Big Stash-Busting Plans: A Very Stashy Christmas

I am making a major resolution for Christmas this year. Apart from my husband and any geek exchange targets, all other recipients of presents:

•  will be receiving at least 75% handmade items, and

• said items must be either edible or made at least 75% from stash. 

The 75% handmade threshold gives me room to add some bought gifts to the major targets (N, for example) while acting as a restraint on that buying. And for people to whom I'd usually only give one or two gifts, that means all handmade.

The 75% stash threshold is intended to be realistic for projects where I might have to buy some specific trim or fastening or interfacing etc in order to complete a project yet still provide the challenge of restricting the main ideas. (100% stash seems too strict and might lead to substitutions that will adversely affect quality.)

Allowing edible gifts helps me deal with those gift recipients who just don't like more crafty items enough. Or who I know would prefer an ephemeral gift. Not to mention being fun to make.

I'm really excited about this resolution now and am enjoying finding patterns and projects that can work with stash resources to plan presents. I know it is only April but I suspect I'll need all the time I can get!

The recipe backlog

In addition to a modest cookbook collection, I've spent years buying cooking magazines and tearing out recipes that appeal to me. I enjoy cooking and experimenting with ingredients but our actual meal planning tends to get stuck in a rut. As part of my being a stay at home mum experience, I've decided to shake that up and clear some of those torn out pages at the same time.

Every week, I'm trying two new recipes from those pages, one savoury and one sweet. Recipes that are either not that good, or more trouble than they are worth, are discarded into the recycling; successful recipes also end up in the recycling but get written up in my recipe book first. The only pages I'm keeping are the 'to tweak' recipes - ones that were ok but I suspect can be made better and into regulars on our meal line-up.

So far we've had a very successful one-pot mustard chicken, a tweakable chorizo, chicken and potato gratin (my husband wants more chorizo, I want a bit less thyme, so we'll try those changes and see), possibly more trouble than they are worth chocolate cherry strudel (filo pastry!) and jaffa friands (6 egg whites!), some rather uninspiring lamb, pumpkin & couscous salad, and one or two others that were clearly so 'meh' that I've already forgotten the details.

Decluttering the house by two magazine pages a week might not sound like a lot, but I'm enjoying the chance to actually try these recipes that I've saved over the years and start to whittle away at the recipe backlog. I've also vowed not to buy any more cooking magazines for at least 6 months.

In parallel to this, I'm working on ways to make our meal planning a better experience. At the moment I'm considering 'meal packages' - a set of three meals that have some ingredients in common to lessen waste - and 'prompt cards' - writing index cards with recipes by major ingredient (so chicken recipes, bean recipes, etc) so we can say 'well, we have chicken in the freezer; this week we should do one of the chicken recipes' and just grab the card and have a look.

I'm too afraid to start looking online for meal planning techniques because I just know there will be a flood of ideas and I'll get overwhelmed!

A New Year and a new routine

Happy New Year!

New Year's Day is, of course, the traditional time to beat oneself up over the failures of the last year and make highly specific and probably unachievable goals for the next. The existence of N. has short-circuited both of these processes. As I've expressed on FB earlier this week, I read several 2013 retrospective pieces from friends and thought "I've been so unproductive... but wait, I grew a person in me." And I know that any goals I make for the next year will have to fit around caring for him.  (For instance, the first part of this paragraph and the last were written an hour and ten minutes apart, as N. woke up and I had to deal with changing him, feeding him and playing with him. It would have been even longer, but he is now enjoying some 'daddy cuddles' and I get a few minutes free to do this.)

It has been very easy to not do very much since he's been born, and not really have goals for the day beyond  caring for him except little things like 'do a load of washing', 'go shopping', 'go to parents' group', 'go to social event'. This is mostly because as Benj is taking long service leave, I feel obliged to let him enjoy this time off work too, so we've been lazing around a lot. Not to belittle the overwhelming demands of 'caring for N.' - we are finally on top of a lot of things, but his patterns seem to change every few days. We spend LOTS of the day feeding him, playing with him, holding him, settling him to sleep, bathing and changing him, etc. So it only seems fair that a lot of the rest of the day is relaxed.  But when Benj goes back to work, things will need to be different and I'll need to get into a new routine, one that tries to have a structure to my day and week and month.

I'm going to try to set up a 'crochet station' near his playmat, for example, so I can crochet for a few minutes while he's happily occupied. He doesn't really need more than voice input from me while it is moving around. If I have the project in a bag, it can just sit next to the mat and I hope I won't forget to work on it.

I think that is the key - having projects set up in easily accessible places so I can snatch minutes of time without having to waste them searching out materials.

I'm also going to vary things and listen to more Craftsy lessons while I'm feeding (mostly I've been reading on my Kindle or going online on my phone).  I've been going a bit crazy over Craftsy lately, which will be the subject of a whole other post.

The Baby Drawer

I made my first deliberate purchase for a future baby at the Sydney Royal Easter Show when I was 19 or 20. I'm going to say 20. I was wandering around the sheep and wool pavillion (back in the days when that meant half was display of sheep and fleeces, and half was actually relevant sales and information booths) and saw these absolutely gorgeous handspun and handknitted merino wool baby blankets. They had other things as well, scarves and hats and sweaters, but the blankets were just amazing. I bought one, and a skein of wool (the very fine cream merino yarn shown in the stash photo in my last post).  The wool went into stash, waiting to be used for something Really Special, which clearly has yet to eventuate.
The blanket started my baby drawer.

This lovely blanket made from organic wool was my first baby drawer purchase. 

The baby drawer is an extension of having a hope chest. My first item for my hope chest was a lace tablecloth given to me on the occasion of my birth by Mrs Squadrito, who lived up the street in Balmain.  I used the hope chest not so much as a 'for when I get married' but as a 'for when I have a place of my own'. The baby drawer has been the place to put things I've bought or been given or have tucked away to save from my own childhood.
For example, the cute metal mug was mine as a child, and the dress was worn definitely by my sister and possibly by me:

Whereas these I've bought over the last fifteen years:

Isn't that frog washboard the cutest thing ever?

I have to confess, having a baby drawer made a lot of sense until I had to explain it to people, at which point I worried it made me seem desperate. I remember being a bit apprehensive when I talked to my now-husband about it for the first time. But I've always liked planning for the future, and grabbing cute items when I saw them - who knows if I could find that frog again?

Suddenly though, I'm buying with an actual baby in mind, rather than hypothetical future baby, and that makes a difference.  One or two cute singlets and onesies in a drawer are swamped by the bags of second-hand clothes that helpful friends have provided. We went shopping yesterday and ordered several important items, including a pram and a bassinet.  And I've been going through the baby drawer with a new eye, assessing which items will actually be used. 

Making Room for Mustard Seed

The arrival of a new baby, even when eagerly planned and anticipated, has a sobering reality when one actually looks around one's crowded one-bedroom unit and thinks "where is all the baby stuff going to FIT?".  Our baby, who has been nicknamed Mustard Seed since the beginning of this pregnancy, is not going to have an excessive amount of material possessions - I hope; I'll blog later about how I'm planning to encourage ethical gifting and, inspired by my sister, discourage new plastic toys - but the little things add up. We've received some second-hand clothes and muslin wraps, a rocking sleepy-chair for day; we need to fit in a bassinet or cot, probably find a way to put a chest of drawers in for the clothes.

There are two main components to making more room - the first is a major plan to renovate our current unit and the soon-to-be-vacant unit behind us into one lovely family home which will be ours for the rest of our lives. I'm not going to blog about this much, except when it impacts the rest of my life; at the moment we are talking with my mother-in-law, who owns both flats, about the legal side, and starting to gather estimates from builders on what the renovation itself would involve and cost.

The more achievable plan is decluttering. Oh, the decluttering. I'm going through everything, slowly but surely trying to whittle down possessions I don't want or need. Occasionally I think 'wait, even if I do get rid of X, is another four inches of space on top of a kitchen cupboard actually going to make any more room?' - but then I remind myself that if the renovation is as severe as I think it will be, all of our stuff will need to be in storage or in temporary rental, so the real question is 'do I want this enough to pay to move or store it?'. Often the answer is no.

I'm decluttering in the bedroom at the moment. Clothes are mostly done, which I'm feeling good about. I'm about to start hobby/craft stuff, which is a bit more painful. I'm trying to be realistic yet balance future needs. It is one thing to say that I'll never go back to painting miniatures or making terrain, but... I've said that before. And maybe in 6 years time I'll have a little boy who wants to paint monsters...

As a result of all this sorting, actual crafting is taking a back seat. I'm making some star-stitch booties from a pattern in a library book that was going very well and now I've hit a point where the pattern doesn't seen to actually work out. Blerg.

Stash-busting for the baby

With my last week of work over, I'm turning my attention to a variety of things - getting Parlour Duck crafts underway, working on my assignment for the embroiderer's guild class, and crafting for the baby.
Since I've found out that the baby is almost certainly a boy (the doctor doing the scan said: "I could be wrong. But it would be one of those cases that we write up to use as an example of how we can be really wrong.")  I've had to readjust my crafting ideas - I'd been so sure I was going to have a girl. Oh well. I'm now totally besotted with the idea of my wriggly little boy, so all good. So I've been back through all my magazines and torn out patterns, I've been trawling through free patterns on Ravelry, I've been borrowing books from the library. But before I go crazy and buy a lot of new yarn and fabric, I want to use up what I can from my stash.

My sister sent me a link to a great blog post where the blogger has arranged her stash so seriously, she can make GRAPHS of what is left to use.  Awe-inspiring. For about ten minutes I was drifting in a 'huh, that wouldn't be too hard' daze but then I realised that I'd use organising the stash as another procrastination technique.  Anyway, I dumped out my yarn stash and made a pile of all the yarn I'd either bought to make baby gifts or had left over from previous baby gifts to work out what I had to use up. Turns out, not a great deal.

Baby-project yarns from my yarn stash. 

In fact, the more I handle the soft-spun mohair (the turquoise yarn) the less I'm happy that I ever used it for a baby poncho years ago. It has a slight underlying scratchiness. So that might be used for a grown up project. I made the decision that I didn't have enough of any one yarn - except maybe the very fine cream merino - to do a large project, so these won't make blankets. The cream merino and maybe the pale blue/white/yellow at the front will make cardigan-size projects. The others will go into socks/booties/hats/etc.

I'd forgotten that making baby things could be so quick! I made a hat last Thursday. Grabbed the pattern from my stack of 'torn from magazine' sheets. Grabbed yarn from stash and hook from roll. Started crocheting on the train to work. Continued during the evening minding the counter at the store. By the time my shift was over, the hat was complete apart from weaving in the end, as I hadn't brought a large tapestry needle with me.

Baby hat, made from stash, completed over the course of a day at work. 

Now I'm making some socks from the same yarn, using a pattern that I've made for other people's babies over the years and really liked.  It feels good to be able to add stuff to the baby drawer that I've made for this specific, known-about baby.