Oh, For the Love of Words

This blog article is a collaboration with Nicole Douglas nee Carruthers, an amazing writer in her own right, and 2019 winner of the Western Australia-wide Armadale Writer’s Award for her short story “The Mushroom”.

When I finally got around to reading a rough draft of her story several months ago, I’d never been so impressed, and told her she needed to publish it, although I’m not sure she remembers through all the new baby haze. She captures everyday rural emotion so brilliantly. She wishes she could write funny like me, but I would kill to capture the nuances of emotions and gestures like she does. She can write a paragraph about a single moment and it’s beautiful. I’m a little jealous, but not at all surprised. I remember her telling me this story when we first became friends a decade ago! And I love the piece it was finally developed into.

You can read her story here.

It seems fitting that I should be writing this with Sara-Jane. Our friendship has been built on our shared love of words; reading them, writing them and of course speaking them at a million miles an hour. The first night I met Sara-Jane, I lent her a book and we’ve stayed in contact through letters. For my wedding Sara wrote me a book. Just for me. My book – though I am sure that she would argue that it was her book for me.  I think that defines our story. That, and I was grateful to find someone who could talk faster, longer, and louder than me. I never thought it possible.

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What Happened When My Mother Taught Me To Drive Stick

Most stories like this start by saying, ” I hope my husband, wife, neighbour, colleague-from-ten-years-ago never reads this story…” But I know my mother’s going to read this story.

My mother and I have quite the history together. Something that I love and appreciate her to the world’s end for, a decade later—but that annoyed me to no end at the time—was her penchant for making me learn things in the most difficult circumstances possible.

Whether I was up for it or not.

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Your Complete Survival Guide To Being Friends With a Knitter

Without getting poked in an eye.

I mean, unless you’d like to see the world a bit differently, like all of us knitters do. We always have needles on hand after all. For us knitters, all time not actively doing something that precisely prohibits knitting, is time that could be spent knitting. And just because there’s something you couldn’t conceive of doing while knitting, doesn’t mean that we haven’t conceived of a way to do just that.

If we don’t have knitting along, we’ve forgotten it. Reminders, please? If we do have knitting, we might not even knit at all, but it’s beside us, just in case. Small projects for working in waiting rooms and in line. Larger projects for being in one place for a few hours. Complicated patterns for times when no one is speaking to us, and easy ones for social gatherings. 

Any space of time between this and that, or here and there is time for knitting. If you find yourself waiting for someone to grab a project bag, always a few steps slower behind you putting needles away…congratulations, you are friends with a knitter.

Here’s a few things you are going to hear a lot.

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We Tried Out a Daily Budget: Here Is what Happened – Part Two

This is obviously the second article. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. This is what we discovered during the first few months.

It’s easier mentally to keep track of a daily budget. And helps to stop the total budget from running out mid-week, or mid-month.

Include anything that isn’t a fixed expense. Basically, if it wasn’t a mandatory bill every month, it went in the budget.

Find an amount that’s challenging but won’t leave you giving up in despair. We decided on twenty-five dollars a day. An amount that wasn’t so challenging that we’d never meet it, and binge ending through budget despair, but still required a good bit of ingenuity. Why have a challenge that isn’t a challenge? Also, because I’d been reading a lot spend-fasting articles, and because I’m a glutton for punishment.

Preparing for a daily budget is important. We balanced the bills in both halves of the month so we weren’t “broke” the first half and spending all our “free” money during the second half.

We found a lot of cool ways to save. Including just procrastinating spending a lot.

We picked our sacrifices. Turns out, cellphones were an easy toss. Nutrition, and haircuts, an absolute no. If trying to include something in the budget made us throw our hands up in the air and say toss the budget this week, we decided it was better to have it as an outside expense, rather than spend a ton more after giving up. We figured that out the hard way.

Does it work? We haven’t necessarily met our saving goals, but we paid down the credit card. We paid for eyeglasses and major car repairs, including two new tires and a leak in the coolant, and a three day vacation. All out of our debit account, instead of with our credit card. You can read the entire up and downs of it here.

Now onto Part Two.

It wasn’t working. It stopped working, I should say. We had made a lot of good habits, (Mainly that almost everything I might enjoy buying at a thrift shop isn’t needed, and now must come off a specific scavenger-hunt list. You can read more on how I changed my relationship to shopping, and stuff in general, here.) But we were still spending a lot more than we’d have liked, at the expense of keeping our savings account happy. We’d slipped back into old habits, and this was being was being reflected in the amount we’d dug into our overdraft the night before every payday.

So, on a sunny Thursday in June… well the long and the short is, we went to the bank and retrieved fourteen twenties, and fourteen fives. And it worked, mostly. No more scrolling through the banking app on the phone mentally adding up how much was left in the weekly budget. If there was money left for the day (loose change) or the week (bills), it was in the teapot. We only physically spent from each day’s bills. It worked out until we had a giant argument because instead of sticking to the budget, hubby was just running a tab on the lunch truck.

(It turns out that if someone agrees to something but struggles to follow through on it, their heart isn’t in it and it is definitely worth finding out why!)

So we brought everything back to the table, literally almost. (Partners have great ideas. If the other partner listens.) He wanted to take clothing out of the budget.  The reason? We don’t buy clothing often enough to warrant it. We both, due to proportions, find finding clothes that fit a struggle, so we’ve often gone with the philosophy, if it fits well, and it’s a good quality item that will last, buy it regardless of price (with-in reason), because that seldom happens. So, because spending the same amount over a longer time, is still spending less, we buy the clothes we need, find quality items by thrifting when we can, and don’t worry about trying to fit a ninety-dollar bra, into a twenty-five-dollar-a-day spending limit. (If you think that’s outrageous to spend on a bra, well, I’ll give you my boobs.)

And sometimes you just need a card, like at gas pumps. Its easier or sometimes the only payment option (Costco). So we started taking out fourteen twenty-dollar bills every week, which left us seventy in the bank, which is roughly our two-weeks expenditure in gas, and we just fill it up completely when we need to and forget about calculating it. (So I guess gasoline really isn’t in the budget anymore, but we’ve decreased spending proportionally to compensate.)

For a while we were very strict about only spending one bill per day. Our grocery trips went up, but because we mostly buy fresh, and I’m limited in how long I can manage energy-wise in a shopping trip, it was okay with us. And it helped us build a really good habit. But now we’re somewhere in the middle, we don’t spend our entire budget the first day in a mega-giant hundred-dollar grocery shopping trip, leaving us annoyed at our budget, and struggling with it the rest of the week. But it’s more practical because spending more than a day’s worth at once can save more over all, and we’ve settled on a happy medium of a few days allowance at a time.

There is still barely anything in savings.  However. We have had a ton of unexpected expenses that we able to pay for promptly and in full without feeling the pinch or having to delay something that would affect our safety, like having a tire blow out on us. I finally felt really dumb when I looked over at my hubby and said, “I just realised I shouldn’t feel bad that most our savings have been used up on emergencies because that’s what an emergency fund is for…” He facepalmed.

I also have just realised that now everyone knows that the spare cash cache is a teapot. (See what I did there?) Good luck figuring out which one of all of the them, in a timely manner though. (Hubby has put a moratorium on buying teapots.) Time for a new system or hiding place, maybe? Although most of the time I’m just like, Oh you need five bucks, sure. I’m staying in the garden and I’m not climbing back up those stairs, its in the teapot…

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

It’s Time To Slay Your Dragon: Finish That One Project

Everyone has a dragon they need to slay. And by dragon, I mean project. And by dragon that needs slaying, I mean a project that just, needs, doing. And has been put off for a very long time for a few vague-but-specific reasons that are little, but always add up to it never being started.

For example. You know almost everything about how to do it, but need to learn a couple specific skills that you aren’t sure you can master. Or you’d like to start research into how to begin, but you don’t know what you don’t know, so you can’t begin to research, because you don’t know what to research. Or the project just requires you to do one specific task before you start, that you can’t admit to yourself that you just hate. So somehow you never get around to doing it. You understand.

My dragon to slay was a knitted sweater.

Imagine being an expert knitter who hasn’t knitted a single sweater. You could easily be mistaken for a novice! Imagine it. A knitter who doesn’t knit sweaters. Is there such a thing? She must be still learning, she’s always working on socks and hats and dishcloths. Meanwhile, I’m knitting socks with my eyes actually closed (practiced so I could watch TV at the same time), and writing my own patterns for lace stockings. Doing five hundred rows of lace border on a Victorian shawl. But I haven’t knitted a bloody old boring sweater!

Okay, I’ve knit one, but can you really call something knitted out of Red Heart worsted weight yarn (universally known by most knitters to be the scratchiest brand of acrylic, or at least it was when I last bought it), and knitted so tight, with needles so small, so that it stands up by itself, like cardboard, a sweater? I didn’t think so.

So there was more than a few reasons I wasn’t knitting a sweater. I was just plain old terrified. I was certain that I was incapable of picking out the right fibre to match the right pattern. And then, even if I did that, there was no way I was going to be able to pick the right size of needles and gauge for the desired feel of the knitted fabric. And then, however to pick out a pattern that will actually fit? I don’t use patterns! And lastly, I loathe sewing and picking up stitches because there’s no right way to do it. Ah! And just thinking about picking up a darning needle to sew together a knitted seam was enough to make me rewrite a whole pattern to avoid it, why have side seams, when you can just knit it on four needles? I was, of course, just plainly not meant to knit a sweater.

However, envy got the better of me. I know a woman. She was slaying dragons every week. Beautiful hand-spun, hand-dyed, and handknitted colourful dragons, e-ver-y week. Damn it. If she could, well I was going to!

I lamented to her that I wished to knit a sweater, but never do, and when she asked why, I automatically and replied that I find them too hot, don’t like wearing sleeves, and…Lightbulb realization. Apparently that had been holding me back too. Her suggestion: a sleeveless cropped sweater, and she suggested a pattern to start with that she had already knitted. Great, at least I have someone to summon when I inevitably start to throw it against a wall.

Well didn’t I figure out quickly that my first few reasons for feeling incapable of slaying this particular dragon, were easily fixed. I just needed to approach things in a slightly different order. Which meant not following my instincts of trial and error, lumping it, and following some instructions.

First, a beginner pattern. (So it wasn’t too hard.) One that the fit does not need to be exact. (So I don’t have to worry about fit.) Done. I made the Mount Pleasant Top by Meghan Nodecker you can find and purchase the pattern on Ravelry (Facebook for Knitters) here. Second. Patterns have these things called instructions which include the weight of yarn to be used. And third, a gauge. This wonderful thing that says how many stitches and how many rows should form a two- or four-inch square of fabric. More instructions! Who knew? Having it come out the right size, and very un-cardboard-like. Easy peasy.

I started with the recommended size of needles, knitted a swatch, adjusted needle size. Repeated until the desired gauge. It never came out exactly, which I lamented about to my friend, who I then received a very sarcastic text from, stating “Guess you just can’t knit it then. Haha.” Which I promptly ignored.

Fourth. Measure myself, and pick a size. Fairly standard, and also easily done. Next time, I will go with my gut instinct, and knit the waist in one size, and the bust in a size larger, because I already know that my waist-to-bust ratio is larger than most, but I was very focussed on following instructions, and so I just picked the size recommended, and kept toddling along.

Then came casting on the stitches. I learned the method required (long-tail) which uses a double strand of yarn, and requires you to pre-determine the length you need before you start, (unless you have two identical balls, or are able to work from both ends of one ball), listened to the warning in the video about making sure I pre-calculated and didn’t run out of yarn, and then promptly ran out, nine stitches before I’d finished the required three-hundred and twenty-four! I did this twice.

Four attempts later, I had the stitches on, and was working my way up the scalloped lace trim. Fortunately, the rest of the sweater was pretty uneventful. The entire thing just went round and round quite hypnotically with barely an added stitch here, and an added stitch there for increasing, and half-a-million stitches later, I was up to the bottom of the collar. The shaping (leaving stitches here, adding stitches there, in order to create the shoulders) was minimal, and soon I was facing the my last battle: the biggest thing holding me back from making a sweater.

Picking up stitches (creating new stitches out of a side seam)! And sewing knitted seams! (I once was teaching a knitting group and ended up in a five minute rant about how I hate sewing up knitted pieces so much, and patterns shouldn’t need this and blah, blah, blah. Cue the laughter when someone wasn’t paying attention, and turned and asked me the best method for stitching up the side seams on her baby sweater.)

Turns out my real fear was that there wasn’t a neat, simple, right way to do it. I was afraid that I would have to just kind’ve stab at it around the shoulder holes, until I had enough stitches to begin going round and round for the sleeves. Well. There are many, neat, right, ways. And there are also YouTube videos for learning all of them. (There are YouTube videos for everything.) I still hate both, and I always will, but now they are tolerable to do.

It turned out that this pattern was really and truly magical. Four rows to knit after picking up the stitches for sleeve one. Repeat for sleeve two. Repeat again for the collar. And this miraculous thing alled a three-needle bind-off! A method of casting off knitted stitches that sews two needles of stitches together into a lovely sturdy, straight seam (in this case both shoulder seams), with no…sewing…required!

I was so proud of myself that I couldn’t even wait to wear it until it was actually done. I wore it out to a coffee shop, stripped it off, and sat there with my coffee and my darning needle, stitching in all the little ends. Dragon slain. Dead. Stomped on. And sat on, with my sword stuck in the ground beside me. (Okay my dark side is running away with me now.) Not really. We just needed to make friends. Just enough to get things done.

And we might meet up again. (The yarn I used for the top is starting to pill, so I think I’m going to unravel it, adjust the sizing, use a different colour balance, take out one skein of wool and use another, and do the whole thing, all over again.) And the whole thought of that, it doesn’t even make me blink.

Twenty-Five Dollars a Day: Part One

Image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay

My husband and I are trying to see if we can spend less than twenty-five dollars a day, every day, for the foreseeable future. (Minus fixed expenses: rent, car insurance, life insurance, car loan payments, utilities, phone bills, and subscriptions. Although subscriptions are a debatable expense, obviously I’m using my Microsoft Office one right this moment, but I don’t really need a subscription to AcornTV, just so I can binge watch Doc Martin and Midsomer Murders.)

This means that everything else including groceries, gas, pet supplies, household items, toiletries, hobby supplies, clothing, gardening supplies, and any other item that might come up (husband’s morning coffees), need to somehow come out of $175 a week.

Twenty-five dollars a day seemed like a good amount, not small enough that we’d be driving ourselves insane trying to figure out how we were going to eat by Wednesday dinner (paycheque comes in Thursdays at midnight, so our budget week starts Thursday and ends Wednesday), but not large enough that we are able to stay inside it without noticing. It needed to be an amount that required a little ingenuity to stay under.

We did a few preparatory things. I remember reading an article that said the best thing anyone could do to help their budget, was to split rent payments. If you always paid all your rent in one pay period, and none of it in the other, the money in that half was going to be spent regardless. So by setting aside half the rent in the pay period it wasn’t due, then only half of it would be due in the other one, and it would always feel like you had more money during that pay.

We were doing the same thing, paying all our pills in the first half of the month and often running out, then using the second half of the month’s money to spend wherever. It felt like free money, because we had no bills to pay. We made a few phone calls to change billing dates, and presto, only the rent, internet, and one car payment come out of the first paycheque, and everything else comes out in the second. It is still only a sixty-forty split, but it’s a huge improvement.

The other thing I did was make changes we could to fixed expenses. We tried to discount anything we could, checking car insurance rates with the agency, making sure we had the cheapest internet provider, and the cheapest mobile phone provider (we decided mobile phones were a want, not a need, and switched to a VOIP service, and boom, our cellphone bills went from thirteen-hundred a year to seventy-five for the first year and ten a month thereafter). It wasn’t directly related to our daily spending limit, but definitely would help the amount we would be able to save in the long run. We calculated that at the end of every month, if we’d done everything right, we’d have close to a $600 surplus.

We started Christmas Day of last year. For the first few pay periods, we were really strict the first week, but indulge ourselves the second one. But since then, we have figured out a few things.

The first was that all the money was being spent on the weekend. No surprise there. So we ended up splitting it: one-hundred dollars for Thursday to Sunday, and seventy-five for Monday to Wednesday. Eating and driving during the second half of the week, is nice too.

We also learned very quickly what we were willing to sacrifice, and what we were not. I, for instance, am absolutely not willing to go without a haircut every eight weeks. (I’m post-chemo, I have healthy hair for the first time in my life, its growing out beautifully, I love my hair dresser, and yes it is true that regular cuts every six to eight weeks are what keeps your hair healthy, your hair dresser is not just trying to make money.) I’ve read the spending fast articles where people give up everything from public transit to haircuts and pay off insane amounts of student loans in incredibly short amounts of time. But. (Sorry. Still not happening.)

We were also not willing to sacrifice health and nutrition. No living on starches because they are cheap. The hubby has an insanely physical job, I’m recovering and re-building my strength and stamina. (I’ve been relying on a super nutritious diet in order to lose a lot of the weight I gained during treatment, because I’m limited in the amount of activity I can do, and having lost twenty-five pounds over the past six to seven months, I have no desire to reverse that trend.) But after discovering that brussels sprouts, which we love, are the same amount per pound as pork, we swapped those for giant cabbages! And now we buy whatever cuts of meat are on sale and learn how to cook them.

If an unexpected expense came up, it was really easy to just say to ourselves that the budget was blown, so who the hell cares, we’ll spend what we want and try again next week. So we just decided that certain things were important enough to come out of our surplus. (Haircuts. Car repairs, because they are heckin’ expensive. The guinea pigs’ new cage tray. Paint for the bedroom. And so on.) We wouldn’t stress about fitting those in. But we’d stick to the budget for other things.

I think the thing we most often ask, say or tell each other is: Can we buy it tomorrow? Can it wait till tomorrow? Or. We can pick it up tomorrow. After all, spending the same amount of money you’d normally spend on something, but over a longer amount of time, is still spending less.

It’s now four months later. Obviously we haven’t quite learned all our lessons because we just counted up how much we went overbudget last week, and now we’re going to try to figure out how to make sixty-five dollars last for the next six days. And we still have never had a month where six-hundred dollars went into savings, although that might soon change. But half-a-grand in car repairs were paid up front, the credit card is paid off, money is going into savings, and we’ve only ended up in overdraft once. (Timing issues, mostly.) And spending habits are definitely changing.

Let’s see what the next four months holds.

Get Rid Of 1000 Things!

You would be surprised what you can discover if you have ever ended up housebound for any reason, for any extended length of time, with only your books and laptop for company. Or also yarn and needles, if you are a knitter like me.

I’d compare the feeling to being a reader living in a tiny European town a hundred years ago, and only travelling the world through the works of Jules Verne because, well, you use the options available to you at the time. I ended up going down the Youtube rabbithole on my laptop a lot of the time, where, between true crime, and what happens if you cut a giant rubber band ball in half, I discovered Ted Talks, and came across a lecture called Getting Rid of 1000 Things. This seemed like a fantastic idea. Our flat was a distaster, I was stuck looking at it all day every day, and I had zero idea where to start to fix it.

I was already pretty sure that my habit of filling up rooms with every neat thing that crossed my path was the result of the random purges I grew up with, where every keepsake I might have collected as a child, was summarily dispensed with by my parents, without notice: sentimental, heirloom, or not. Add that to chronic overtiredness from mental illness and poor health. My limited amounts of daily energy meant that groceries were being purchased, but not put away, dinner was being eaten, but dishes were staying unwashed. We’d arrive home, but the suitcase never made it farther than the front hall, and only got unpacked when I started to miss the items that were still in it.

I’d discovered this link between being tired all the time and items not being put away, when once, several years ago, a magically tidier house coincided perfectly with the start of me taking medication for sleeping. I was putting things where they belonged without even thinking about it, because it didn’t take any extra special effort. The result of all this: a desperately untidy house, that was chock full of things. I needed less things to have to put away.

Time for something new. Challenge accepted. Get rid of one-thousand things! But where to start? I needed everything in my flat.

I started easy. I went around our place and found anything and everything that didn’t belong to me. Baby yarn that I had promised to a friend, items that I had borrowed from friends for our wedding (three years ago). Items lent to me. Everything went in plastic grocery bags and got hung on the front doorknob based on who it belonged to. And because I always clean the house from the front door in, that stuff got returned to its owners really quickly, because there was no way I wanted it hanging there for very long. I even returned items in the post. With extra thank-you items included. When I had a whole lot of things to return to one person or household, I added items that I thought they might like. (I mean, it would have been really funny to add a couple really random items to each bag, but with my sense of humour, you learn to exercise just a teen-sy bit of restraint. Here and there.)

The next bit was a little harder. I’m definitely guilty of the mentality that “everything can be sold for something,” but I earnestly tried to replace that with “I value the expediency of just giving things away, and the free space I get back faster, a lot more.” I put things that I could deal with parting with for free, on the curb below my bedroom window. And then I creeped all the people who stopped to take them. I’d still love to know why a sixty-year-old man wanted a reproduction oil painting in a faux brass oval frame. I don’t think he was going to turn it into a serving tray or put a wedding photo in it, like I had planned to, before it lived in my apartment for three years.

Then there were things that I just couldn’t justify giving away for free. No matter how much I told myself I should. So I figured out how to get my friends to take things away for me. I held a ‘front hall garage sale’. Everything that needed to be gone, went in the front hall. (Everything I have ever gotten rid of has gone to the front hall first, because the closer to the door it is, the faster it might walk out of the house.) Anyone who came to visit, was notified that whatever was sitting in the front hall was good for the taking. This made it easier to give away things that were definitely worth money, because I could imagine that the money was going to people who could use it, and eased the guilt of passing on gifts that I had just never used. (Surely any giver that found out, could be happy that items were actually being really enjoyed, even if it wasn’t by the original recipient.) It was worth it to see an item that had sat above my stove for two years unused, go to replace the same item a friend had lost and really missed. A lot of ‘used twice-a-year’ items for me, became ‘used twice-a-week’ items for someone else.

I also combined collections with friends. I sew. My friend sews. I only really ever sew with her. (We live six doors apart. She even bought a chair for me to do my knitting in, in her craft room. Like how cool is that, I have a chair designated for me in someone else’s house! That wouldn’t exist, if I didn’t. The feels. Man. The feels.) We added all my various sewing notions and threads to hers. More chances of us both finding stuff we can use, twice the selection of thread colours, and besides, she has organized storage for sewing supplies and materials, and I don’t. Also, her machine is currently set up and in-use and mine isn’t.

Christmas turned out to be great for this challenge. I know presents aren’t mandatory, but somehow my family hasn’t lost the magic of giving or receiving them. In poor years we’ve brought nothing, and in better years we’ve bought or made things for absolutely everyone, and it hasn’t mattered a stitch. So I made myself an additional challenge: make Christmas presents out of anything that was already in the house. (This really only works if you’re crafty, however I’m willing to bet that artsy-ness and crafty-ness go hand-in-hand with clutter more often than not.)

I made six lace snowflakes, seven dishcloths and a dishtowel, two handbound hardcover notebooks, two tiny knitted owls, a tiny Molly Weasley sweater tree ornament, magnetic scrabble for the refrigerator, a school scarf, lavender sachets that read “smellier undies.” (I did previously mention my unique sense of humour.) I bought magnets, stickers, and three sheets of paper, but a whole whack more than that left the house. (Oh, and then I made my poor family play Steal-the-Present. But, not to worry, it turned out to be pretty hilarious, and I think we started a new tradition. Other people are even going to help make gifts, and I get to come up with even more hilarious ideas for next year. The presents do have to be worth stealing.)

By this point, I’d gotten to where the lecturer had stated that you could get just as much of a high from getting rid of one item, as you would from buying one item. Things were flying out of the house at such a rate that I started double checking with my husband to make sure I wasn’t getting rid of things we actually might want later. And I started realising the very, very, obvious: if I don’t bring it inside the house, it can’t get inside the house.

Thrift shops could still be scavenger hunts, but actual scavenger hunts have lists. They are not for buying everything that makes you go “Squeee!!!” and turning to your husband and saying, “Can we buy this please, please, please!!!” My husband is very learn-ed in saying no. My current list includes: colourful contemporary ceramic planters. China that matches the set I already own: Rosebud Chintz by Spode. And retro-mid-century furniture. That last one is mostly just for drooling over. I now understand that I no longer need any more furniture, and that I can’t fit all of it in my tiny flat anyways.

I was keeping tally of how many things I’d gotten rid of on the chalkboard in the kitchen at the beginning, but since it took less time to just get rid of the stuff than to actually count it and mark it off first, I lost track really quickly. I have absolutely no idea how many things are gone now, but I’d guess closer to five thousand than one thousand. By now, the chalkboard is luck its still there!

All of a sudden, I’ve found myself finishing projects, because if I paint my diningroom table, the paintcan can leave my house. And if subtracting things can be just as fun as adding things, then maybe finishing projects could be just as satisfying as starting them, and now the top of our wedding quilt is done, the bookshelf is built, the diningroom table and chairs are almost painted, I finished a halfway-knit scarf, the canvases are mounted on the walls, and get this, my husband suggested we get rid everything we don’t need in the kitchen! And if it’s not impossible to beat the fact that you have been a messy packrat for your entire life, and can make a whole different way of living just as habitually instinctive, then maybe other long-held beliefs, like –every knitter has a giant stash of yarn that they never use and that’s just the way it is if you’re addicted to knitting–, aren’t true either. I challenged myself to start every new knitting project with wool or yarn that I already own, and my entire yarn collection now almost fits into a half-bushel basket, which sits in the corner of my diningroom where I can enjoy the tidiness of all the stacked yarn cakes and let them inspire more fun projects.

I have always wanted to be someone who just walks in and tidies and dusts a room, sweeps and washes empty spacious floors, straightens two books, plumps a couple cushions, and who’s every possession is part of the décor right down to the red collander hanging on the kitchen wall, that is the same one that is used for Spaghetti Tuesdays, and that’s it, there’s no more.

Now I’m currently digging into the deepest depths, of the last room, in farthest corner, of the whole house. I surprised my mom and my aunt this morning with the embossed garden flower cards I brought them home from Albany, Western Australia, six years ago. (There’s no reason that if you find a gift you bought or made for someone, that just somehow never made it there, you can’t still give it to them. Unexpected gifts are the best ones.)

I’m still stuck in the house most of the time, but now I don’t have to look at all the things! Thanks, Liz Wright.

Up-Cycle Old Fabric Into A Rug

Stuff you need. I used a 4mm crochet hook, no. 2 weight yarn (fingering, sock, or fine baby weight), and strips of cotton fabric 2-3 inches wide.

Don’t worry. You do not need to learn, nor know how, to crochet to make this. How this rug is woven together just happens to be a very simple method that is called the ‘single crochet’ stitch, and the most efficient tool to do it with is…you guessed it… a crochet hook.

I spent a ton of time experimenting with different sizes of hooks, widths of fabric, and weights of yarn, and found this combination to result in the nicest and closest look to a loom-woven rag rug. If you want a finer or chunkier result, I would size everything up or down proportionately.

Your fabric. Prepare a good quantity of your fabric to start, some of each main colour that you have. Having a lot of colour selection to start helps you really get into the grove of your rug, and is way more fun than having to stop every couple rows to make more strips. It is also probably less annoying to anyone listening to you doing this. Rip the fabric into 2-inch to 3-inch strips. If you rip the fabric instead of cutting it, your strips will be perfectly straight, you will save a ton of time, and you will never notice the difference.

I went to a thrift shop and purchased thirty dollars of bedsheets, because I was extremely particular about the colours I wanted, and had a complete vision for my sitting room that included periwinkle walls, dark stained wood, colourful orange pottery, and green tweed fabric. But really any fabric that is cotton or resembles it in some way will work. My rug ended up including pieces of my old scrubs, odd or stained pillowcases, leftover fabric from other projects, and old tablecloths. Just remember to adjust the width of the strips based on the thickness of each type of fabric if you want your rows to be even. There are methods for cutting smaller fabric pieces into very long strips; get friendly with YouTube.

I never worried about stains either, unless ,well, a whole cup grape juice had spilled on something, then by all means cut around it. But tiny ones will never be noticed.

You can use any fabric you like, but old fabric does have a few benefits. It’s already washed, dried, shrunk, stretch, faded, ran, and anything else you can think of. So when you finish your rug, it will keep looking just like it did when you finished it for a very long time. If  you absolutely want to use new fabric, do you yourself a favour and at least run over it with the car a few times first.

Find that yarn. Any decent lengths work. When you run out of one length, simply tie a knot, move it to the back of the rug and keep stitching. I used acrylic, cotton and wool. All will work, but I do wonder how well the acrylic will wash and hold up over time.

If you are not a knitter, talk to your knitter friends.

If you are a knitter, here is where you fall in love with me. Pull out the black hole of your knitting stash. All those little bits of sock yarn left over from every pair you’ve ever knit, because it’s perfectly good wool, single balls of ugly sock yarn that your friends find for you in the thrift store because they know you knit socks, leftover fine baby yarn, acrylic yarn you think is pretty, but deep down you know you will never use because you’re a yarn snob. At four feet wide, I had already used up the left overs from more than ten different balls of yarn, and by the time you get that far, one ball of sock yarn might do you for two rows. I decluttered like mad during this project.

Plan colours, or not. I ripped a good quantity of strips from every different colour of fabric and rolled them all into balls so I could see all my colours at once. I found the best way to decide where to put what, was to lay out three to five strips beside my last row, and then decide what order looked best in terms of the overall scheme.

Making a truly multicoloured blended rug takes more planning than you think. One sequence of colour will make some colours pop and another will make them appear to blend in. Be as particular or as unparticular as you wish. Don’t be as particular as me; you might never finish.

Start your rug. Start by working single crochet stitches around a two-inch length of fabric. Then roll the stitched part into a snug coil. Do a few stitches around two rows of fabric to hold the coil together. Continue working single crochet stitches in between each stitch from the row before.

There is no perfect time to increase or decrease. You will find you need to add more stitches in at the beginning, but eventually, just stitching in between each stitch from the previous row should be sufficient to keep the rug flat. If it starts cupping add some increases in that area, if it’s wobbly in an area, decrease.

Don’t worry if it gets bubbly, wibbly, wobbly, or anything of the sort, it’s definitely a timey-wimey project. Once the rug was a decent size, my bum spent so much time sitting on it, while I worked around and around it, that I assure you it is very flat now. The rug. The rug is flat now.

 (Oh, and spoiler! You can iron it. That’s in step 9.)

Stitch and stitch and stitch some more. Change colour every one to one-and-a-quarter rows. This way you don’t really notice the colour joins or double rows. If you aren’t making a multicolored rug like mine, well you are free to do what you wish. To change the strip/colour, cut a small vertical slit in the very end of both the old and new strips. Thread the new strip through the old strip, and then thread it through itself. To make the joins a little neater I also tucked the corners of the old strip through the slit in the new strip before pulling the knot tight.

Make your rug whatever width you like. The larger you make it the more yarn and fabric you will end up using, obviously. At the beginning, a ball of yarn that would make one sock, did me twelve rows. By the time my rug was over four feet wide, twelve rows became three. I have no idea how much fabric I’ve used so far, but I’m getting to the end of a few sheets at least.

If you are a math geek like me, do not keep calculating how much of the surface area of your rug you have completed. Otherwise, when your rug is over four feet wide, you’ll discover that you are only 45% of the way through a six-foot diameter rug. Pi r2 for the win!

But here’s the calculation anyway. Pi(radius of width completed)2/Pi(radius of desired width)2 = percentage of surface area of the completed rug that you have finished.

This discovery is why my rug is beautifully worked, but still definitely a work-in-progress!

Finish the thing. Take your finished rug and soak it in some soapy water and rinse it well. I can guarantee you it will at least have gotten a little dusty since you start. Dry it flat. Or hang it over a drying rack. If its not flat enough for you after that, run a low iron or even use a bit of steam (that will depend on the yarn you have used) over the wrong side. Make it yours. Stencil fabric paint on it. Dye it. Add non-slip undercoat. Draw on it with bleach. Crochet a few rows of yarn around it and add a fringe.

I’m still convincing my husband on the last one. But he doesn’t know that I’m secretly afraid that if I don’t add a border, I’ll just keep working on it here and there every time I’m in our sitting room. And one day someone will find him and me, in our nineties, dead and buried under an acre-wide rug.

To make sure this doesn’t happen, and if you’d like to make your own spite rug, please buy my mountain of leftover old fabric. It can be yours for the low, low, price of…just make me an offer in the comments!