Miss Thrifty

If you are planning a trip to the Angels Vintage Sale  (aka The Clothes Sale of my Dreams) on Saturday 6 December, have you seen this?

Angels is running a prize draw to give a small number of vintage fans the opportunity to be the first people through the doors: (more…)

I’m back! I’m jetlagged and should be in bed in right now, but instead I’m trolling the net and I just came across this:

 
I love Angels: it’s an amazing theatrical costumier in London. The owner wants to clear some space and has filled a Wembley warehouse with boxes and bags full of vintage clothes from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, to be sold off at rock-bottom prices at a one-day sale next month.

Style blogger Mademoiselle Robot says:

It will feature items from the 1930s till now and they will not be priced individually but by bag. You will be able to get a medium bag for £10 (able to hold a suit and shirt, or three dresses) or a supersize one for £20 & then fill it with pieces from BIBA, Quorum, YSL, Bus Stop, Jaques Azagury, & Jean Muir or high street labels of the past thirty years like Chelsea Girl, Jaeger, Joseph, French Connection, Stirling Cooper, Artwork Blue & Stefanel.

Period military uniforms and costumes featured on BBC shows will also be for sale. Angels has published full details about its vintage clothing sale here, and here’s the skinny:

Date: 6 December 2008.

Time: 9 am to 5 pm (frankly, I’d get there early).

Venue: 3 Boundary Road, Wembley, HA9 7ND.

Map: voila!

I wouldn’t miss this for the world, but 6 December is also my husband’s birthday so I’m not sure how I’m going to work it…

UPDATE: See this later post about the Angels sale, for details of a prize draw plus their list of rules for would-be buyers.

I asked my Frugal Grandma if she would provide holiday cover while I am away on my Thrifty Roadtrip this week. Frugal Grandma can do anything…

When you make fruit pies put the bottom layer of pastry in the tin, paint with egg and leave to dry. This stops the bottom of the pie from becoming soggy with juice. Use the rest of the egg to paint over the top of the pie before you sprinkle with sugar, and this will make it nice and shiny. Try not to put too much juicy liquid into the pie as it will make its own when it cooks.

When you make a bread and butter pudding, put a smear of marmalade in the bottom of the dish. This greatly improves it.

At Christmas, mince pies are often a bit rich when you have been stuffing yourself. So in our family we always make a lot of little apple pies, which seem to go much faster. Don’t forget to make the tops of the mince and apple a bit different so you know which is which.

- Frugal Grandma

I asked my Frugal Grandma if she would provide holiday cover while I am away on my Thrifty Roadtrip this week. Frugal Grandma can do anything..

Biscuits gone a bit soft? Use them as a crumble topping over fruit, sprinkle with sugar and cook.

Don’t throw away the chicken carcass: boil it with the skin, then strain it off and pick out any pieces of chicken meat (horrible job). Bung them in the stock with salt and pepper, tarragon, dill, garlic and anything else that’s handy. (more…)

I asked my Frugal Grandma if she would provide holiday cover while I am away on my Thrifty Roadtrip this week. Frugal Grandma can do anything..

Frugal Dinner

This recipe is called Beef Collop; it was first made by my mother when she ran a small London cafe in the late 1940s. Meat was rationed at that time and my ma never liked to waste anything, so she invented this dish. It became so popular that she ended up having to buy meat especially for it.

If you have very little meat left from a roast, say 2 slices of beef (or lamb, pork or chicken), then do the following: (more…)

Yes, I know I’m really late to the party. I’d read all about Freecycle, which reduces waste by encouraging people to post their unwanted items online, and pass them on. But I hadn’t really paid much attention, because (a) Freecycle always popping up in those same rubbish “recessionista” features in the women’s pages. You know: those round-ups that tell us all to go out and stuff fallen fruit into our Lulu Guinness handbags, and take our clothes to “swap parties”. Also, (b) I’d presumed that Freecycle’s domains were eco-trendy places like Islington and Brighton, rather than my creaky Yorkshire backwater.

But lo! I looked Freecycle up, and it turns out that the little place in which I live (pop: 13,000) has its own, thriving Freecycle group. (more…)

I’m surprised the mint and parsley have lasted this long, in their big fired pots out on the patio. But as the days get shorter and colder, both herbs have faded.

So I have now picked the nicest leaves and put them in the freezer. The mint goes in a water-filled spare ice cube tray; I don’t bother making parsley ice cubes, but chop the herb and chuck it in a freezer bag instead. I can pull the herbs out when I need them, and I expect that they’ll last until my fresh mint begins growing again and I can grow some new parsley from seed.  

I like the mint cubes in mojitos!

Doesn’t this book look marvellous?

Make Do And Mend was published in the UK in 1943, by the Ministry of Information, at a time when food and clothes were rationed. Every British citizen was permitted one egg a week, a modest cube of cheese and unlimited bread and vegetables. Coupons for clothes were cut from allowance books; enterprising women supplemented these rations with garments cut from curtains, and kohl pencil lines up the backs of their legs, to look like stockings. Their cookware was handed over to be turned into fusiland turned into aeroplanes. (And if all this wasn’t bad enough, their towns and cities were being bombed at night.)  

This frugal tradition continued beyond the Second World War and into the 1950s, when the Manchester Evening News published Take a Tip : a collection of readers’ money saving titbits.

It’s funny, isn’t it? These little booklets have been hanging around for decades, unwanted and unread, gathering dust in attics and mouldering on charity shop shelves while we’ve been out spending and splurging on overpriced frivolites and cheap tat.

Now that we’re headed for a recession - a Depression, even, if the doomiest of the doom-mongers are to be believed - all these pearls of wisdom are suddenly relevant again. With our financial indexes plummeting, our markets in turmoil and our elected representatives banging heads with one another, this seems as good a time as any to revisit some of our forebears’ handiest household hints.

Here are some of my favourites: (more…)

Our new composter arrived today. It looks like this:

We have put it out in the garden, behind the shed. You dump the peelings etc. in the top, and scoop out the resulting compost through the sliding hatch at the bottom. This is a family-sized bin and it’s massive: I think it will take us a year to fill it!

Not only is it eco-friendly, it only cost us £20.00 including delivery! Our county council (North Yorkshire) is subsidising the costs of all home composters purchased by residents.

We bought it from the website recyclenow.com; if you are reading this in the UK, enter your postcode into the site’s homepage to find out if you can get money off too. You can also enter a competition to win £100 of gardening vouchers.

Five composting tips: (more…)

Homemaker Barbi has a terrific tip for keeping the contents of your salad drawer fresh. Stick a clean, dry sponge in there! The sponge absorbs the excess moisture; foods that are prone to mould and mush, such as strawberries and tomatoes, stay fresher for longer.

I love tips that are as deliciously simple as this one.