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The pleasures I have enjoyed recently include…
…volunteering at a conference for an organisation I really believe in and seeing several good friends there…
…’Receiving’ the trousers I had asked for. Three pairs all at the same charity shop…
…Brand new Marks & Spencer’s clothing for £1 each at another charity shop. While boxers and a white button shirt haven’t been a priority, they were missing and help to round my wardrobe out…
…A friend showing me just how close the beach is to her house. “…for whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find at the sea” (e.e. cummings). Examining new things and thoughts…
…and discovering that the last of my inner turnmoil is already washed away…
In my new flat, the oven doesn’t seem to hold a consistent temperature so I have been baking less until I figure out a way to deal with it. This makes my bread machine all the more important!
I had a gift certificate and planned on adding £25.00 out of pocket for the purchase of a bread machine. The store only carried it in their cataloge so I had to pay for it and get it delivered to the shop. As I walked into the mall to place the order, I went by a new-ish charity shop that seems to carry a lot of home goods- appliances, kitchenware and boardgames seem to be its forte. I saw the same model of food processor that I had in the old flat and stood around guarding it while thinking. I have ‘learned’ time and time again to not try to rationalise charity shop purchases but just to go with my gut. Still, I always try to make a rational choice. I told myself I didn’t really need a food processor but in the end decided to splurge the £12.50 anyway.
As I arrived to the chain store with food processor in tow, I was told that the bread maker was on sale. The balance after the gift certificate was only going to be £13, bringing the total for two appliances to the price I was prepared to pay for one. That is when I remembered that I should always follow my gut: I was meant to walk by and buy that food processor. Bread, hummus, pumpkin puree…these are things that form my basic food needs. I am being watched over.
Crochet washcloths and a Cardigan!
I have been feeling a bit wordless recently but am enjoying the words of others in beautiful lyrics and engaging books. As I let the words wash over me or replay them in my mind I am also reveling in textures; the soft hat I am knitting, this cosy cardigan and drapey-yet-just-textured-enough-to-tickle-while-gliding-over-my-face washcloths.
The washcloths are the same as the ones I made in the spring, using 4-ply cotton and a half-double stitch. The cardigan was scored a few weekends ago at the charity shop for 3.49 and contains angora and lambswool.
1. Spending an entire weekend with my best friend from high school. I’m very lucky to have her living on this same island. It’s one of the gifts in my life.
2. Eating her yummy food- her crumble, pastas and enjoying hours and hours of wandering, talking, and sharing. Her blackcurrant jam was delicious!
3. Bringing her treasured American treats that I had stashed away. Root beer barrel candy and the autumnal treat of Philadelphia, spiced wafers.
4. Finding this beautiful, beautiful sweater that feels luxurious and makes me do a little internal leap of excitement when I look down to see it!
I found these two beauties on the same day as the housewares shop I did the other week.
My life has been chaotic this month as I unexpectedly became single and have been packing to move (which I will be doing in two days), so the green finds were perfect.
I now wear green as much as possible (which is quite a lot considering it was already my favourite colour!) in hopes of healing.
I have figured for a while that I would be moving within the half-year but the circumstances are a bit different than I could have imagined.
I’ve been pretty good with getting rid of unwanted objects, materials and such yet had not thought about furnishing a new place. Or, doing this alone. I guess that intellectual challenges haven’t been enough growth so I “needed” emotional challenging as well…
Saturday I wandered all the charity shops in town and came up with a few things. It was a beautiful day just about to crest into autumn. The shops were all prepared for the influx of students to our town and luckily, I arrived before they wiped the shelves clean.
The cutlery was purchased new with a £10 gift card to ease the burden! The storage basket, baking dish and bath towel all came from the charity shops for £5.04 in all.
In July, I picked these up at the charity shop on the Isle of Arran, which is one of my favourites. They always have a fantastic selection of knitting needles, sewing and knitting patterns and a wide variety of sheets and pillowcases (that must have been recycled around the island hundreds of times!).
They tried to charge me £1 for the whole batch and that felt immodest and greedy so, needing the £10 note in my wallet, I gave them £2 instead. The knitting needles are a 4mm and I have no idea what sizes the double headed crochet hook is!
I have two cute charity shop finds from the past week when I went in search of a dressy blouse. No blouse ever ‘materialised’ (sorry, I had to!), but I found a nice trench coat and an angora blend sweater! The photos are a bit washed out, but the fabrics are not!
My current trench coat is looking worn and dingy and will be upgraded at some point in the future. (I’m thinking about replacing the collar and adding some complementary fabric to the cuffs and piping). Until then, I have this fantastic springy green one to do the job! Once I brought it home, I saw the “dry clean only” tag but since it is only a poly-cotton blend, I decided that it must be able to handle water. I put it on a low temp delicate load designed for sweaters, hung it dry and it was fine! As I placed it on the hanger, I figured out why it says to dry clean: the corners of the jacket bottom are folded, tucked up hems and are not tacked in place. Not a big deal, I just tucked them back up and they held their shape. The photo doesn’t show the cute cherry lining!
Next, I found an angora and nylon blend GAP wrap sweater. It is very cosy and warm and I love the cap sleeves- they’re more versatile for the three similar seasons we get in Scotland. When I first tried it on, I tied it in the back and couldn’t understand why the ties were so long…I envisioned taking it home and shortening them. A few moments later, I tied it in the front in what can only be described as a ‘duh’ moment!
So my sister and her husband have been here for 5 fantastic days so far. I always knew we were alike and besides my partner, she is my closest best friend. Still, when neighbours and teammates ask if we are twins, or our mom says on the phone that after a few days together our voices and intonations have melded together, I should not have been surprised to realise we were in direct competition with one another during a charity shop hop. On Thursday we decided to run through the charity shops in town and soon learned that while I scanned the nick nack shelves and children’s rack for potential souvenirs, she was busy honing in on the shirts I would have grabbed! We wear the same size and have overlapping senses of style.
As she paid for a cute teal shirt in the first store, I jokingly commented that she might ‘forget’ to pack the shirt when she leaves. In the next store where she found another cute teal/aqua shirt, she was thoughtful and let me try it on. At that same shop, I found two football jerseys for them to pick up for my nephew, who plays in a soccer league at home. We all left happy. Here’s a shot of the new shirt. I am thinking about either hemming the bottom up several inches, or making slits at each side to create more of a tunic shape. The first few wears I’ll keep it the same to see how I feel.
Incidentally, I learned that we also play Monopoly in the very same way- in moving the game piece and our property buying strategies…much to the occasional frustration of both our partners! It’s good to have my sister here!
Before you read this post, here’s a delicious muffin I made the other day. I used of a lot of random ingredients (freezer bananas, mixed seeds, an oatmeal-type concoction that I thought was oats until I realised it was museli, etc). I also made soup to knock through ingredients, all the while accompanied by NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me”, my favourite radio show!
And now for something completely different:
My PhD thesis is still under way so I have no illusion about being able to be less of a paper hoarder any time soon. I have 11 binders, two cardboard magazine ‘racks’ and 13 expandable cardboard folders full of documents and fieldnotes from my research, taking up one and a half shelves where I would otherwise have space for books. It’s not that I am going to get rid of these documents. In the future, all research tends to be cumulative in a way but I would tuck them away somewhere. I’ve come to suspect that most university staff only want to work in a department for the priviledge of an office to keep their academic collections separate from their living quarters! This week I filled our recycling bag of papers- thousands of scraps that had already been used on both sides, etc- just sitting around waiting to be classified. Most of the information was no longer useful, like some company phone number without a name- so out it went and I found my desk surface again.
One thing I can begin to whittle down, is my stash- of yarn and fabric. The plastic bins I brought home the other day have been great for that and now I need to really get started on going through what I don’t really need to keep.
I took a large bag of fabric strips (I had the intention of making those into another rug, but the off-white and black didn’t fit anywhere into our schemes or inspire me at all) to the textile recycling skip the other day, freeing up some under-bed space. I am also going to cull our socks – the funky novelty socks we receive as gifts are fun to wear, but not the easiest to darn once they wear so thin. The darning ends up being much thicker than the rest of the sock! Those pairs will be recycled too.
I am not going to have time in the next few years to use up all the half-balls of yarn that I’m not interested in. Many of the colours are going to make it into a de-stash blanket. It’s here if you’re on ravelry. I need to sort through the rest and find a Girl Guides troop to bring it to if there’s enough, or get it on Freecycle or a charity shop.
We have a charity shop bag open in our home at all times. We deliver a full donation bag every three weeks or so. I occasionally post on Freecycle but I need to start taking fuller advantage of it to hand out the things that are unsuitable for donating. I like that you can say “I have this ____ that needs fixing, or repairing, is anyone interested?” and they usually are. The same stuff just wastes the resources of charity shops.
Other ways we sometimes declutter that I would like to make more habitual: a) Selling unwanted books and strange electronics (we have a wireless router that we were sold as “mac compatable”, it wasn’t and then we lost the receipt) on Amazon. b) Finding even more recipes to stretch our fresh foods further with creative uses of the dry ones so my partner doesn’t rush out and buy food because we “don’t have any”. I would like to try a new recipe a week or, realistically, every two weeks.
I am trying to organise all this in my mind because it seems like we are headed towards a gradual change in the road. We are not yet financially comfortable, or even started out in life- parter is still looking for a full time job and I need to finish this PhD and apply for jobs as well. I’ve been keeping my eye open for non-academic positions and applying as I go along, but that must not be in the plan at the moment. Last week I talked to my old boss at the shop about coming back for a shift a week and once the fall semester starts I will have a bit more pocket money from tutoring but I am far from the power earner at this point.
That being said, we have begun to actively think about moving in order to save money. We have such a fantastic set-up right now and are so comfortable, it will be hard to let go of the easy walk to my sports club, the train and the job at the shop.
The question is, at what point does moving to save £100 a month not make sense? We have great landlords and have plenty of warmth and space in this flat. I have lived here for 4 years and it is home. But really, home isn’t a collection of things, home is with one’s partner.
The things just make it harder for us to consider moving. Both of our hobbies take up quite a lot of space, as you can at least gather from my stash descriptions. Moving from the centre of town will knock the prices lower but we still need to be near public transportation and there’s only a certain distance away that could make that move worthwhile. Another thing is that we barely have any furniture in this country. We have a bookshelf, a few chairs…no bed (we do have an air mattress we could use for a while!) etc. So we would need to rely heavily upon our network of fantastic people, freecycle, store vouchers from completed surveys, and finding a decent furniture charity shop somewhere. We also have discussed moving out of central Scotland if any jobs come up, so we really need to start preparing. This potential move may not happen, yet my brain is a-buzz.
1. Be ruthless with worthless (to me) stash fillers that someone else may be able to use- yarn, cds, look into getting a crafty things box together for the guides or other group that appreciates craft supplies.
2. Keep Amazon active and list more.
3. Get the plants under control. Re-pot more babies and give away to friends and freecycle. Pare down to just the main parent plants and keep them happy. Then, freecycle the extra pots.
4. Work on wardrobe. Recycle non-reparable socks, fix the things I plan to fix, get rid of extra bags, wet suits and other strange things that we never use.
5. Crafting priorities- finish sewing the wedding gift, use of the acrylics for the destash blanket, use the large partial-sheets in stash for appliance covers. Go for the biggest impact- use the most materials for the most useful items first!
This post has mostly been to organise my own thoughts, so here are a list of some of the blogs and posts that inspire me when attempting to de-clutter. I may have posted some before but they’re relevant again!
I am inspired by Smallnotebook in general and this new post is particularly relevant. Prioritizing life- well said. That is exactly what we are trying to do here and it seems that it is all around at the moment. One friend of mine has decided to completely disconnect with all non-essentials. She’s keeping her email, but unplugging facebook, her blog and everything else that she feels has cluttered her life. I also really like this post about moving at smallnotebook- it will come in handy some day. Livingsmall is also inspirational for getting rid of ’stuff’. Zen habits has a good approach to stuff. While I don’t keep a wardrobe as basic as this, I am working towards a streamlined and compatible system [and another] of only clothing that I love and that mean something to me.
