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I had a massive ball of aran weight yarn left over…probably about 200 grams worth. It had been used to begin many different projects yet always getting ripped back because I just wasn’t happy with the acrylic sheen it carried. So it sat in my stash- the Obvious stash that doesn’t fit above my wardrobe but in a frame backpack in the middle of my room-and I stepped around it each day.
I have finally put it to good use by making a simple scarf to match my coat!
I still had some purple fabric strips from the rainbow rag rug and made a quick kitchen mat. I didn’t worry about making even stripes, just using the yarn up.
It comprises a sheet, t-shirt and chocolate covered pretzels flannel pajama bottoms.
(sorry the second picture is blurry)
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.
1. TAKEN (subject to collection) Wet suit and boogie board, both well loved. The wet suit is a women’s medium, last worn by a 16 year-old. Partner remembers owner saying there is a small tear in the suit somewhere but we cannot find it. It should be easily reparable.
2. TAKEN (subject to collection) Three plastic aquarium plants.
3. TAKEN (subject to collection) Jewelery set- earrings, necklace and tika.
4. TAKEN (subject to collection) Radio alarm clock, in working condition.
5. TAKEN (subject to collection) Eleven yellow Ikea photo frames, 4×6 inches.
I’ve avoided blogging this for a while, building up the idea that I needed to say a lot about it.
I started sewing this when it was very warm, finished when it was cold, waited until 9 days of continual rain passed and then photographed it!
This material was once a kitchen curtain at my mom and dad’s. The light weight, almost gauze-y texture spoke to me and said it wanted to be something for warm weather.
This – VERY comfortable- shirt was sketched out and then made entirely by holding pieces of fabric up to myself, changing sizes and sewing it together. I lined the top half, used the factory hem as my bottom hem, and cut out the curtain’s accent stripe as mine.
I’m so crooked in the photos because I’m running back and forth for the self-timer! Click on the image to see it large on flickr.
I heard it through the grapevine…
Originally uploaded by Riotflower
My mom had some camisoles/singlets that were a bit too short for her and just sitting around in a basket. I asked her which colours she would rather have showing a tad from under her other t-shirts, held one against her and grabbed the scissors. I chopped the top off of the ‘visible’ colour and stitched it to the bottom of the ‘hidden’ colour. After about 5 minutes, I had two long singlets that now protect her PD access and add a hint of colour at the bottom of her shirts!
I made this key fob for a friend’s 30th birthday. She’s a big fan of “Napoleon Dynamite” and that was her party’s theme, so I whipped this up. When I say “whipped”, I mean it almost whipped me. The letters were harder to embroider (using the machine’s button hole function) than I had expected and I had to rip several tricky letters out a few times (the Os and the Rs!), though I got better as I went along.
I made it to the same specifications as the frog key fob.
We’ve been continuing to de-clutter, including larger items. Our old cordless now only holds a charge for around 45 minutes which wasn’t good enough considering my family lives across the ocean and we catch up using longer blab sessions. It lived in the closet for about a month. While it was on our list of things to get rid of, charity shops here tend to be wary of electronics and I wasn’t sure about posting something with a half-life on freecycle. Luckily, a WANTED email came through and I was able to specify the charge it holds and a man happily took it off our hands. We also gladly gave away a learner’s aucoustic guitar requested on freecycle, and sent a disused (and in need of repair) bike back to recyke-a-bike. If you have a bike you no longer use, look for a local bike re-use scheme. It somehow feels better to donate a bike to a place that will fix it up in order to sell, than to a charity shop which will probably struggle to sell it.
I tried another batch of homemade laundry detergent using this tutorial/recipe. After the dry detergent didn’t work for our clothing/machine/regular cycle, I took a break from trying for a while. Around two weeks ago, I decided to whip up a batch of the liquid detergent and it works perfectly! Apparently, the type of water you have in your area, the individual machine cycles and some other things (can’t remember what!) can affect the outcome, so if one doesn’t work very well, try another. We have been using it constantly since then and the clothes come out of the machine smelling like fresh air! I only made about 1/6 of the amount when I made it due to space issues, but I am going to find a large tub very soon because we’re definitely switching.
I’ve been sewing a lot on my rare free time and am beginning to miss crocheting. I’ve been drawn to sewing tiny things for the quick results they yield, but definitely will be getting back to the good old yarn and hook very soon.
Here are a few interesting articles on the subject of material scavengers, the editorial responses on poverty and factory work, and a brief business article on what retailers will be doing to deal with decreased spending. The last article suggests that stores will be carrying less stock- including less colour or style variety in clothing. Perhaps after a few (“fashion”) seasons the monotony of being a cookie-cutter consumer will wear on shoppers and thrifting and creating clothing will become standard style protocol.
*Four pieces of pine, 29 x 65 cm (11.5 x 25.5 in).
*Two pine shelves (unfinished wood) with metal and wood brackets. Both shelves are 18.5 cm deep, one is 86 cm long, the other is 116 cm.
My neighbour was getting rid of 4 large pieces of scrap wood and I couldn’t bear the thought of it getting binned, so I took it. Partner vetoed the decision, so it’s up on freecycle. We have never finished or hung the shelves.
