www.tineke.net

Archive for March, 2010

I thought I’d post an update on the performance of the cloth bag for storing mushrooms. I used some mushies last night, and they were much dryer and less slimy than they get when stored in plastic. The bag felt damp though, so I think I’ll swap it out for a dry one, in case something sinister starts growing on it. Mostly, I really like knowing that my food hasn’t been resting against icky plastic.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering why I just don’t get a paper bag for the mushrooms, the availability of paper bags in the produce section is very random at our supermarket.  I think I’ve only managed to find them twice.  And anyway, a cloth one will last much longer than a paper one.

We’re on a definite plastic avoidance strategy nowadays.  We’ve been doing the easy stuff, like taking our own bags to the supermarket.  Then we got some lovely stainless drink bottles – two big ones for us to take to the gym, and one little one for Anneli.  We prefer our wooden chopping boards over plastic, and glass jars for storing food over plastic containers.

But this is a new level of plastic avoidance: fabric vege bags.  I didn’t like all the plastic bags that we collected our fruit & veges into at the supermarket.  So I thought, why not take fabric bags for that purpose too?  We use self-scanning at the supermarket, and almost always checkout without staff involvement, so I wasn’t worried about any raised eyebrows at the checkout.  I used some old sheet material, from some delightful floral sheets scavenged at Mum’s new bach, and made four simple little drawstring bags.

Here are the new bags, being modelled by some oranges, mushrooms and baking potatoes.

Happy plastic-free fruit and veges

I have plonked the mushrooms straight into the fridge in their cloth bag, and I’m hoping they will keep better than they usually do in plastic.

I did a bit of baby sewing in the last couple of weeks.  Firstly a couple of simple singlets.  The one in front is from a very light jersey I picked up at Rotorua Spotlight while in NZ.  The one in back is from a cotton lycra that I bought at last year’s Symässa in Borås, from MG-Tyger.

Secondly I whipped up a pair of baby pants.  These are made from the legs of a pair of pinstripe pants that I picked up for free at a Freecycle meetup in Göteborg last month.  I made them in the 18-months size, and added a cute purple floral along the cuffs since they are way too long at the moment.  The pockets are also floral on the inside.

The snow has compacted and hardened up, so it’s a lot easier for the deer to get around the neighbourhood, and we’ve seen our locals in the garden a couple of times.  We used to have a usual gang of three, but now they’re four!

Our local gang of hooligans

The weather has  been warmer, with positive temperatures quite a few days in the last week.  On Saturday it was really warm in the sunshine, so we sat outside for our morning tea.  Anneli had one of her favourites, cottage cheese with orange chunks.

Anneli enjoys her morning tea

I’m still working on getting the new blog up to date, in particular getting my photo gallery in place and getting the photographs back into my older blog posts, which is a bit of a tedious job.  It’s all coming along though, thank you for your patience!

Looks different, doesn’t it?

I moved the site to my lovely husband’s lovely server this weekend, and moved my blog from an FTP published Blogger account to a new WordPress blog.  I had been meaning to move hosts for a long time, and generally give the site an overhaul.  But I finally got motivated to do it when Blogger announced that they would no longer be supporting FTP publishing.  So, I said bye-bye to Blogger.

The look of the site will change – I am using a free theme but I really want to customise the look for myself. And I haven’t moved all my photo pages across yet, but hopefully all my old content will start trickling back into place, as and when I find the time to do it.