Miss Thrifty

I hope that you are all having a great Christmas break. Right now I am having a fine ol’ time sitting on my bottom, pushing Turkish Delight into my face and watching telly, so this is just a quick post to show you these:

Homegrown Brussels sprouts! I was very impressed when I saw them. They were grown by my friend, illustrator Erica Read, whose aptitude for crafty things extends to cooking and gardening, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I heard that Brussels can be quite tricky to grow. Also, you have to plant them up to 6 months before you can harvest the spouts, so some forward planning is required.

Erica said that she planted the seeds out at the back of her garden a few months ago and promptly forgot all about them. She remembered them in the days before Christmas, went out there, pulled back a big frosty leaf – and there were the sprouts, all lined up on their stalks and ready to be picked and eaten. Simples!

Her timing was perfect, not just because it was Christmas but also because, according to old-timey gardeners, harvest Brussels sprouts the morning after a heavy frost and they will taste especially sweet.

If it’s that easy, I’ll have a go at growing them myself next year…

InvisibleHand is a great new tool for online shopping. In a nutshell, it ensures that you get the best possible price for your chosen item. I have been testing it out for the past few days, and I’m pleased with the results.

Two caveats: firstly, it is an add-on for use with Mozilla Firefox. Roughly a third of Miss Thrifty’s visitors use Firefox, so I thought this tool worth mentioning. If you are using Internet Explorer, Safari or Chrome, my apologies. Secondly, InvisibleHand is currently enabled for use in three countries: UK, USA and Germany.

This is how it works. You go here and install The Invisible Hand on your browser. It is free. Next time you are searching online for a specific product – a Flip Ultra HD camera, say, or a packet of soap nuts – InvisibleHand springs into action.

It searches online stores and a small text box pops up at the top of the screen to show you the lowest price and the vendor. You can then click through to purchase the item. In my opinion it is better than Google’s own shopping results, because it searches in real-time (i.e. you get the latest prices) and your results aren’t clogged up by overseas vendors who charge peanuts for the product – but the earth for shipping. I like it.

[InvisibleHand]

A couple of years ago we couldn’t find our trusty box of Christmas decorations. The box was stuffed in a remote corner of our loft, which isn’t boarded and is filled with all kinds of rubbish; trying to retrieve anything is the suburban equivalent of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

So as 25 December rolled towards us and we didn’t have as much a scrawny string of tinsel above the fireplace, I picked up a couple of cutprice bargain bin decorations from Focus DIY. I think this felt hanging decoration was about £1. As you can see, it’s a novelty advent calendar: the little Father Christmases and stockings all have numbers painted on in gold. We’re a bit old for advent calendars, but at least it added a little festive cheer to the sitting room.

Earlier this month I strung up the decoration and didn’t think anything more of it. My husband, however, had other ideas… (more…)

Miss Thrifty reader Felicity Hall, a needlepoint queen and purveyor of hot-to-trot needlepoint kits,  got in touch to let me know that she has started to upload a wealth of free patterns to her new website. You can copy and print the patterns – and if you have any problems, Felicity will e-mail you copies as PDFs, which seems jolly nice.

The first pattern is a Christmas ornament (pictured), with other patterns to follow.

I’d love to have the time to do something like this. Right now it is very busy at work and I can barely find time to iron a pillowcase, let alone stitch a pretty project like this in an idyllic, domestic heaven-themed daze.  In the meantime I can dream on, I guess!

Would you like some free photos? Miss Thrifty reader Amy pointed me in the direction of a website called Free Photo Printing – 455 Free Photo Prints, which does what it says on the tin.

Many of the photo developers – Truprint, Boots, Jessops et al – offer sets of free prints for new online customers. You just have to pay the postage (usually around the £1 mark). This site lists all the companies, the numbers of free prints available from each one and the postage costs.

The links take you to the companies’ homepages, which can be a little annoying because you have to click around, but it’s certainly a site to bookmark.

The best offer right now is Jessops‘: 40 prints  (6″ by 4″) and 99p postage. You also get a voucher for £6 off their fancy photo paper photobooks.

Actually, if you are on the hunt for thrifty Christmas gifts, Jessops have got a couple of good offers at the moment. Until 23 November 2009, you can get 20 per cent off their personalised photo calendars.

Thanks Amy!

Image credit: tick followed tock.

Here at Thrifty Towers, we have a delicate situation.

For Christmas, husband’s family clubbed together and bought us a Wii. They observed, quite correctly, that we did not have a Wii – and were, in fact, the one remaining Wii-less branch of the family. They also know that we are on a tight household budget. And what a lavish gift it was! As you can imagine, we were both stunned and grateful. Our Wii came with extra gubbins including another controller and a game.

Now here’s the rub. And before you ask, it’s not that they bought us a super-expensive games console and got pot plants in return. Those are good pot plants, damn it! (more…)

Christmas was a dizzying whirl of visits to relatives and friends in various parts of the South East, and I’m still disorientated. Seriously; I spent this afternoon working while feeling ever so virtuous for beavering away on a Saturday. It was only at 9 pm that I found out it was only Friday (to much chortling from my husband). Hey ho; at least I get to have two “Saturdays” in one week! But it’s time to come back down to Earth again, isn’t it?

It also means that another edition of Friday Bargains is due. And I must admit, I’m enamoured with the sudden rash of £1 deals. They’re everywhere! (more…)

Welcome to The 157th Festival of Frugality: The Queen’s Speech Edition!  And a special welcome to all first-time visitors to the Miss Thrifty blog. If you would like to stick around, please feel free to put your feet up: some of the most popular posts include thrifty household tips, my beloved Thriftymobile and a hotlist of Frugal Twitter Users. For regular updates in your RSS reader, whack the big orange button to your right.

With the Festival on the other side of the pond this week and Christmas looming, I thought I’d go for a quintessentially British theme. As you may know, we take the seasonal festivities very, very seriously over here; Christmas Day is centred upon a vast lunchtime banquet at which we all wear paper crowns, eat until we pop and try to keep the flaming Christmas pudding from setting the curtains ablaze. After that it’s copious quantities of sherry and telly until bedtime. The day after Christmas Day is a public holiday, to give everyone time to recover.   

So there is plenty to choose from when it comes to selecting a theme. I was going to go with The 157th Festival of Frugality: The Alka-Seltzer Edition, but on reflection felt that this would provide an unfortunate impression of the scenes of carnage Dickensian delights for which the British Christmas is renowned.

Instead, I have plumped for another fine British Christmas tradition. (more…)

The Times has published its top 12 money-saving tips for Christmas. It’s as wickedy-wack as one would expect; I know I’m mean about these well-intentioned broadsheet round-ups, but come on! This time around, the top frugal tips include wrapping presents in brown paper from the Post Office (which, erm, works out more expensive than regular Christmas wrap), and decorating the Christmas tree with pine cones foraged from one’s garden and spray-painted gold (Pfffffff. See: Caitlin Moran).

Anyway, another one of the Times’ tips is to eschew Christmas crackers in favour of recycled, fill-your-own crackers from John Lewis (£5 for six). But one of the readers has replied with an even better idea, which I love: (more…)

Despite my avowed intention to keep up with all the UK Christmas bargains, sales, deals and discounts, I’ll admit that it has been hard going. Right now is there any store that is still selling its wares at full price? Woolies has gone under – who’d have thunk it? – and even newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph have taken a break from running the usual glut of diamond-studded, designed-labeled gift guides to publish lists of coupons and codes.

Traffic to the coupon codes sites has boomed, although I find the sites themselves to be a mixed bag: they feature lots of good offers but also plenty of expired ones, which can be irksome.

So I’m quite taken with this UK Christmas Sale website. It isn’t fancy, but it does the job. The site lists all of the sales that are on right now, with links to the stores’ websites.

A sister site lists details of all the post-Christmas and New Years sales.