden. I say 'new' as it's in an old belfast sink that was discarded when we moved in. It has housed alsorts of stuff but will be happy with my herbs from now on. Anyway, I digress. It's got tangerine in it as we have a visiting cat who is liking to do it's business in there. I'm really very cross about it. I am a pet lover but this is upsetting me now.

I'm about to log off to cook up a big ham for food in the next few days. I'm also bread making and looking forward to supper.

Also decided to throw 'modern clean cut kitchen' logic out of the window and use the top of my kitchen wall shelf as storage. All my preserves and HM items will live up there. I am surprised that I have never done this before... being a food horder and all :cool:

DawnW

QUOTE=chickadee;68460978]Good morning! I just wanted to pop in and say what a lovely thread this is. I was awake early this morning, typical on a Sunday, and have been reading through the MSE forums. This thread caught my eye and it has been a good read. I'm also one of the brigade that hates waste. I was brought up in a home where money didn't grow on trees and everything had to earn its keep. I remember my sister making bedding from fabric from the market. There seemed so be a sea of it! A double duvet cover if I remember correctly. Mum could afford to buy a duvet but not the cover, so my sister bought some sheeting fabric and made the cover. The last time I asked it was still going, not bobbly or worn. That must be 30-odd years ago!

[/QUOTE]

This might seem a bit odd to younger readers but things like duvets / duvet covers used to be very much more expensive than now. It wasn't possible back then, to go into a supermarket and buy bedding for just a few pounds ( I got a nice king size set reduced to £10 a few weeks ago). My first duvet, an early synthetic one, cost about £80. To put this in context, my husband brought home only around £25 a week from his farm job, and I, like most back then, was a stay at home mum. It was however super quality and very warm, which was necessary in a cold tied cottage with no central heating. I only parted with it recently as it didn't fit our kingsized bed, but it is still going strong as I gave it to my daughter in law for one of the big grandsons, along with the spare double bed :rotfl:

It is odd, isn't it, that, although the cost of living has increased in many ways, with huge rises in accommodation costs and so on, some types of basic, necessary 'stuff' (household goods, electricals, clothes) have actually become cheaper. Possibly poorer quality as well, but at least within everyone's reach. I remember having to save for ages to replace kids shoes (back then, they cost the same more or less as now, with earnings very much less :eek: and things like cotton sheets and towels, which were I think more expensive).

Can anyone think of other things that were more expensive or the same cost years ago, despite much lower earnings and poor availability of credit (no credit cards then, and to get a bank loan involved an interview with the bank manager :eek:), which made them quite problematic for low income families to obtain? I remember my Mum having to rely on catalogues where you could pay an agent weekly, and having to do the same myself.

chickadee

Oh my goodness DawnW, yes the trusty catalogue. My mum had a Marshall Ward catalogue, but my friends whose mums were younger and trendier had Grattan. Most things available over 20 weeks but if it was a bigger item it could be paid for over 44 weeks. It was my job to fill in the tiny boxes on the payment sheet to work out how much had to be paid every month, which is why I remember it so clearly. It was early training for me, I'm an accountant now, ha ha!

[Deleted User]

I remember well having just moved out of home and into a bedsit wanting to buy a record player and speakers back in the early 1970s and having to get my dad to stand guarantor for the hire purchase agreement as I wasn't a married woman even though I was employed and had a good job of quite long standing, times were different!

GreyQueen

Mum can remeber having to get a transistor radio on hire purchase about 1960. And her Dad had to stand security for her - she was in her late teens and had been working since she was 15.

Shoes were the bane of my parents' expenditures when we were kids in the sixties and seventies. Mum has feet which were badly damaged by neglectful parenting in her earliest years and was determined that the same wouldn't be mine and my brother's lot. We were often dressed from jumble sales but the shoes were new, leather, and properly fitted in the shop.

I remember the Marshall Ward catalogue, too. We had another one (John Moores?) too. Things always looked so much nicer in the pix than they did when they arrived. It has coloured my attitude to shopping to this day; I want to see and touch what I buy, not shop remotely.

All household textiles were proportionately more expensive, as was clothing, and knitting yarn. Mum used to carefully unravell worn out jumpers to salvage the yarn. These days we still do, but for charity projects, but then it was in earnest. I recall her taking apart two adult sweaters, one burgundy and one navy, and making both of us tank tops with navy and burgundy bands across them...........and I had a much loved sweater of the softest yarn which was in pastel narrow stripes (yellow, white, pale blue and pale pink) which had been gathered from pulled-out baby garments.

This era was also pre-chazzers and pre-bootfairs. There wasn't much secondhand stuff about and what there was, was absolute rubbish.

In a mature consumer economy, you can live pretty handsomely off the discards of other people; I've ben doing it my whole life, lol.

cheerfulness4

My mum used to have the Janet Fraiser catalogue which was part of the Marshall Ward group. There was always mass excitement in our house when the new one came out.
I used to scoff at my Nan's Ambrose Wilson catalogue because I thought it frumpy and now I find myself ordering from it these days.:p

Hiya Chickadee. I love that name as its what my husband calls me.:D

My Cold has finally gone so now I'm pressing on with the garden. All my tomato plants staked today and continuing to plant up the borders. One hanging basket ready to hang once we've bought some brackets tomorrow.
Plan to make up the other hanging basket tomorrow. Very pleased as they have cost very little to make and I noticed the ones I used to buy are £30 each in the garden centre this year.
I reckon mine looks just as good. It is a bit heavy though. I forget only have a little house now.

Love the sound of the Lemon Curd cakes. A nice simple idea to ring the changes. I suppose chocolate spread could work too then, do you think?

Rose_Wood

Evening All

I've been reading along but haven't posted for a while but enjoying all the posts.

I remember my Mother unpicking jumpers and having to hold the hanks of wool after they'd been washed whilst she rewound it into balls. Once she unpicked a large men's sweater in a deep gold and made polo neck jumpers for me and my two sisters. I was ok as I was the eldest but my youngest sister ended up wearing all three as she grew! She was heartily sick of them by the time she was too big to wear the one that was originally mine.

I also remember my parents giving me a duvet and duvet cover as a wedding present as it was such a major buy! And we got a set of bright pink brushed nylon sheets as another present from some distant relative which were horrendous but got used on the spare room bed as they were all we had.

Another memory is one Christmas when I was about ten is my main present being a dolls dressmaking book. However, the actual book hadn't arrived in time although being ordered early and so my parents wrapped up the same book from the library so I had something to open. I still have it though and made lots of the dolls clothes from it. It was this one

I still love sewing and knitting so the habits were set very early. I haven't done much over the last month but have finished DGD's room with the quilt I made from the Country Diary bedspread someone gave me. I finally got DH to put up the wooden curtain pole and some pictures. One of the pictures used to be mine from when I was a little girl and was in my daughter's room too. We had a set of 4 but I handed them onto my sister for her son's room and he still has 3 of them but I got back the one that was 'mine'. I then printed off some images by the same artist - Mabel Lucie Atwell and made a matching set to go with my original in a frame that held three from a charity shop. I am hoping to get the others back eventually as they are quite girly and my nephew is about to start secondary school this year so I can't see him keeping them on his wall much longer! You can see the giant doll I made for DGD in the picture too.



I still have a second bedspread to play with and was wondering whether to make another patchwork quilt and maybe put it on ebay or Etsy and see if anyone wanted to buy it. It has a slightly different design and a white rather than cream background. The bedspread fabric in the photo is the one that makes the large flowers and the matching flowery squares. It is then backed with the quilted top of the original bedspread in the same fabric.

I hope the meet up with everyone goes well this week.

Rose