Something I wrote in 2015 but didn't title

Welcome!

For many years I have been fascinated by charity shops, vintage markets and carboot sales. I blame this on my mum, who as a single parent was always very clever with money when we were growing up. She's also a bit of a hoarder, which I have inherited too (this is ideal as when I was a teenager I got to wear the clothes she'd kept from the '60s and 70's, and now I can pass on my bang-on trend '90s clothes to my stepdaughter).

Not many of the things in my house are new. I love buying secondhand, when something has had a whole life before coming to me, and finding or inheriting other useful pieces.

A lot of my success with living this way is based on luck, for example I was able to furnish one flat entirely using furniture found left in the street. This is a lot easier if you live in a student-y area - where people are moving in and out of buildings and discarding their belongings fairly frequently - and where there is a culture of street furniture. There is also hard work involved, what with actually making the things.

I like working and being busy, but am not really motivated by money. I realised this while knitting a scarf, which took several hours - I wouldn't be able to earn enough (in a "proper" job) in the same amount of time to buy a hand knitted scarf of this quality. Unfortunately the world doesn't really function without a certain amount of cash, so hopefully the things I come up with can help stretch out what you do earn.

In this blog I intend to share some of my projects (where I take things which would otherwise be thrown away and make them useful again) and hope to inspire others to make and mend their own things too. I want to do reviews of charity shops and will post photos of my best/favourite finds, and will also be asking some  friends to write guest posts.
 
While these projects will be thrifty, I am mainly driven by recycling - bringing things right back from the brink of being thrown away.

I realise there are already lots of blogs with this sort of thing in them, so I will try to only post if I think I have something special to share. I will not post content just to have content.

Thank you for reading!