2024 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

PipneyJane

Thanks everyone for the good wishes.  Beyond my sleep being constantly interrupted by the pump of the drip in my arm, I’m OK.  Fingers crossed that I’m out by Saturday morning.  (We have Test Match tickets.)

Laura_Elsewhere said:

I hope it's going well, @PipneyJane - both the treatment and the knitting! 


No buying of clothes- but I've been busy  

We're finally making progress here- on Friday we're driving Mr E's obsolete computer things to meet with a collector of that type of computer stuff, so it's going to a good home where it will be very much appreciated. We're also dropping off a box of my books to our local second-hand bookshop. Some other books are being posted to new homes too. 
A long way to go but it's progress... 

And in the morning on Friday, I'm meeting my usual swimming-pals with rakes and brooms and we're going to give our changing area at the quarry a good scrubbing so it's a LOT less muddy this winter- two years ago the Council kindly put down several loads of stone chippings, but then last year after the autumn leaves made it all a bit mushy, someone asked the tree-felling people to put down tree-chippings and they've all gone to mush and it's been ghastly in wet weather, really awful! So we plan to rake it back to the stony layer, and try to keep it like that... 

And I've taken the worn-through old rubber soles off my WW2-replica shoes, little tan leather lace-up brogues with a low flat heel- now they have new rubber half-soles glued on well with Klebfest, and Blakeys non-metal segs nailed onto the heels, and I've taken out the cord laces and waxed them well (they last years longer). Tomorrow once all the glue has set, I shall polish them to a gleam  
Dry, comfortable feet this winter! 

Well done @Laura_Elsewhere on multiple counts.  Please describe how you waxed the shoe laces.  I’ve never seen it done.

No coupon spends, yet, for me to report but I did manage to go into the belly of the beast on Saturday and not spend coupons!  I had a £5 Hobbycraft birthday voucher to spend before it expired, so spent it on quilting clips for seaming and some buttons for my leather jacket.  (All the buttons are loose, but one was missing.  I’ve taken the jacket to the local dry-cleaners and they’ll do the necessary for me, since it involves creating shanks, etc.) 

- Pip

Laura_Elsewhere

Glad to hear that the Borrowford Cottage Hospital is doing well with you! 

Waxing shoe laces- only for the round, cord-like ones- all I do is hold a block of beeswax, or a beeswax candle-stub, in one hand and pull the lace over it under tension, in one direction and then the other direction; then put down the wax/candle and just pull the lace repeatedly through your hands, letting the warmth of your hand or fingers melt the wax into the lace. To end, hold the middle of the lace and grip one side between finger and thumb, snugly, and run it through from middle to tip several times; repeat for the other half. Then your laces should run smoothly through eyelets. 
Any time a round lace si starting to show wear, just take it out and wax it- it usually adds ages onto its lifespan! 

I finally need to darn the elbow of my Harris tweed jacket, some 25 years old or maybe over 30, we're not sure... luckily I have cobweb wool that will suffice... 

Nelliegrace

Can you still get suede elbow patches? @Laura_Elsewhere I sewed some on my old Herdwick jumper. I love wool, it is warm but doesn’t make one sweaty like synthetics. My long, navy wool duffle coat is over 30 years old. (£7 from the school uniform department at Beatties where they had racks of them after a school closed. Might be worth a thought.)
I bought another Welsh tapestry waistcoat for £14.99 from eB. My sister liked my grey blue one and asked if I could find one to suit her, but I shall let her try on and choose one of mine. It is colder in Scotland and I am sure she will appreciate it.  


No coupons used, and no new clothes bought.
P.S. There are some good quality, men’s vintage handkerchiefs this week, but keep it under your hat.

Laura_Elsewhere

@Nelliegrace - I've never been keen on suede elbow-patches- and as this is a really beautiful Harris twee,d I shall enjoy darning it as invisibly as I can It hasn't actually gone through yet, only worn til the threads are hair's-thickness, so I hope I can reinforce and catch it all, so it barely shows  

Nelliegrace

@Laura_Elsewhere, There is an amazing You Tube film on The Magic of Invisible Mending, Kaketsugi, from Japan.

I wore the waistcoat to the craft and country fair this afternoon. It was much admired by the ladies on the woolcraft stalls, some coming for a closer look at the tapestry. I wonder if I have set a new fashion. There were women busy knitting and crocheting, a lovely sight. There were alpacas in various colours and some brown Shetland sheep. 

PipneyJane

Laura_Elsewhere said:

@Nelliegrace - I've never been keen on suede elbow-patches- and as this is a really beautiful Harris twee,d I shall enjoy darning it as invisibly as I can It hasn't actually gone through yet, only worn til the threads are hair's-thickness, so I hope I can reinforce and catch it all, so it barely shows  

@Laura_Elsewhere with your skills, I’m sure you’ll do a beautiful job.

Update on me:  Friday’s methotrexate levels were back in the safe zone, so I was discharged in the early evening.  Spent yesterday at The Oval, watching the cricket and knitting on my current sock.  Almost bliss!  (England didn’t play as well as the score line suggests and bad light stopped play at 1755.  Also, we had a few drops of rain and it wasn’t exactly warm.  No wind, though.)

Who recommended the book “Less” by Patrick Grant?  I started reading it on my phone, on the Tube on the way home.  Whoever it was, thank you.  Not only is it a timely polemic, it’s full of fascinating facts: e.g. “The way our economy has been run over the past fifty years has only benefited the wealthiest in society.  The average income, adjusted for inflation, of the bottom 90 per cent has been essentially stagnant for the past forty-two years.”  to which, from my personal experience, I totally agree.   (In fact, I’d say that for the middle classes, salaries have gone backwards.  In 1990, a newly qualified accountant from the “big 6” was earning £30,000; when I qualified at the end of the decade, it was still £30,000.  At that point, jobs for project accountants were advertised as paying £42,000; I saw one advertised yesterday - 25 years later - paying £42,000!)

Patrick’s writings chime with the dead-tree book that I’m reading: “Private Battles, How The War Almost Defeated Us” by Simon Garfield, a collection of Mass Observation Project diaries from 1941-1945.  I’m just at the point (sometime in 1943), when the Beveridge Report was released.  The general reception is positive, although one contributor, Edward Stebbing, complains that the workers will have to pay for it, not the rich.  

Another contributor, Ernest Van Someren, had an article about his family’s budget published in Housewife magazine, at the end of April 1942.  I can see contact with the British Library in my future, in an effort to track down a copy.  I’m assuming they’ll have it on microfilm, since nothing turns up on Web searches.  (One thing that did turn up was an American paper on their home front, The Housewife Enlists, from 1943.  I’ve downloaded it, but not read it yet.)

- Pip

PollyWollyDoodle

Oh I’m so glad you made it to the cricket, Pip!  I hope you’ve now got some downtime at home to recover from being in hospital. 

Someone else recommended ‘Less’ I think, but I certainly posted on here about reading it.  I’ve had to return it to the library now, but it is a very powerful book, and I have already changed some of my behaviours as a result of reading it.  

The Simon Garfield book sounds interesting. I might add that to my Christmas list   

PipneyJane

PollyWollyDoodle said:

Oh I’m so glad you made it to the cricket, Pip!  I hope you’ve now got some downtime at home to recover from being in hospital. 

Someone else recommended ‘Less’ I think, but I certainly posted on here about reading it.  I’ve had to return it to the library now, but it is a very powerful book, and I have already changed some of my behaviours as a result of reading it.  

The Simon Garfield book sounds interesting. I might add that to my Christmas list   

There are three in the series, @PollyWollyDoodle:  We Are At War, Private Battles and Our Hidden Lives.  They cover the period from 1939 to ?1950.  Worth every penny.  (I definitely own the first two.  Am not certain about the third, since a) I can’t find it, and b) I have no record of purchase, but I would have sworn I had it.  I’ve read We Are At War a couple of times, but this is the first time I will have read all of Private Battles.)

- Pip

Sarahspangles

@PipneyJane I hope you made the cricket.

I’ve been a bit AWOL as August was a busy and stressful time at the Ministry. I need to complete a dispatch today and work next week but have then been granted 10 days leave. Since I work from home this isn’t much of a change, but I’d like to get the house and garden ready for Autumn and hopefully unblock some home projects for OH to do. He (being retired) has done lots of cycling over the summer, earlier this week he cycled from (Eric) Morecambe to Bridlington via the Way of the Roses, with an overnight stay camping in Ripon and a train at either end.

I have used three coupons, but not on myself. I got some Rowan DK cotton for a jumper for DD. The other seven balls were technically second-hand as they were from eBay, unbanded. Even in Winter cotton is the only option as she is a vegan. It’s lovely yarn but still hard on the hands and my left index finger has a callous on the pad because cotton doesn’t move off the needle the way that wool does. The jumper is 2/3 finished and quite good for distraction in the evenings.

The yarn purchase leaves me at 46/66 coupons used, and I still haven’t bought any ‘tops or bottoms’ for myself. I’m sticking with my policy of not counting yarn unless it’s been knit up, since I had no real yarn stash going into the conflict. If I manage to complete my BFL sweater that would be 6 coupons used. I’m sure I’ll need to buy something when it gets colder.

The eBay cotton yarn purchase was a job lot and left me with nine balls of unused DK in Autumn colours which I don’t think I will use. I put it on Ravelry classifieds hoping someone would like to make a blanket, but no takers. This is how stash builds up!

Sarahspangles

Sarahspangles said:

@PipneyJane I hope you made the cricket.

We crossed in the post, I see you did!

It amused me this morning to get an update from my DS, 24. I think a couple of generations earlier he might have ended up at Bletchley, though possibly overseeing men in overalls with tiny spanners rather than piloting a desk. He does work in a Cambridge building that has a real Cold War shelter in the basement.

Anyway, he sent a snap of himself presenting at a conference in Cologne, apparently in a basement, although I’m sure the exposed brick walls are a design choice. I’m proud of him as he’s rather shy and I know he was very anxious beforehand. The amusing bit is that before the trip he was sat down by the company lawyers and given guidance on not letting any mission critical secrets out. At the last conference he was approached by someone Chinese, with very odd questions, so it seems to be a genuine risk. Nothing really changes….