2024 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

PipneyJane

I’m home!  Got discharged at 11am.  Have to go back on Thursday morning for Haematology Outpatients, but that’s OK.

Meanwhile, I am sitting on a worn-out couch in a living room that is far too disorganised, thinking what can I do to fix this. There’s plenty of physical space, so why is there no room to move?  Seriously, I never got around to doing anything during Lockdown, but now I want to make this room work.  It’s mainly stupid things that need to be moved off the floor or off whatever they’ve been dumped on and shelved.  (Yes, music scores I’m looking at you. You need to be put into magazine holders and then put back on your shelf, to occupy half the space.).  Why hasn’t the Downunderbox from last Christmas been chucked? It only contains a jar of Vegemite and a packet of eucalyptus sweets.  (Those have my name on them.). Everything else has been eaten.

To deal with the couch, I expect that I will be paying tribute to the Vikings via the website of a certain Swedish furniture store, possibly with another bookcase or two in the order, to help clear the other stuff.

- Pip

Laura_Elsewhere

Oh WELCOME HOME @PipneyJane!  

Almost all of our furniture (excepting, bed, bedroom-shelves, small bookcase triple-stuffed with books, bench Mr E made and my 1902 Singer treadle) is being collected on Thursday by a local hospice charity... 

Then Mr E is driving back and forth, dismantling, carrying downstairs, driving here and carrying up stairs and remantling his son's old teenage-bedroom furniture which is rather conveniently a whole wall of Ikea's 'Besta' which is what we were considering buying- only then ex-Mrs E said she wanted their son's old room to use as a spare room and wants the ugly Ikea stuff gone- since we actively like it, and its fabulous cherry-red drawer-fronts and doors which they no longer do, we are very happy to have it, and free... 

But it means a lot of hard labour for Mr E, and it means camping out for a couple of weeks with everything unpacked from one lot of furniture and not able to go into the new... 

CapricornLass

Good luck to Mr E with putting it all together again.

Glad you're back home, Pip.  

florianatwobob

Glad you’re home Pip. Take it easy for now. 

Oh Mr E definitely has his work cut out. Good Luck. 

I have spends to declare. A pair of dungarees (6 coupons) and a work blouse (5 coupons). 

MrsCD

Welcome home, Pip! Don't overdo things, though.
Mr and MrsE too, don't do too much and make yourselves ill.
I'm starting to sound like my granny! 😁

Cherryfudge

Great to hear you're home, @PipneyJane!

And all this furniture moving, ladies... sit down and have a cuppa, you can spare a few minutes. I'm sure it will be worth the disruption when the new things are in place, but it's hard work while it's happening.

boultdj

Thank you @Laura_Elsewhere, the jumper wool was got before the war started and the sock wool was a thoughtful Christmas present.
Welcome home @PipneyJane

Gem-gem

Pleased to hear you're home, @PipneyJane! Try and take it easy whilst you are recovering. 

Good luck to Mr E in dismantling the furniture and then getting it back together again.
When I moved and my tv had lots of different wires going to a dvd player, vhs player and Dolby surround system I placed masking tape round each wire and then onto the back of the tv and colour coded it / wrote the name of the wire. Putting it back together after the move was so easy. Nowadays, there is only the tv and no other wires. 

Would it help Mr E to colour code each section, so that you know which doors/ drawers go with which unit. Could also label each drawer as 1 for top, 2 for next one down, especially if the are different heights. Just a thought....to help. 

flamingo747

Glad you're home, Pip, definitely rest up

No proper coupons used, but secondhand I've added 6 for 2 aprons, 5 for M&-S cardi, 5 for long sleeve top, 6 for nightie. Now 34 secondhands 

Cherryfudge

Harking back a bit, we were discussing the relative coupon values of pure wool and artificial fibres and based it on something Pip had seen at (I think) the Imperial War Museum - something along the lines of artificial fibres being half the coupon value of natural fibre.

Now I may be going over known territory here (sorry!) but I was looking at this page on the IWM's site, which was newish to me: I might have seen some of it in a different context but one little bit stood out:

Most wool was rationed but some was available off-ration. To qualify, it had to be made of less than 16 per cent animal hair.

Obviously that was useful in terms of the situation in wartime, but possibly a bit of a contradiction in terms of what we were saying about environmental impact (artificial yarn is worse for the environment as it doesn't degrade as natural fibre does). We have a three-way divide that may will have changed proportionately since wartime: pure wool isn't easy to come by compared to 100% acrylic, and we have bamboo or cotton yarn too. I don't know if they were at all available in the war. Cotton has a down-side because producing it takes a lot of water. Bamboo? I don't know.

Environmentally (and again, I'm not an expert so am open to better information) there's also a cost to wool, both in greenhouse gases and in animal welfare. The latter is being addressed by some farmers, and there are some fields that only sheep or goats can use.

So should our lower coupon cost be applied differently? If it's not a good idea to encourage 'plastic' yarn, I think we discussed it having a higher coupon cost. I think. It might have been last year. Is there a 'perfect solution' in terms of reducing coupon cost so it makes minimal impact in our modern 'war' on environmental damage? What, nowadays, is the equivalent of 'less than 16% of animal hair? It could be yarn that's less than 16% synthetic?

I don't know. What do others think? The rest of the context on the IWM page suggests knitting was encouraged, partly to recycle fibre and ease pressures on coupons, and partly to provide warm clothes for service personnel. How would you design the coupon cost of yarn if you had a free hand to implement it in today's context?