Health And Safety In The Workhouse

The problem with child labour is equipping your worker: Brillo pads are so big for little hands and decanting bleach into tiny little bottles is just tiresome. However, there is a lot you can do at home, so here is how to make a tiny wee pair of oven gloves and give your little drone a helping hand getting that roasting tin out without incident.

Bits and bobs I scrabbled together:

• The scraps of a £2 IKEA fleece blanket, leftover from other projects,
• One IKEA facecloth, leftover from the wipes project. 
• Some white thread.

How I cobbled it together:

Cut a long rectangle of fleece about 70cm by 15cm and two further rectangles the same 15cm width by about 20cm.

Lay the smaller rectangles over either end of the long strip: they will make the pockets for their tiny, calloused hands go into. Trim the corners into a curve - you know the shape. Use those end parts as templates to make duplicate pieces in the towelling material from the facecloth using the existing hemmed edge as the flat edge of the curved shape to save you having to hem it.

Align the towelling shapes onto the ends of the long strip and sew a line of stitches across the existing hem on the towelling.

Next lay the fleece shapes right on top of the towelling and stitch round the other three sides (the curved edge), keeping close to the edge.  Turn the pockets inside-out and the whole thing should look roughly like a pair of oven mitts.

Cut a thin strip of fleece, roughly 7cm by 1cm, fold it along its length and run a line of stitches along it make a little tape which form a hanging loop in the next step.

Turn the mitts over to the side with the pockets.  To make the joining strap look neat, stitch a small hem along the edges between the mitts, stitching in the tape you made to form a hanging loop.

Da-daa!  And there you have it: some sort of comeback when The Social turn up at your door wanting to know about your toddler turning up in A&E with a roast beef shaped burn.

They also make nice gifts for little people with little play kitchens.  

One Mean Housewife ponders the practicalities of knitting a miniature toilet brush...

Double Bubble

"I hardly ever buy Fairy Liquid," says the blithe housewife in the vintage ad.  "I buy it a little less often, ha!" raves One Mean Housewife, triumphantly shaking a fist at the telly.

You see, I can tell by the look of that woman that she has a spotlessly clean home.  I bet she even wipes the nozzle of her bottle.  She wouldn't allow this grotty build-up of gunk in her kitchen, even if it is premium, long-lasting, Fairy gunk.

More fool her.  Every day, she wipes away a little bit of money.  Every day, she squanders a few seconds of her time.  She knows not of the simple scrimping pleasure she squanders.  She doesn't know that she could could have a free sink of dishes, that if she waited until enough of that green gold accumulated she could rinse the nozzle as she filled the bowl and get bonus bubbles.  

The following video contains explicit scenes of a woman enjoying cheap kitchen thrills, and a very dirty nozzle.

Now hands that do dishes can feel smug as can be mmm!

One Mean Housewife, with a sharp implement, commences scraping the soap dish...

Mother / Goose

Only the best will do for my baby's bottom.  The French Renaissance satirist Rabelais reckoned the best thing to wipe your backside on was the neck of a goose.  Decadent!  But they don't sell them in Mothercare and I can never get the damned things to lie down on the changing mat, so baby wipes it is.

Wipes, however, do not please a mean and lazy housewife.  They work out at 1p each and you go through them like, well, geese. They are also indestructible so probably not the best from a sustainability point of view.  In this house, we have gone to reusable cloth nappies and, because it's easier and cheaper, we have gone to reusable cloth wipes too.

The best known brand, Cheeky Wipes, come in at £27 for a kit to use alongside real nappies, £13 more to add the extra bits you need if you don't already have a cloth nappy set-up.  You'd save money after a few months, sooner if you are wipe-happy.

Or you could make my IKEA wipes kit for a fiver.  I used:

• GLIS box with lid, 3 pack, £1.50
• KRAMA washcloth, 10 pack, £3

How to:

• Cut washcloths into quarters.  Five washcloths should do.  Save the rest for other scrimping.
• Run a zig-zag stitch along the raw edges of each piece.  If your machine has an overcasting foot, use that for a great edge.
• Put the wipes in the box and add some plain tap water.  

You get three boxes in the pack so you can have one for each wing of your mansion and one for the nanny's room.  Or use one to store all the money you've saved.  If you want to go out and about with them, use a sandwich bag.  They are ten times better at the job of bum cleaning than slippery wet wipes too.

Finally, when you've hung your wipes up to dry after the wash, try not to squeak with pleasure as you pull them off the line like this, ready folded to the perfect size for your little box:

One Mean Housewife, with a faraway look in her eye, lovingly strokes a Swedish storage solution...

Measure For Pleasure

This mean old housewife is a 1980 vintage: pleasantly mature, but young enough to have been bottled up in metric measures.  750ml, not 25 Fl. Oz. That said, we remember the information we use most and I never approach the bar and ask for 568ml of 80-/ ale.  No wonder I still have to thrash through a frantic mental conversion every time I see metric.

My tatty and trusty jug.

But measuring is important. If you're going to scrimp, you need to make sure you feed the family and not the bin and that means preparing the right amount of food.  One of my aims is to cook (or defrost) a square meal from fresh ingredients every night.  Get the amounts right and you can have exactly one for the table and one for the freezer, clean plates, full bellies and disgruntled, underfed garden birds.

Modern Wastrel, go tomorrow and purchase a jug and scales and position them at the front of your cupboard. You already have a jug like that?  Well stop using it to microwave beans and restore its dignity (you'll never get rid of the orange glow, mind).

Here are some of my magic numbers, memorised to help me cope with the metric problem:

• 400ml = a whole adult meal dished up.  200ml for One Weaned Infant.
• 100ml by volume = rolled porridge oats for one (same for the child!). 200ml of milk.
• 100g = uncooked pasta for one (less with cheese sauce).
• 75ml by volume = uncooked rice for one, twice as much water to steam.
• 100ml = the exact volume of both of my ladles.  They are different shapes.  Also, for breeders, the volume of one of those little Tommee Tippee food pots, up to the opaque line.
• 100g = enough meat for one adult.
• 200ml / half a tin = enough cooked chick peas, lentils, etc. for one adult.
• 1 Brussels sprout = more than enough for anyone.

One Mean Housewife, with pipette and burette, measures out tomorrow's watery gruel and pease pudding.

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.