Packaging Matchmaking

Now you can read "Charlotte's Web" while listening to Nick Drake and watching "Bambi", but there is nothing, nothing in the world sadder than this:

Ah, the missing puzzle piece: gone forever or just snuggled up in the drawer of the DVD player? You'll never know with a toddler in the house.  If you are One Mean Housewife, you might also find yourself quite upset by this:

It's an empty packet of baby pyjamas.  Look at all that plastic.  Look at all that reusable plastic, with its resealable zip lock, just crying out to be used again for something or other.  What a waste to chuck that straight in the landfill.

Now I can't stand waste, but I don't want to be the subject of one of those Channel 4 extreme hoarding documentaries.  Once every three months after Toddler Boy was born, as I unpacked the next size packets of vests and pyjamas, I was faced with a selection of those plastic wallets and every time it was an uncomfortable experience.  To bin or not to bin: that is the scrimper's question.  Couldn't do it.  Somewhere in the whirling eddies of my intuition, I knew there was a use for them.  So I indulged myself with a spot of light squirrelling.    

I wasn't wrong, reader.

Now, you can pop bubble wrap while scratching your itchy foot and writing in biro on a banana, but there is nothing more satisfying than a perfect storage solution.  

It's a match made in packaging heaven.  The packets even come in varying sizes to suit the wee one's different puzzles and, because they are transparent, His Little Highness can look and choose.  How developmentally appropriate, ha.  

Hand-me-down, complete jigsaws in salvaged plastic storage sacks. Oh yes.

One Mean Housewife, for longer than is appropriate, agonises over a shoebox...

Baby Volume Control

Toddlers have a really annoying habit of growing.  Mine is always at it.  Last week he decided to grow a bigger head and expand out of his beautiful pom-pom hat, just in time for the cold weather.  Naughty child.

We had a rake in the hand-me-downs drawer and found a beautiful replacement.  However, it was three sizes up and he'd only been good enough to grow two sizes overnight.  The solution was obvious: buy a bigger hat up his porridge ration every day for a week and see if I could fatten him up enough to fill it.  Didn't work; time for an old fashioned solution.

Today, I made like my One Mean Granny and sewed him up a little pad for his hat:

The idea is to fill up the excess space at the top of the hat and keep its shape nicely.

I used a little bit of a £1.60 IKEA fleece blanket.  This is a much cheaper way to buy fleece fabric than off the roll in a haberdashers.  The pattern is a circle for the bottom panel and four curvy triangles for the top.  This shape sits nicely inside the top of the hat but two circles would probably have done the job.  I stuffed it with a little bit of wadding from a dead cushion.

Urchin to cherub in one easy step:

One Mean Housewife, examining a babygro, wonders just where you would sew in a gusset...

Scrimping Through The Eye Of A Needle

I do love my little sewing machine but sometimes I wonder if she's a bit wasteful.  Imagine!  The very gadget I bought to turbo charge my scrimping.  But sometimes I look at Janome (it's "Ja-GNOME-ay" says The Sewing Machine Man), with her two tails of dangling thread and I just see pennies waiting to go down the drain.

Her methods are mysterious but I can tell you that, to get started without losing your thread back through the eye of the needle, she needs to have these two tails dangling at a length of at least 120mm.  When you finish your piece of stitching those tails will be hanging out of the start of it and all you can do is trim them off and pull out a similar length for next time.  That means, if you have a lot of pieces to stitch, you end up with a pile of waste threads big enough to make One Mean Housewife choke on her gruel.

Tonight's project is to repurpose some redundant facecloths into reusable baby wipes by cutting into quarters and hemming off the raw edges.  I'm going to sew two dozen pieces so that's 24 x 240mm, which is a whopping 5.76m of wasted thread, and it really is good for nothing, unless you have a lot of vacuum cleaners that need destroying.

Here's my prudent plan:

Rather than trim off each piece after sewing and pull out a new pair of tails to start the next, you can put the next piece straight under and sew, like this:

That saves pulling out a length of thread just to waste it and you end up with, instead of a dozen pieces each with a tail, with a little string of bunting with just a tiny length of thread between the pieces for trimming off, like this:

23 tail-ends saved (can't save the first one) with an average join of 20mm x 2.  So that's (240-40) x 23 = 4600, 4.6 metres of thread still safely on the reel and away from helpless Hoovers and Housewives.


One Mean Housewife, desperately seeking to quantify her thriftiness, Googles the price of thread.

Rag Trade-Off

On the 5th of November I received this question from a reader:

Dear Mean Housewife x1:

I am wearing a shirt that I think is a bit too shabby even for a student, and I am about to throw it away. The question is: is it worth washing (cost of soap, hot water, electricity) in order to recycle as clean rag? Or is it cheaper to just buy J cloths or similar?

Yours ditheringly

Martin

It's a burning issue and is just crying out for proper thorough and scientific investigation.  Well, you're not going to get that here.

However, I'm interested in the answer as I have recently washed and cut several garments for this very purpose.  It's a bit of a mystery, the cost of running a wash.  There are so many variables to consider: power, water charges, soap, time spent not having a life, etc.  Let's ignore lots of them and have a rather half-hearted look at the 'details'.

This geeky forum's users reckon a wash might cost about 15p in electricity (I'm assuming you cold-fill because gas is the same price as gold).  The same geeky forum's other user reckons in his area, with low standing charges and high unit charges, it's about 0.1p per litre for water.  Waterwise reckons an average modern machine uses about 50 litres, so about 5p per wash.  Aldi's own brand washing powder comes in at 10p per wash.

So that's a total of 30p for a load of washing.  Now you could wash at least 15 shirts in one wash so I'm going to say 2p to include the shirt in question.

For that 2p, you'll get at least a dozen rags out of the front and back of that shirt (these areas are unlikely to be worn out).  You can pick up a packet of 10 Asda generic blue and white cloths for 36p and you'd have to get to the shop and back.  One-nil to the old-fashioned rag method, I think.

Martin, you may snip with confidence.


One Mean Housewife, clutching an upcycled semmet with intent, gets back to polishing the brasses.

Playing The Stock Market

In case you didn't know it already, stock is the key to happiness for the mean and workshy cook.  It's the philosopher's stone for getting tasty dinners out of cheap ingredients without much effort.

Now, obviously I have fresh, homemade stock bubbling on the stove at all times. Ahem. However, I do like to keep a little library of stock cubes in the cupboard for emergencies. Today I had a look at my selection and I think I may have been buying naïvely.

My current cube collection is all branded. Frivolous! I always buy that Marigold Swiss bouillon vegetable stock powder: it seems to go in anything and I like the tub/spoon set-up. I used to buy Knorr cubes but last time I fell for the funky design and crumblability of OXO. Deciding which of my stash to use today, I discovered that you need two OXO cubes to make the pint (-ish) of stock you get from one Knorr cube.

I thought I would look more closely and compare my stock of stock for the greater good.

Warning: grocery geekery ahead. Here are the values for one litre of stock: how much you need, how much sodium is in there (stock cubes are mainly salt) and how much that will cost* to buy.

	Cubes/spoonsful	Sodium	Price
Knorr (Ham)	2.2 cubes	3.8g	38.4p
OXO (Vegetable)	5.2 cubes	4.9g	43.4p
Marigold (Vegetable)	4 tsp	3.6g	23.8p

*Asda prices from mySupermarket.co.uk on 31/10/2012.

So, yes, compared to Knorr it's 5p more per litre for OXO crumblability and more of it is salt. You also need to unwrap 6 times! BUT, you can get the equivalent amount of Marigold for 15p less with a similar salt content. If you're prepared to buy a double size pack of OXO you can save about 25% on the total price, bringing it cheaper than Knorr.  

Marigold still wins on price and for me it wins on usability. The tub and spoon means the exact quantity you want and no unwrapping. Now if only they would drop the veggie health food stance and make it in smokey pig flavour...

One Mean Housewife puts on her spectacles and takes the ruler to the spaghetti...

Down With This Sort Of Cling

Behold the world's least desirable roll of cling film!

A floppy box which flattened on first contact, ends which exploded moments later, a cardboard blade which couldn't cut chocolate mousse, never mind the world's stretchiest, most indestructible substance inside: it's quite a package.  I don't understand how the stuff can be so thin it's near unusable and yet strong enough to resist cutting with any of the myriad blades in my kitchen.

Every encounter with the thing has given me a grey hair or a wrinkle and yet this tormentor has lasted 4 years in my workspace.

Why?  I don't like to waste.  I couldn't bring myself to throw it out.  I felt I could/should thole it until it ran it out.  But it never ran out.  How could it?  Would you use it?!

Well, today is a great day.  By way of a special offer at Lakeland, I have acquired for free a roll of superior cling wrap and a dispenser that actually works.  Praise be!  It's so pleasing to use.  I'm wrapping things that never needed wrapped.  I'm not sure if my husband can still breath in there.

I'm going to wince when I do it as there are many, many metres left, but today is the day I finally get that grease-stained, malformed little box of misery out of my life and into the bin.

One Mean Housewife, an oblong box in hand, skips out of the back door in her slippers.