2022 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

Gem-gem

Thank you @PipneyJane for your Easter wishes.
To all who are celebrating either Easter or Passover, I hope you are able to do in a way that you want to and with your loved ones and friends. (Without fear of Covid etc).  

Cherryfudge

And... is there such a thing as a quarter of a coupon?

I checked at the front of the thread and yarn is as follows: 2 ounces of wool knitting yarn – 1 coupon

• 2 ounces of wool knitting yarn equals 50g of any knitting yarn containing natural fibres. Note: according to a display I once saw at the Imperial War Museum, there was a different coupon cost for man-made fibre, but I've never found out what so let's assume acrylic is half the coupon cost of wool.

So 25g of acrylic yarn is a quarter of a coupon? I might have to go and get it a friend at this rate!

nannygladys

Laura_Elsewhere - you both look so radiant and the colours, wow, love love your outfit, perfect, and Mr looks very happy too 

maryb

Aaargh!  The moths got at ALL the summer clothes I had carefully packed away - or so I thought.  Everything has at least one hole.   I don’t think much if anything is salvageable because it was already several seasons old and beginning to look a little shabby.   I don’t really like summer clothes as much as winter styles so haven’t been tempted to buy new each year. 

But now I’ve had to buy two new pairs of linen trousers and six tee shirts as a basic wardrobe replacement which I work out comes to 44 coupons.  I’ll need a couple of cardigans/jumpers as well so I’ve blown my allocation for the year already.  I’ll read along and cheer you all on but for myself I’m having to bow out of the challenge 

PipneyJane

Cherryfudge said:

And... is there such a thing as a quarter of a coupon?

I checked at the front of the thread and yarn is as follows: 2 ounces of wool knitting yarn – 1 coupon

• 2 ounces of wool knitting yarn equals 50g of any knitting yarn containing natural fibres. Note: according to a display I once saw at the Imperial War Museum, there was a different coupon cost for man-made fibre, but I've never found out what so let's assume acrylic is half the coupon cost of wool.

So 25g of acrylic yarn is a quarter of a coupon? I might have to go and get it a friend at this rate!

@Cherryfudge, yes, you can count a quarter coupon.  Historically, it was all-or-nothing, but we’re in a parallel universe. 

Hmmm…. Your question has triggered a chain of thought… Given everyone’s concerns about micro-plastics in the water and global warming, should we drop the discount on acrylics next year?

maryb said:

Aaargh!  The moths got at ALL the summer clothes I had carefully packed away - or so I thought.  Everything has at least one hole.   I don’t think much if anything is salvageable because it was already several seasons old and beginning to look a little shabby.   I don’t really like summer clothes as much as winter styles so haven’t been tempted to buy new each year. 

But now I’ve had to buy two new pairs of linen trousers and six tee shirts as a basic wardrobe replacement which I work out comes to 44 coupons.  I’ll need a couple of cardigans/jumpers as well so I’ve blown my allocation for the year already.  I’ll read along and cheer you all on but for myself I’m having to bow out of the challenge 

Damn moths!  Sorry to hear you’ve been a victim, @maryb.  Don’t write yourself out of the challenge yet, you never know what Sid-the-spiv might bring.

- Pip

Laura_Elsewhere

@maryb, my first two years in the challenge I ended up way over my 66 well before the end of the year... I blush to admit it, but I even kept buying, from those dodgy spivs, Mr Asda and Mr Sainsbury, in particular...

So definitely stick around still, even if you're already at your limit - maybe coming to the Village Hall for a cuppa will help you spend less with the spivs than otherwise! 

Thankyou for the lovely comments on the outfit - I'm rather pleased to say that I made every single stitch of it, right down to the skin, except the heavy-silk stockings (handmade by a friend), and the shoes which I very very heavily modified a few ytears back What's nicest is that I swithered once or twice about maybe wearing a bought item I already had, and Mr E said how nice it would be to have things I'd designed and made - lovely to have one's work appreciated! 
We bought the yard of dupion silk for his tie and my cummerbund, and we bought a yard of pure-silk satin for making half a dozen red silk masks (we posted one to the Dowager Mrs E who sent a generous cheque which we used for the silk, along with kind @Nonnadiluca's gift of coupons last year - thankyou again!).
I bought the brooch I'm wearing as a pendant, handmade by Nicky Wade-Evans, 'Gemmeus'. 
We paid for the very nice pub meal the five of us had afterwards (Mr & Mrs, best man, best woman, her mum being in loco omnium). 
There was the room-hire at Registrars'. 
Er... 
We think, adding in every single thing we can think of, we stayed below a grand by quite some way. We are rubbish at being commercial-minded consumers  

Theoretically there's another thirty-seven thousand quid that the average wedding in Britain in 2019 cost...! No, seriously, we looked it up and the average, pre-pandemic, was 38k...!!! How?!?!?! 

PipneyJane

Good question, @Laura_Elsewhere. How can you have a £38k wedding?  Well, for a start, that figure is probably the mean not the mode and it includes the price of the Honeymoon.  Yes, there are poseurs/influences out there who have Daddy/sponsors spend a fortune on their wedding, but the majority of people won't.

The number may also be skewed by the fact that Asian weddings can particularly expensive, involving several receptions and hundreds of guests, as well as multiple wedding outfits.  They can last a week.  

DH and I had a good wedding, 60 guests at the main reception, 120 guests later on and cruised the Nile on honeymoon.  Memory says we spent considerably less than £7k in 2003 on the whole lot, but I can't find the spreadsheet. In today's terms £7,000 equates to £11,776.29.  (Thank you Bank of England Inflation Calculator.)

- Pip

PollyWollyDoodle

I got married for under £2000 … but that was in 1986! 😂 However it was still very low budget by the standards of the day.

My brother had a Jaguar, so I persuaded him to drive us, my uncle-in-law was a professional photographer so… My mum made the wedding cake, I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to do that anyway. And I bought my outfit reduced in the sales in John Lewis, it wasn’t a wedding dress as such. 

I could easily see how you could spend £38,000 – if you’ve ever been to a wedding fair and seen some of the things on offer, it wouldn’t take long. It just seems ridiculous to me that (mostly) young people are spending this sort of amount when that would actually be a decent deposit on a house in some parts of the country.  Doesn’t matter how much you spend, it won’t make the marriage any better or worse!

Laura_Elsewhere

@PipneyJane, oh the sites we gaped at, open-mouthed, broke it down - 38,000 quid but it includes things we'd never even heard of like the "wedding present event weekend", which appears to be everyone who's invited to the actual wedding turning up either before or after for another expensive hotel weekend bringing the presents... we haven't even got any proper wedding presents because we couldn't think of anything to ask for!  
But also it included a couple of grand on the dress (about 20 quid in my case, and if I'd bought all the fabric new maybe a hundred max), then the bridesmaids' dresses, the florists' bill (bunch of wallflowers and cowslips from the garden), the caterers at 150 quid a head, the cake, brides' hair and make-up (did me own), manicure (did me own - every finger a different shade from pillarbox-red through vivid rich oranges to bright sunflower-yellow!) oh, just on and on - and iirc there were hen party and stag party but also incredibly something called a pre-hen party...?!?!? 

And from what we read, most of those are actually considered part of "a proper wedding" these days, in the same way that nobody young would dream of not having Netflix, etc. We've had comical conversations with Mr E's son, 25, about the concept that we grew up with which is that sometimes there;'s nothing to watch so you read a book, go for a walk, re-arrange your record collection, etc., and he just refuses to contemplate the idea. Why would he? If he didn't have Netflix there's tons of stuff on YouTube to watch, so he'd never need to be without things... it's so weird to us! 
Also, we think those long weekends when you couldn't afford to go out and had nothing to do (except your essay) were part of how we made such good lifelong friends at that stage of our lives - all those hours just hanging around in someone's kitchen, broke and bored and just talking and talking and talking... you get to know each other pretty well! 

Nonnadiluca

It sounds like a wonderful day with all the important things just as you wanted and none of the dross, which is what costs those eye watering sums! 
Our wedding, 28 years ago, was similar; 7 of us in the registrar's dining room, where she performed the ceremony, in a beautiful place that was very special to us, a meal in a local restaurant afterwards. I wore a red lace dress which felt very outrageous but fabulous 😀. All these years later we remember it with great fondness and we're still going strong!  Let's face it, the only really important thing is the person you're marrying 🥰, and by the look on your faces you've got that nailed!!