Recycling Challenge Day 3

My recycling challenge for yesterday was completed before midnight and basically involved rounding up all the dogs damaged toys and bagging them up for the dump.
Today's, recycle/ get rid, has been to find a box, a little notepad and the DVD's that were gathering dust in the TV cabinet. Register over at Drop Spot and find a suitable place to use as a drop spot.
Rather than throw things away, or take even more bags of stuff to the charity shop, I thought it might be fun to leave them in a drop spot for someone else to enjoy, free of charge. Maybe they will reciprocate by leaving something for the next person.

Over the next week I have to make up the money that I spent on my craft table. One idea is food shopping.
I will only buy things that are on reduced at the coop. It shouldn't be too difficult as they reduce things at 4pm every day. Should be quite interesting as well to make meals from whatever is available. Kinda like seasonal foods eh :) I think I should be able to do it for under a pound per day. Oh the perils of a Woman with an impetuous nature.

Five more surveys dropped into my inbox this morning. I completed them over lunch and the total points accrued got me another Amazon gift voucher with points left to spare.

The tops are now on my craft table and everything is ready to go just as soon as I move all my stuff in there. I have enough wood left in the shed to make a huge drawer to go under the table top and there are quite a few furniture items being listed on freecycle lately, to provide me with extra storage space and adding a few shelves will leave the work top clear. It looks a bit bare at the moment but once I get everything moved in I will no doubt be wondering where all the space went and screaming "I need a bigger house"

Recycling Challenge Day 2

Oh dear, today has been one huge 'FAIL' day.

• Buy and fit the table top - FAIL (Bought but not fitted)

• Sew and fit the valances - FAIL

• Make tomato chutney - FAIL

• Bake a cake - FAIL (In my defence, 'J' didn't bake her infamous soggy chocolate brownie either)

• Visit a friend - FAIL

• Ship my eBay sales - FAIL (packed but not posted)

• Start work on a business website - FAIL

• Decide what to recycle for Day 2 of the challenge - FAIL - (but it's only 5pm so I still have time)

• Decide which wellies to buy- FAIL

• Visit the charity shops - DONE (With mucho gusto. Surprise Surprise)

Charity Shops, aka, Veni Vida Visa - I came. I saw, I spent a little (too much)
I had a great time today in town, heh heh and what's more I didn't even visit all the charity shops because I couldn't carry any more bags and the walk back to the car was a nightmare with the bags bouncing off my legs and my arms aching with the weight of the books that I bought.  Luckily 'J' wants to go into town tomorrow so I will pop in with her. Here's what I found.

Charity Shop Alley

Craft Books

Photo Paper for my autumn wall art project

Cute Tin, couldn't leave it on the shelf

 Pot Boot. I already have one of these but it's a brown one. Now I have one for each foot.

 Lovely little wicker basket. I can't resist baskets.

I also bought a roll of sticky labels for my jars of produce, dress making scissors, two spools of cotton, 2 sheets of plywood and a sheet of white faced hardboard for the craft table, 5 stocking fillers for Christmas presents, 2 cups of coffee and a slice of quiche.
My plan to leave those blue ornaments on the shelf in British Heart Foundation seems to have worked. They were gone when I walked in there today.
Total spend for the day was £51.41 and I didn't even buy a pair of winter boots. I couldn't find any that I liked actually so tomorrow I will take my old ones in to town, get them stitched and they will be good as new.
The slice of quiche that I bought for dinner was solid. I put the side of my fork into it and it just didn't give at all. I stood up to take it back to the counter but when I saw the queue, I sat down again, wrapped it up and brought it home for the dogs. When I microwaved it, it returned to an edible state so me and the dogs shared it.
As I walked in the house, the heavens opened and the sky went black. Perfect timing I thought, so I kicked off my shoes, threw my coat over the back of the chair and my carrier bags on the sofa, made a coffee and sat down to sort through my shopping whilst watching the rain bounce of the patio. I love autumn and winter weather.

FAIL day maybe, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. Hope you all enjoyed yours just as much.

Recycling Challenge Day 1

Today's Weather: Dull

View From My Window: Some of my tomato plants are having a last ditch effort to ripen and the other two are dying a death.

It's day 1 of my declutter challenge and yes I did get on with it. I took all the spare bits of wood from my shed and with a little help from my friend, we built the base for my craft room work surface.
Now I just need a top which I think I will have to spend a few pennies and buy, otherwise the room will remain unusable for god knows how long.  
The whole things dismantles easily and stands against the wall just in case I need to drop the bed down (you can see it top left in the photo). I found some more material in the shed that I will make a valance with to face off the table and hide all the boxes of crafting junk that will eventually gather underneath.
Actually I am going to remove the word Declutter, from my vocabulary. It's just not true. I don't declutter, I recycle. I hoard things in my shed until I need them and then I give them a new lease of life. If I ever dismantle the craft room, it will be placed back in the shed and recycled yet again. Look, I even recycled that old stool :) I knew it would come in handy one day.


Tomorrow will be a busy day. I have to buy and fit the table top. Sew and fit the valances. Visit the charity shops. Make tomato chutney. Bake a cake. Visit a friend. Ship my eBay sales. Start work on a business website and decide what to recycle for Day 2 of the challenge.
I still have to decide which wellies to buy as well.

 

Tuesday

Today's Weather: Bright sunshine with a little shower

View From My Window: No view today, two views tomorrow

Started the day by taking Mum down to Marks and Sparks for her luxury goods. Well you know, even I like the food at Marks.
Regardless of my frugal ways, Marks and Spencer and the Wednesday market at Barnsley will remain with me for life because I was brought up on them.

My trip to the dump it site netted me 7 square yards of red leatherette that a couple of bar fitters were disposing of, which was great. Expensive stuff is thick leatherette.

One of the good things about your best friend and next door neighbour being a frugalista...is that a word? Be right back, just need to google it.....
.......well it appears that it is, albeit more urban dictionary than mainstream. Anyway I digress. One of the best things is that when either of us goes foraging in the wilds or indeed, in the local shops and we come across something good, we share our bounty.
We were sat outside having a coffee last evening when her hubby came back home with a carrier bag full of stuff from the supermarket.
Honey roast ham down from £2.39 per pack, to 29 pence. He bought the lot, ha ha 4 packs. Wonderful. Now I need to bake half a dozen tea cakes to make sandwiches.

When I was snapping photos of the autumn foliage today I had an idea to turn the pics into wall hangings. This is the kind of thing I'm hoping to achieve, which will depend on how big I can blow them up without losing quality. Three photos hanging next to each other.

Heh heh I had to show you this photo. I mentioned the word 'Swim' and they were off. Which made me wonder if I should even bother trying to teach them to run alongside my bicycle, or just put them in front and yell "Mush"
Why pedal if I don't need to eh?

I still keep reading blogs about people decluttering and still can't bring myself to throw things out or give them away. Nevertheless I am going to have a shot at it with a little twist.
Starting tomorrow, rather than getting rid of things, I have set myself the challenge of USING at least one thing per day for the next 29 days. That should keep me busy and declutter a bit.
Or maybe it just means that things will migrate from the shed to the house. We shall see.
Wish me luck, I believe I may fail on this one.

Thank you to everyone who attended Mum and Sft's Tea parties, it was a pleasure to make your aquaintance and I will follow your blogs with much anticipation. ha ha no pressure to blog daily, at all.

Take care all. See you tomorrow

Mum's Tea Party

 Good Morning everyone,

Well if you didn't already know, today is Mum's Tea Party and I had no idea what to bring until I saw a fortune cookie. So, I made a little website just for the occasion in order that I could provide a plate full of cookies for everyone to snap open and find profound statements and quotations surrounding the frugal lifestyle.

As this is a tea party for the frugal minded community I thought it also might be fun to add things To Do and Not To Do with tea and after a quick nosey around the internet I came up with 20 interesting, alternative uses for tea and another ten things that you must not do with it. 

Here's the link


Here's hoping everyone attending the party has a good time.
Pass the tea vicar

Dull Day

Today's Weather:

Dull

View From My Window:

Each morning I stand at one of my windows with my first coffee of the day and look out in order to get some inspiration for the day ahead..

Today I looked at the wind chimes and realised that they have never done what they said on the tin. Not a peep from them, Not even in the strongest wind.

I think I made them too heavy.

I did adjust them so that they were closer together but still, nothing.

That dead plant needs chucking in the compost bin as well.

We didn't make it to the charity shops this morning because I couldn't be bothered. Just one of those mornings. Instead, I put the radio on and cleaned the house from top to bottom, including the kitchen floor ha ha. It wasn't something I did out of boredom, more the fact that someone really annoyed me this morning and when I am annoyed, I clean.

The Spinach is growing like crazy again so I have been searching for Spinach recipes to try and reduce the supply. If only the cabbage and cauli would come of age I would be fine, but that's not going to happen for a while, if at all.
From the recipes I found there were 5 that appealed to me

• Smoked haddock & spinach gratin
•  Bombay Potato and Spinach Pie
• Spinach baked eggs with Parmesan & tomato toast
• Chickpea, tomato & spinach curry
• Spinach pesto pasta with olives

All of the recipes above are on the BBC Good Food Guide website and there are 200 of them to suit all tastes, meat eaters, vegetarians, vegans,everyone.
As for tonight, I am having Haddock with spinach gratin and green lentils.

Yesterday, I ended up with a little pile of Apple and Lemon seeds, which are now dry and I am planting them to see if I can nurture some trees. I am trying to devise a way of making a little Eco system in my craft room. That room fills with strong sunlight from sunrise to 3pm so I must be able to grow something in there over the winter months. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Out with the dogs at lunchtime I wandered onto the old colliery site, which was planted with trees when it closed. It's always worth looking around to see what you can find so spent an  hour prospecting.

I really need to learn more about mushrooms and I also need to read the booklet for my camera and work out how to do close up photography with it. I am unlikely to identify anything from the quality in the pics below.
I could just uproot them and take them home but I don't really like to do that. It seems wasteful.

Wine Making

Today's Weather: Sun and Cloud

View From My Window:

Looking down at my shed this morning I knew there had to be lots of things in there that I hadn't seen for a while, despite frequent trips inside. I had to go in there anyway to get the bits of wood which will form the trestle's for my crafting table, so I decided to have a good snoop around after breakfast







Added to my 'Things to do over Winter' list, is the art of wine making.

I browsed the web to find out exactly what equipment I need to get brewing and found these plastic demijohns for £8 Now, I accept that I'm no expert when it comes to wine making, but aren't these just water bottles that you can pick up from any supermarket?
Or are they made from stronger stuff to account for the expansion during fermentation?
If they do turn out to be nothing more than the standard water bottle, I shall be adding a cork, a stick on LCD thermometer (cheap as chips) and retailing them on eBay for £5

Tomorrow morning we are going into town to take care of a few admin things, so a trip around the charity shops is inevitable. It's also really easy because they are all located down the same street. We start at the top of the street at the cafe for a quick coffee and then into the first charity shop and zig zag our way to the bottom of the street, calling in each one. Jules is still looking for a new handbag and I am on the lookout for, well anything really. I will let you know what I find tomorrow evening.

I made a Jelly/Jam/everything, straining bag last night in a moment of boredom. I'm quite pleased with it and it should do the job (we will find out when I make some apple jelly later this week)
Jules looked at it whilst I was making it and asked why I don't just lay the muslin inside a colander and strain things like that, but I wanted a dedicated bag so that my colander is free for other use.
She's probably right but I'm in a making mood at the moment so there was no way her advice was going to deter me, besides the fact that I have plenty of muslin to do the colander thing as well.

Having thought about materials for my fluffy slipper boots, I decided to use up the duvet remnants from the dogs bed project and an old beach towel. I can just feel my toasty little feet whilst I wander round the house in them. I will let you know how they progress.

Made a batch of apple chutney, but it went wrong again. Sometimes when I make things like this I end up with a burnt flavour, despite being very careful and not letting it stick to the bottom or sides of the pot. Anyway, I got two jars from it and the juice that was left, I will pour into a sauce bottle and try and convince myself that it's a smokey barbecue sauce rather than the remnants of burnt apple chutney.

Commercial Break - cue adverts with music that make you want to spend

Actually I just dipped my finger in the chutney now that it has cooled and it doesn't taste half bad if I say so myself. Recipe on my Craft Blog

2 jars of Apple Chutney and a Bottle of Chutney Sauce

The recipe called for the juice and rind of 2 lemons and you will be pleased to hear that I didn't waste the Lemons. I popped them in a pan, brought them to the boil and poured into a little spray bottle to use as kitchen cleaner. Christine's Grime & Lemon, if you will.



I had a bit of a Tupperware Trauma earlier today when it all spilled out of my cupboard as I pulled out the weighing scales, but everything happens for a reason and as I bent to pick it all up I realised that my kitchen floor needed a clean and couldn't wait until tomorrow. Actually I'm lying, it WILL wait until tomorrow, I just said that so that none of you leave comments saying "Look at the state of your floor you filthy cow"

It's free listing weekend on eBay so I posted a couple of things on there,
started to make a little web site ready for Mum's Tea Party, dug a few items from the shed and moved them to the top of the pile, ready to be recycled and now I'm thinking what to have for tea.
Other than that, my Sunday is nearly at an end. Time to go and watch River Cottage Veg.
See you all tomorrow. Take care.