Guardian ARticle today - excellent money saving old style tips!

kay41_2

I have just been reading an article in today's Guardian about a lady whose mum was a real old style saver - some very good tips in there too! I will try and post some of them later. One I'd never heard of was dried orange peel to use a firelighters - apparently makes the fire smell nice too! Really worth a look - in the G2 section

belfastgirl23

thanks for the tip - just checked online and here it is I think

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/04/ethicalliving.recycling

kay41_2

That's the one BelfastGirl - thanks for that! I am still laughing about the embroidered nametapes! My mum and dad would do that. They bought a house for £245,000 about 11 years ago and were chuffed to bits to find a bag of able labels with the house address on! I think they cost less than £3 to have printed at the time. I also remember my mum putting all the little chips of soap in the toes of a pair of old tights to make a 'washcloth' - they looked so disgusting that I couldn't bear to use them. I am going to try the firelighters though as I eat 2 oranges per day. I keep my old rubber gloves for use in the garden. They don't need to be watertight and you can then just chuck them away.

belfastgirl23

I do the rubber glove thing too - the hierarchy is, first of all kitchen use, then bathroom use, finally outdoors use

grunnie

What a brilliant story sounds like my grandma my mother's mum. She died in her 80s and was very oldstyle. Now my MIL you could say used to do an on line shop in the 40s and 50s. She left a notebook with her weeks shopping list and a 10 shilling note under a stone at the end of a country road( they liked on a croft) and it was collected by the co-op and delivered the next day.

kay41_2

My grandma had 4 children and always had all her food delivered. The milkman, the baker, the butcher, the grocer. She had accounts with them all and my dad said they used to go on shopping errands for her and say put it on Mr Xs account - he was the local headmaster, so I guess trustworthy! She didn't drive and worked as a teacher. It's a different world now. You would have to be super rich to send all 4 of your children to boarding school now, wouldn't you? My dad and his siblings all went away to school from the age of 12 and yet they weren't rich.

maypole

A brilliant article. She also made elastic bands from old rubber gloves! and hair from hairbrushes was put out for the birds to help with their nests, how do, people think of all these things.

Caterina

I do the orange firelighters, good for lemons, tangerines and grapefruit skins too! What a lovely article, very inspiring!

Caterina

kay41_2

Hair from hairbrushes - I had forgotten we used to give it to our small animals to use in their nests and they loved it! I must start doing that again for our hamster. I'm still racking my brains for a use for toenails - are they good for compost?! My mum still uses envelopes for writing lists on and has a big bulldog clip for them!

mary43

Brilliant article...............it really was a period of waste not want not.........re-cycling before we'd even heard of it.
Mum used old tights cut up as plant ties.........in fact anything that needed tying. Dad must have kept every single nail and screw he ever had or 'aquired'..........when we cleared the house the little shed was full to overflowing with onion nets, hammers with the heads taped on.......all manner of things.
I learned a lot from how they lived............when my kids were born their romper suits (no such thing as baby grows at the time) were made from old shirts I got from the church jumble sale.............lol Bit of embroidery on them and no-one ever knew.

Seakay

My gran taught me to do "sides to middle" with sheets (it's a good idea to do a French seam and then sew over it so that it's really strong andd lies flat) and I was very grateful when I was an unemployed ex-student and my last sheet from home went see through in the middle! In fact I was thinking only the other day that I've a couple of seldom used sheets that could benefit from having it done