Crafting on a budget

  Crafts, such as sewing and knitting, have regained popularity over the past few years. But with that popularity has come a price hike. Add that to piles of cheapo Made-in-ThirdWorld clothes available to buy and you sort of start to wonder why you’d bother making clothes, when a simple skirt looks set to cost you $50. Especially when it’s quite likely you’ll screw it up!

  Easy solution-ditch the shops. Well, the buy new, fashionable shops. And head to your local op-shops and markets, and search out some………..

Patterns-From sewing patterns to knitting and crochet patterns to books covering everything from basket weaving to millinery, they’re all at the op-shop. I myself have a slight addiction to vintage sewing patterns and craft books-if you can’t find any except Eighties ones with massive shoulderpads, you probably live near me. At a maximum of 50c a pattern, and under $5 for books (I got six for $1 last week) you can afford to get a library happening. I nearly had a heart attack when I found out new ones are around $10-$16 each-you’d have to make a lot of each to save $$$ with them.

Fabric and wool-Much of this is ugly polyester and nylon, but good stuff does come up. Pinwale cord is popular, and i’ve made plenty of kids pants from it for under 50c a pair. I’ve also picked up Bendigo Mills wool for $1/200g, and my nanna cleared up at a garage sale, getting two pallets full of wool from a deceased estate for $50. That was four years ago and she’s still using it!

Linen-You must raid the linen section. Sheets give you large areas of fabric-flannelette for winter pyjamas and linings, cotton for….well, everything. You can make dresses from pillowcases, very fashionable in blogland a few years ago. Woolen blankets are astonishingly cheap and make excellent mattress protectors, heat resistant batting and nappy covers. I also have a slight addiction to chenille blankets-I get a rush when finding them, similar to what I imagine heroin would be like. But as they average $3 each, there’s no come-down afterwards.

My pretties………

  Existing clothes-These often just need a bit of imagination to turn them into something new. Last week I helped Lols turn a woman’s tunic into a skirt for herself. As it was already hemmed and had pockets it was pretty easy. You can cut kids pants from the sides of adult shorts/pants, and use the existing waistband/pockets. Woolen jumpers can be felted and the sleeves turned into longies, or frogged and made into something else. Bags from jeans. The ideas are endless. This is a bit of a trend right now, so a search for ‘upcycled clothing’ should bring you plenty of ideas.

  Also, tell everyone you know that you sew/knit/whatever. Lots of people start up crafts then ditch them, and are happy to offload the leftovers in their cupboards to someone who’ll use them. Post on Freecycle asking for freebies, you never know what might turn up.

  Mostly, I stick to craft shops when I need threads and notions. Most have sales and member discounts, so I sign up for everything and stock up when it’s cheap.

  And because of all of this, my kids clothes average out at about $3 per item. And so I can actually afford to dress the five of them in extremely funky clothing, rather than the dregs I would be left with should I have to buy everything now they’re getting bigger.

What i’ve read-March 2011

The Triumph of the Airheads and the Retreat from Commonsense, Shelley Gare-Very good! If you commonly see total idiocy presented as serious ideas, and taken up solemnly, while you shake your head muttering “what the fuck?” then read it. Also for if you hate the dumbing down of virtually everything-surely i’m not the only one who hates being patronised? Australian too.

Grassroots #202 & 203-All caught up now.

Booms, Busts and Bushfires-Australia 1973-present, Jackie French-Yes, I know it’s a kids book, but I know embarrassingly little about Australian history (after 14+ years of formal, state-sanctioned education), and everyone has to start somewhere. Educating my own children is excellent motivation for filling in the gaps of my own education.

Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer-This sat on the shelf for weeks after the husband read it, because I was sick of reading ‘food’ books. But he kept urging me, so I started it…………and loved it. It’s really good to read a book that actually takes a point of view, instead of the normal ‘this happens, it’s horrible, but i’m still an omnivore’. Yay, someone else who feels the need to completely boycott the meat and animal products industry! I have more to write about this, don’t bring a steak sandwich to the reading ;)

The Fable of all our Lives, Peter Kocan-novel. I liked this, but it’s sort of hard to see why. It’s not technically an interesting book, but I found myself finding excuses to read it. I enjoyed the theme of the QO vs the Regime, because I certainly feel like that a lot of the time. Some rather interesting events happen which will get you thinking about our over-policed, over-paranoid society.

Going car-free, part 2

  So now we’ve gotten rid of the car, how on earth do we buy big bags of flour, animal feed etc?

  Food shopping-we don’t get much from the supermarket, so we don’t have to lug $300 worth of stuff home in one go. We can generally stack a weekly shop on the top two seats of the monster pram. The husband goes to the markets weekly for fruit/veg/honey etc, and he takes my bike, loads up the hobo milk crate, sticks a bag on each handlebar and teeters precariously home. He still says that it’s much easier than trying to find a park, then lugging all the purchases to the car. He can take the bike right to the stalls.

  Bulk foods-for us, this is only available in the next town, about 40kms away. Dragging huge bags of stuff home on the bus is not do-able. I have two options.

 

1-Impose on a friend, but in a very small way. I can ring up the store, order everything I want, and pay for it with my debit card. They will pack it all up in bags and boxes, then the next time a friend goes they pick it up for us. I hate asking for anything from anyone in general, but this is fine as the storefolk will even take it out to the car for them.

2-Organise a co-op, or bulk-buy. This is something i’m working on, simply because I can then get organic flours and grains (which are prohibitively difficult and expensive to get here right now) way under the retail price. And when you chomp through as much food as we seven gluttons do, it makes a big difference. I’ll let you know how it goes.

  Animal feed-15 chickens, a cat and two guinea pigs need more than scraps can provide.

1-Grow more. We have kale and lettuces mostly for the chooks. They’re also partial to fallen guavas, and as these are right next to the neighbours bedroom window, we pick these up and take them to the chooks rather than vice-versa. We’ve also been experimenting with blocking off part of their run and growing grains to about 20cm, then opening it back up for them to forage-it’s working very well. No transport necessary for this one. Except the grain home, but it grows exponentially.

One of our New Hampshires indulging in wheatgrass. The kids scoffed it too.

2-Ask for delivery. I can get the organic, vegetarian chook feed we’ve been using delivered, but it’s $40 a bag. Eek. That’s just the local price though-I was getting mine for $32 from another town. So a better fix is…….

3-To ring up the company listed on the bag and discover they do co-op sales. So if I can sell between 20-50 bags, I can have it at $22 + freight a bag. Much better. I’m aiming for 50 to reduce freight-we’ll take at least 7 so shouldn’t be too hard. So if you know me, and you want to put in your order for organic chook feed, please do!

4-We also still swing by the dumpsters as often as we can. Two-day old bread is guaranteed (there’s normally at least five garbage bags full of it in one supermarket’s bin) and there’s usually yoghurt, milk or custard to mix it with, plus some fruit. Including bananas last week. Yes, they’re throwing out bananas at $10 a kilo-literally!

  The last problem was bales of mulch. But then the farmer said, yes, he delivers for $10. That is cheaper than it would be for us to pick them up from about 10kms away, all things considered. We don’t have to hook up the trailer, drive out there, load them up, do a tricky reverse through the mud, drive home and unload. They just arrive, like magic.

  And that brings me to possibly the biggest bonus of not owning a car-the time saved. Which doesn’t make much sense, don’t cars save you time? So many things that I would normally unthinkingly jump in the car to go and do i’ve stopped to think about instead, and come up with a better option. I’ve been ringing around rather than driving places to have a look, asking about delivery options, and tracking down companies to see if I can buy direct. It’s saving so much wasted time. And it seems to be saving me money, not costing me money.

  Which is the basis of my next post-how much money we’re saving.

I thought TV wasn’t a babysitter?

 

Going car-free, part 1-car alternatives

  Well, we have done it. The old bongo-van is sold and gone, and we are completely car free. The only transport we have is provided by leg-power, not petroleum. And it feels great. But that can probably be attributed to the fact that the bongo-van was old, decrepit, and had done far too much paddock bashing. As a result stuff was breaking everywhere and it was getting very stressful-the final straw was the husband driving through a watercourse we knew, which had been carved out very deeply by the January rains. Crash went the car as it bottomed out……….and half the exhaust fell off. Added to the loooong list of things-that-are-wrong-with-the-car, it was obvious the only sensible thing to do was to cash in the rego and sell it, which was over a month ago.

Me in the poor old bongo-van-and this was normal everyday driving for a while!

  We tossed up buying another straight away, but decided against it. It’s an interesting challenge to go without, and it means the money we would use to buy another is saving interest on our mortgage, instead of depreciating in a hunk of metal. In saying that, I do like the security of knowing I could go out and buy a car tomorrow if something dire happened-I wouldn’t be so happy if I couldn’t buy one, full stop. Knowing it’s a choice makes all the difference.

  So, how do we get around?

  We knew the car was on it’s way out when we moved back to town, so we got a house that was well located. In regional Queensland this is of utmost importance-the public transport here is crap (says me, spoilt by jaunting around on Melbourne’s public transport for my teen years). So we have not yet caught a bus. Instead, we have plentiful bikes. These have all been found at the tip shop or op-shop, and are extremely old, but I think they’re groovy. Everyone else in town probably just thinks i’m a hobo. Especially with the milk crate on mine. There is a baby seat on one for Frosty, and we’re working out how to get a baby seat on another, for Shorty. For now, I ride slowly with Shorty and tow him (with baling twine, more proof of hobo-ness) when he gets tired. The girls can ride for miles without tiring, and love it. They’ve asked us not to buy a car again.

My not-so-new wheels

  Otherwise, we walk. We have the monster pram, which comes in very handy for carting the boys, along with food shopping and a few tonnes of library books. The girls can also jump on top if they’re tired. I will have to tackle the public transport system to go to the next town for Shorty’s hearing test in a few weeks, but it all seems straightforward.

  Oh, and I stopped to talk to a friend at a bus stop a few days ago. I left when the bus arrived, and beat it to the centre of town, about 3kms away. With a 15kg Shorty behind me. It is seriously faster to ride our old, gear-free bikes than it is to catch a bus, or even drive most of the time. There’s no finding a park, we can dump the bike right next to the door of wherever we’re going. It’s only now that i’ve realised how seriously time-inefficent cars are, in distances of under about 5-10kms. Plus, the bike is free.

  If we want to go further afield, we can catch taxis, buses, trains or planes. We can hire a car (although, after getting one for free for two days and working out what we would have paid, it’s not really on our options list. If you have 5 or under to transport, and a Rent-a-Bomb nearby you could do it all the time).

  Next, i’ll post about getting things done-food shopping, big bags of animal feed etc, that you would think you “need” a car for.

Soft drink? When you could have mung beans?

I followed a pattern?

  So unlike me. But it wasn’t particularly painful-none of the vintage ones i’ve used have been so far. The modern ones, however, may as well be written in Swahili for the trouble they give me.

  Simplicity 6996, bought a bit bashed-up and stained on the outside but still good.

The result of #3, in an op-shop denim with IKEA fabric that’s been sitting in my cupboard for about four years. I did rescale the bodice for my skinny girls, but other than that resisted my natural urge to fiddle with it.

  

I’m toying with the idea of making another in chenille, but simply cannot bring myself to cut into my precious stash of bedspreads yet.