Making Good Use

Laundry Bag

There were a couple of things I wished I'd taken with me on the Windsor / Legoland trip, a warmer coat for one thing (although we were very lucky with the weather), and a laundry bag for my smalls (or in my case bigs) would have been good too.   So I decided to take my scissors to an old embroidered tablecloth and make myself one.

It's not huge, about 14 x 15 inches, but the fabric is beautifully soft and worn and the embroidery is very pretty and beautifully done.  The tablecloth was this one that I found last year at the 'Coffee and Jumble.  The ribbon was from a large reel that I've had so long I've no idea where it came from.

I'll put it in the suitcase now so that next time I go away I won't forget it.

Twitchy-Eye Tired

Back from the trip to Legoland and Windsor and I'm so tired this evening that one eye is twitching!  I'll just post a few photos as I'm too tired to type anything of any use!

 

This happens every morning at 11.00 am, quite the spectacle.

 

The 'Gherkin' made from Lego - totally amazing.

 

One of the highlights of Legoland for DN - a dinosaur tattoo that will last for a week.  Pretty impressive stuff, I wish I'd got myself one too.

 

We think this flag flying means 'Queenie' was in residence.  (Sorry about the 'slant' of the photo, not sure what happened there.)

 

Awesome view of the castle and St George's Chapel from our hotel bedroom. 

Before and After

Before - the front, one side and half the roof almost totally overgrown.

After - looking much better, and I never knew there was a finial and a light on the front before!!  One side of the roof is now totally shot to pieces as the ivy had been holding the damp up against the wooden roofing boards, so that'll be a little job for the future. 

Clearing the ivy, and generally giving the garden a fantastic tidy up cost a grand total of £45.00.  Excellent, and it's all looking sooooo much better now.

The car boot sale this morning was really busy with plenty of buyers and sellers having been brought out by the glorious spring sunshine.  Today I seemed to buy loads and loads of toiletries - always a winner in my book.

Marks and Sparks fruity-beauty bath and shower jellies - £1.00.  Large Boots bergamot orange and olive body butter - 50p.  Body Shop camomile eye make-up remover and vitamin e neck gel - 50p for the two.   Anna Sui shower gel - 20p.  Fcuk scrub and body cream - £1.00 for the two.  John Frieda Frizz Ease straightening potion - £1.00.  I also found a rather spiffy 'Keep Calm and Carry On' mug - 50p.

Righty-ho, I'll be away for a few days hopefully having a wonderful time with my sister and DN here.  The weather forecast is not too promising but we won't let a bit of rain stop us enjoying ourselves.

It's Not What You Know ....

In the past six months since I've stopped going to the hairdressers and have been having my hair cut by the local mobile hairdresser (recommended to me by the ever-lovely next-door neighbours), I calculate I've saved somewhere in the region of £100.  As it only costs £5.00 for a cut now as opposed to £25.00 per visit to the hairdressers I've not only saved a wad of cash, I've also been tempted to get my hair cut much more frequently.  P also gets his hair shorn at the same time and he pays £4.00 instead of the £10.00 per shearing he was paying at the hairdressers, so he must have saved approx. £40.00 too.  Plus we don't have to bother going down to the high street, plus I don't end up with a frightening hair-do which I then have to walk around with for a day or two.  Do you know what I mean?  Having a wash, cut and blow-dry always ensures you walk out of the hairdressers looking very 'done' in the hair dept.  Which is just not me at all.

Anyhoo, you may remember that some joker came a couple of weeks ago and quoted £500 to get the garden into shape!!!!  Since then I've been chopping, slashing and ripping-out like a dervish and although things look much better, there is a limit to what I can achieve with just a pair of Asda value secateurs and a two-step step ladder.  Now it just so happens that the very nice mobile hairdresser's son-in-law does a bit of gardening on the side.  He's just been round to give a quote and he's reckoning on 4 hours or so @ £10.00 per hour to rid the poor old shed of most of the engulfing ivy, and to do some other bits of heavy pruning and weeding too.  Now that's more the price I was expecting to pay.  He's coming back tomorrow afternoon to do the work.

Which, hopefully, means the shed may at long last reappear from beneath the ivy coat it has been wearing for the last few years.

Having slated Oxfam charity shops for their exceedingly high prices more than once on this blog, I think I'm going to have to revise my opinion of them.  Last week I found the wonderful eiderdown for £2.99 in the Oxfam in Billericay.  Today in my local Oxfam shop I found two tubs of brand-new unopened 'Moon Sand' for DN - 99p each (£4.00 each on Amazon) and two brand-new pairs of Next boxer shorts - Wallace and Gromit ones - also 99p each (these types of character boxers seem to sell for approx. £11.00 for a pack of two), also for DN.  Whilst I was in there I gave their rack of cards a good perusal and ended up with two very suitable Easter cards - one was 99p and one 49p.  With cards being SOOOOOO expensive I was really pleased to not only find nice cards at a good price but also ones where the profit goes to a good cause.

Home Thoughts from the Top of the Garden

Since the garden bench was moved a couple of weeks ago, I've started sitting up at the top of the garden with my mid-morning cup of coffee.  I've gained a whole new perspective of looking at the house.  From this position it reminds me of a child's drawing of a house - lots of chimneys and a steeply-sloping roof.  And looking at it from this angle the whole place looks minute.  Now although it's by no means a large house it is definitely a lot bigger than it looks from 12 yds or so away.  Also noticeable from the garden bench is just how shot-away the roof tiles are (I imagine that'll be mega-bucks to replace those), and how 'tired and emotional' the paintwork is!!  Luckily for us we only rent the place, and although we do really like living here I'm not sure we'd ever want to buy it as it is just a tad too small and would need an awful lot of money spending on it in the fairly near future (the central heating system is out of the Ark, and the downstairs windows at the back are totally rotten and need urgent replacing.)

However, whilst we wait for the housing market to hit rock bottom before we buy, this is a very nice place indeed to call home.

The tuna / pepper/ sweetcorn / rice salad concoction I made for the evening meal yesterday worked out very well and was almost as tasty as Waitrose' Wild Rice Salad - which costs £1.99 for a tiny tub.  I reckon I managed to make at least twice the quantity for somewhere in the region of 75p.

Using Up a Bit More

Thanks for your suggestions yesterday about what to do with half a bowl of cold rice.  Heather's idea of making a rice salad sounded good, especially as it meant I could also use up the half bowl of sweetcorn left over from last night's Sweet Potato and Sweetcorn Soup, the pepper that has been lurking in the back of the fridge for over a week, and a small tin of tuna in sundried tomato and basil that has been sitting on the shelf for well over a year.  All mixed together with the rice that should make a nice tasty salad to go with green salad, some salad potatoes and, possibly, some warm breaded camembert.

So that's a few bits and bobs saved from landfill.  Sadly, the cucumber which I could have sworn was still good at the weekend had deteriorated to green mush by today so that had to be chucked out, as did one egg which was past it's use-by date.  I'm a bit dubious about using eggs much over date although I did use up two of them yesterday when they were only one day out of date.

The Sweet Potato and Sweetcorn Soup which we had for our evening meal yesterday was very easy to make and tasty too.  It also used up three small sweet potatoes which had been lurking about for a while.  It's a James Martin recipe and I found it on the BBC Food website. I find BBC Food a very useful place to have a look at in order to use up odd bits and bobs of food as you can type in an ingredient - for example, sweet potatoes - and it gives a whole list of recipes that use that ingredient.   It's a very handy tool in order to avoid food waste as much as possible.

The Tale of Three Ripe Bananas

Heather is running a Use It Up challenge for April which ties in very nicely with my 'tale of three ripe bananas.'

P takes an organic banana to work with him as part of his packed lunch every day.  Last week he came back one evening with three very ripe bananas which he hadn't got round to eating but which had all schlepped up and down to London with him in his briefcase.  I only really like eating bananas which are positively under-ripe - pretty much still green - so I knew I wouldn't ever eat them up.  The following afternoon I decided to make some Banana Bread with them.  It's a really easy recipe from 'The Complete Rose Elliot' cookbook but it does have to cook for an hour.  Now, I don't know whether there is something wrong with the oven, or the clock, or what, but after an hour what came out of the oven was pretty much charcoal.  I was not happy - feeling I'd now not only wasted three organic bananas but an egg, butter, sugar, flour, golden syrup etc etc.  I tried eating a slice but the burnt crust was just horrible.

Cut to the following afternoon when the burnt offering of the banana bread was still sitting on the kitchen side - taunting me - when I had a 'eureka' moment.  I hacked off all the burnt bits with the bread knife, sliced up what was left, soaked the non-burnt sponge slices in some sherry and arranged them around the sides of a large glass bowl.  Then I added a carton of custard to the middle of the bowl and chilled everything in the fridge.  Just before we were about to eat I added some chopped banana slices to the custard and, voila, we ended up with banana custard trifle.  With a large dollop of extra thick double cream it was totally delicious. 

So the 'tale of three ripe bananas' eventually had a happy ending.  Now, in the spirit of Heather's challenge, I'm wondering what to do with half a bowl of cold basmati rice.  Does anyone know if you can add rice to home-made soup to thicken it instead of potato?  Or are there any good rice soup recipes out there?

A Box of (Sewing) Delights

My lovely next-door neighbours are having a major sort out of their house because they've had a lift and a wet room installed.  The changes have become necessary as Mrs 'next-door neighbour' has got a degenerative condition which is making it more and more difficult for her to get about.  Without all the changes to their house they would have had to move, something they really didn't want to do as they've lived in that house for over 40 years.

Luckily for me when they decided that the large vintage sewing box had to go they asked me if I'd like to have it.  With no hesitation I said that I definitely would like it, yes please.

It's one of those extending sewing boxes so there is loads of space inside but it doesn't take up much room at all when it's closed.  Fully expanded it is so large that I suspect there must be a touch of the Tardis about it!!

Not only did they give me the box but all it's contents too - which include loads of sewing threads, embroidery cotton, bits of ribbon and bias binding, hooks and eyes, poppers, zips and loads of different buttons.

There were also two darning mushrooms which they were about to throw out as they thought I wouldn't want those - oh, but I did.

I'm really delighted with it all and now just have to think of something nice to get them by way of a huge thank you.

Gosh, I Haven't Seen One Of Those In Absolutely Ages

That is precisely what I thought when my eyes alighted on this little beauty in the Oxfam shop this morning.  I hardly dared look at the price, expecting it to be something truly horrendous (this being Oxfam an' all), amazingly it was only £2.99.  Definitely sold to the woman who has stupidly gone shopping without her faithful shopping trolley (why oh why I continue to do this I just don't know.  Whenever I am sans shopping trolley I always end up with masses of purchases.)

It is only a single size feather eiderdown but has a beautiful faded floral print all over it, with the faintest of polka dots just discernible as the background.

I remember buying loads of eiderdowns years ago at jumble sales.  It was in the days when duvets (or continental quilts as they were then known) had just become really fashionable and people were ditching their old-style bedding (sheets, blankets, candlewick bedspreads and eiderdowns) with gay abandon.  I always loved the faded paisely and floral patterns on the eiderdowns and would rush to buy them up at jumble sales.  Sadly, they were invariably sold on again when I needed a bit of ready cash.

I wouldn't want to go back to sleeping in a bed made up with sheets, blankets and eiderdowns, I think I'd find all that bedding much too heavy to sleep under.  I also have very vivid memories of being 'tucked in' by my Father when I was a small child and he used to pull everything so tight that I could hardly move at all in bed.  However, the old-fashioned bedding does have a wonderful faded nostalgic charm about it.

I actually bought the eiderdown with the idea of draping it over our rather dilapidated garden bench which, since I tidied up the garden, has been moved to a new spot at the top of the garden under a pergola-type structure which is very cool and shady in the summer.  (I am so keeping my fingers crossed that this year we do get some sort of summer!)

Maureen from New Zealand left a comment last week saying she had a Lloyd Loom chair which has been moved with her from one side of the world to the other, and how it has sat under many a tree in the summer.  That gave me the idea of shifting my Lloyd Loom chair out of the bedroom (where it is subsumed under piles of clothes) and into the garden next to the bench when the weather perks up a bit.  I thought the eiderdown would add a nice comfortable cover for the bench and would go nicely with the Lloyd Loom chair.  HOWEVER, I've just checked out what they sell for on ebay, and they seem to fetch very good money, so, once again, I fear a vintage eiderdown will not stay in my possession for very long.

Foxy

My Mum loves foxes, so I decided to make a little stuffie of one for her as something extra for Mother's Day.  I had been really organised and taken some photos of the finished article before I posted it off to her but, of course, the photos were lost when the computer had to be re-formatted.  Mum very kindly took some photos yesterday of Foxy enjoying himself in her garden.  As she is a much better photographer than I'll ever be the photos are much nicer than the ones I'd taken anyway.

I used this pattern for a racoon from this month's Sew Hip magazine as the basis for Foxy.  Although I think his ears could have done to be a bit bigger - more fox-like and less racoon-like.  I also went for the easy option of sewing him by hand using felt.