Making Good Use

Keeping the Winter Chills At Bay (Hopefully)

With the weather definitely getting a lot cooler now I've been thinking of ways to cut down the chilly winds which blow in under the badly fitting and rather ancient french windows.  Last year I tried this method of cutting down on the draughts.  It wasn't a great success as the pipe wrap stuff kept coming away from where I'd stuck it down to the floor and doors and by mid-winter it looked dreadful. 

This year I thought I'd try a more elegant solution and make a custom-made draught excluder.  I'd been chewing this particular idea over for ages and had been keeping my eye open for cheap polyester pillows that I could scavenge the stuffing out of.  I had no success whatsoever, either second-hand or new, and kept thinking what have I got or what could I get hold of that would work as stuffing on such a large draught-excluder.  As if by magic, when I looked in the cupboard under the stairs I came across a large carrier bag full of huge black hanks of thick coarse wool.  I'd paid £1.00 for the lot a couple of years back in the charity shop and they had labelled it as craft wool.  I had tried knitting a few experimental squares with it but the stuff was so hard and coarse and the black dye got all over my hands that I soon bunged it in the cupboard.  Well, long story short, it turned out to be just the ticket for stuffing a draught excluder.  I tied two skeins together with cord to make it nice and thick and then cut out some fairly cheerful fabric from an old tablecloth.

 
I'm pretty pleased with the result and it sure looks a lot better than last years effort.  P was very impressed with the fact that it fitted the french windows exactly, I think he thought that had happened by pure chance until I pointed out that I had, in fact, measured the windows before I started making it and had then cut the fabric to size!  Simples, as the meerkat would say.

Not Your Usual Charity Shop Bargain

The local charity shop was rather quiet this morning, only me, one other customer and the lady behind the counter.  I was busy perusing the book shelves when I heard someone being asked if they liked beetroot or marrows.  It turned out that the other customer didn't like fresh veg at all - 'everything I eat comes out of a packet' was the actual answer.  So, when I went to the counter to pay for a book, I asked how much the bag of beetroot were.  The answer, 50p for the whole bagful.  Sold to the woman who likes beetroot soup very much.

 
These are proper good old-fashioned home-grown beetroots, still with a covering of mud.  I'll cook up maybe half of them for soup this weekend and will keep the other half for a later batch of soup.  Apparently they had only just been brought in - presumably by the person who'd grown them.  

 
They quite often have home-grown produce in this charity shop, and a good selection of home-made jams and chutneys too.  The jams, and especially the Seville Marmalade, are delicious but they seem to be very heavy on the plum jam at the moment - no surprise there really as plums have been so prolific this year.  I do wonder what the good old 'Health and Safety' would have to say about a charity shop selling jams, chutneys and veg but they've got to catch them doing it first.  And I can't imagine anyone is going to complain to the H & S Executive, I would hope our 'nanny state' has not gone quite as far as that yet.

Ebay Sales Update

Lately, I've been really making a huge effort to list as much crap (sorry, stuff) as possible on Ebay.  And it seems to be paying off - I've had some hearteningly good sales.  Most of the really good sellers in the last few weeks have been from this summer's haul of vintage Christmas bits and bobs.

This aluminium Christmas tree which I found for £1.00 at the car boot sale when my sister and nephew were staying sold on Sunday for £22.50.  Woohoo, nice result.  And, amazingly enough, I'd pretty much got the postage right for it too.  I do struggle a bit with working out unusual size / weight postage rates and have been known to be wildly inaccurate at times.  If I've over-charged waaaay too much I refund the difference to the buyer via Paypal.  Sometimes though I've wildly under charged, like the £9.00 postage for a book to the US for which I'd only charged £5.00 P&P.  Luckily for me the book had cost pennies to buy and had fetched a really good price on Ebay so I still made a good profit.  But it was a salutory lesson for me.

Still on the vintage Christmas decorations theme - these paper chains, in very good condition, sold for £15.07, a fabulous result.

And the vintage Christmas fairy sold for £12.00 too.  Both of these items, along with quite a few others, were picked up months ago at the 'Coffee and Jumble' for something crazy like £1.00 for the lot.  (You can see more of the original 'haul' here.)

In previous years I've held on until mid-November before listing any vintage Christmas bits for sale but, having checked the 'completed listings' prices for similar items recently, I decided to try selling much earlier in the autumn. It seemed to be the right tactic which was good as last year I did woefully badly with my vintage decoration sales.  I've pretty much come to the bottom of the bag of the Christmas stuff now so I'll have to concentrate on the other crap (sorry, stuff) that is still lurking around the house.  Yesterday I found a rather spiffy 'Boden' linen and silk cardigan at the 'Coffee and Jumble', it was 50p and will definitely be being listed on Ebay this Thursday.

Oh, and even better, I sold one of my wool-felt Waldorf-type birthday crowns as a buy-it-now.  That was the best Ebay sale of the lot - I always feel really chuffed when someone wants to buy something I've made.

Thrifting in Orange and Lemon

This is the second time recently I've come back from the car boot sale and realised my finds were colour co-ordinated - last time it was pink and blue, this time it's orange and lemon.

The background fabric is a couple of bright orange serviettes that have a bandana-like pattern on them.  I got three of those for £1.00 and they're just the right size for turning into a bag or a cushion cover.  Judging by the label I think they're originally from the States and I've certainly never come across anything as large or as cheerful as these serviettes in the UK.  I could, of course, just use them as serviettes but somehow they're too nice to be used to wipe our chops with whilst eating. 

Carrying right along with the orange-coloured theme is the Action Man frisbee - brand new and in its original packaging - 20p.  I'm pretty sure my nephew doesn't have a frisbee and he's just recently discovered Action Man so, hopefully, he'll like this.  It also goes very nicely with the bright orange Action Man T-shirt I picked up for him in a charity shop on Friday. 

Then there's a Body Shop Orange and Chocolate Shower Creme - 50p and two bottle of lemon Carex Hand Wash - 50p each.  These were from a trader and are just as cheap as Aldi's hand wash which, unfortunately, has a very unpleasant perfume.  The Aldi stuff pongs so badly that it can give me a headache - yuk.  The Carex will make a nice change.

At yesterday's car boot sale I also found an unopened Polo Ralph Lauren pure cotton pillowcase in a rather nice powder-blue colour.  It's supposed to be ultra high quality cotton with over 200 thread counts per inch.  I'll put that aside for Mum as she does like a really soft cotton pillowcase.  Amazingly, I also managed to find two good books for re-sale on Amazon.  TWO, that just never normally happens these days.

Although the car boot season is definitely drawing to a close, and there were considerably less sellers yesterday than a couple of weeks ago, it was still worth going and, fingers crossed, there'll be a couple more weeks of car boots to go to before autumn really closes in.

This and That

:: The weather forecasters weren't joking when they said the weather would become more autumnal at the end of the week.  Whilst not exactly cold, today has been a tad chillier than we've been used to.  Hence, I was very very pleased to find two winter woolies in the charity shops this morning which have already been washed and hung out to dry.  And do please note how close to the patio the rotary washing line is now - oh yes, still VERY pleased with that.

:: Still with thoughts of cooler weather I went to Evans (for those outside of the UK this is a shop for plus-size women) whilst I was in Basildon this morning, and bought myself three new long-sleeved T-shirts - one black, one white and one grey.  I had a couple of these last winter and they are marvellous for layering under all sorts of tops, and they really do help to keep you warmer.  They are pure cotton and were only £8.00 each which considering the price of many of Evans items (£30.00 for a top would by no means be out of the question) I thought they were a relative bargain.  I did have to laugh when I heard one customer in there being asked what size she was looking for, 'big fat girl's size' was the answer.  I know just how she feels!

:: Apparently there is going to be a feature on tonight's Newsnight about Britain's newfound enthusiasm for 'Make Do and Mend'.  It's not the sort of topic the ever-serious Newsnight usually covers (I'm assuming Paxo won't be involved in this one) but it looks like it will be a pretty interesting piece.

:: I also want to say 'Hi and thanks' to Pam over at White O'Morn Cottage who has just read back through my blog to the very first post and has left some lovely comments en route.  Thanks for those Pam, I really appreciate them, and I'll try and get my act together and post the Beanie Hat pattern in the next week or two.