The GirlAlive Blog

Frankensnuggie!

They just started selling Snuggies here in the UK, and holy crap they’re overpriced. It’s like £20. Not going to pay that kind of money, even if I had it. However, my house is cold. Not just slightly drafty. Frozen. So I’ve been dressing like a hobo just to keep from freezing, and a snuggie seems like a good idea. (My usual hanging around the house outfit is 2 long sleeve shirts and a sweatshirt, sweatpants, and a big fluffy skirt with thermal socks and slippers. And it’s still a little cold.)

I bought a fleece blanket from Ikea for £1.69. Then I got some cheap yarn from my stash (80p per ball when I bought it long ago). I knitted around and around in circles until I had some big floppy sleeves. Then I cut holes in the blanket and sewed the arms onto it. Thus is born Frankensnuggie. It is not pretty, but I am warm and I can still type.

Let’s talk about Christmas.

Okay, okay. You’re annoyed with me now. It’s only September and you’re being inundated with back-to-school and Halloween and the last thing you want to think about is Christmas. But I’m bringing it up now for a reason. Because handmade gifts take time, and you should start thinking about it now.

“Wait a minute!” you may be saying, “I never said I was going to make any Christmas gifts!” Why not? Making stuff is good for you and it’s fun. You may still be protesting. “I don’t have any artistic talent or time,” you may be saying. That’s okay too. You can buy handmade gifts.

Do some of your shopping this year at Etsy.com or one of the other online shops that sells hand crafted products from artists and artisans. Handmade gifts have less impact on the environment. They tend to be made with care. And they don’t cost as much as you think they do.

If every person in America just bought 3 handmade gifts this Christmas it could very possibly save small businesses and keep money flowing in the economy. If you buy from a small producer, more of the money goes back into the local economy than if you buy from a large chain store. Think about where the money goes in a chain store. It goes to advertising and high level executives and factories in the third world. Practically none of it ends up back in your own community.

If you don’t have the time or skill to make your own gifts this year, please consider buying handmade stuff. There are galleries and craft fairs in every town. There’s the “shop local” button on Etsy.

If you look over in the sidebar on this blog, there’s a link to the Girlalive Wists. Wists is an online service where you can make a wish list from any shopping site on the internet. There are other services that do the same thing, so you can ask your friends to give you handmade things this Christmas.

Just something to think about.

Alana

Cheese

My husband knows that I have a minor cheese obsession. I don’t honestly eat that much cheese, but I like to read about cheese. I have a collection of books about cheese varieties and cheese production. Here is an average conversation in my house:

Me: Maybe I should become a cheesemaker.
Husband: How are you gonna do that?
Me: I’ll buy a cow and then make cheese.
Husband: We don’t have room for a cow.
Me: Goats?
Husband: We don’t have room for goats either.
Me: What about hamsters? Hamsters have nipples.
Husband: You want to milk hamsters?
Me: It would take a while to get enough milk, but think of the premium price I could charge. I could be the world’s only producer of hamster cheese.

At that point husband rolls his eyes and goes back to his video game.

Needing ideas.

I’m out of a job very soon. There are a limited number of jobs that I can do in an office, and even fewer that are willing to hire an immigrant right now. My husband has a decent job but he earns about £500 a month less than we need to pay all our bills and continue to eat. So I need money.

I have a cafepress shop that brings in a few hundred dollars every few months. Nowhere near enough to live on. The ads on my web pages bring in even less.

Ideas I have in process right now:

Freelance proofreading and editing – I’m nearly through my course for a proofreading certificate.
Etsy shop – I make handspun yarn suitable for knitting, crocheting, and weaving. Not a lot, but it might be a little extra cash.
Zazzle shop – I’ve been thinking about moving a lot of my t-shirt designs from cafepress to Zazzle. But I lost all the source image files when my computer was stolen last year, so I’d be starting over from scratch.

What else can I do that you would pay for? Leave your ideas in the comments.

How to Find the Best Wedding Dress for Cheap

One of my old high school classmates is wedding dress shopping, and it reminded me that I have not shared my gift for wedding bargains with the world. This is a lesson on how to find the perfect dress for a price you can afford.

Step 1: Go to any bridal shop and try on a bunch of styles of dresses. You’re just trying to find out the general shape that looks best on you.
Step 2: Go online and find a dress in the style that suits you, but in a price range you can afford. The trick here is that bridal shops mostly carry the top of the line dresses, and a few bargain dresses. There’s a vast field of mid-range fabulousness that they don’t have room to stock all the time. You can find those dresses on the interwebs.
Step 3: Print off the online listing with the model number, brand and price.
Step 4: Locate a bridal shop that carries that brand of dresses.
Step 5: Take your printout to that bridal shop and have them order the dress. If they carry the brand, they can do it, even if they don’t usually stock it. Try to talk them into the same price as the web, or at least the web price plus the cost of shipping.

Ordering it through a local bridal shop instead of ordering online gives you better coverage for alterations and returns. As a customer of the bridal shop, I was front of the line for alterations, even though I didn’t pay a lot for the dress.

My wedding dress cost under $300, and it looked as good as any I’ve seen for 5 times that price. You’re only going to wear it once. You don’t have to mortgage your house to look good.

That’s my wedding bargain tip for the day.

Alana

Bad blogger! No cookie!

I haven’t been posting here nearly as much as I should because I’ve been busy/distracted/slightly grumpy. So here’s an update about stuff and things.

I got my new spinning wheel, and got it all put together and I picked up some bobbins from a nice little local online shop (since it only came with one bobbin). I got a couple bobbins full of singles spun, and then started plying them together. It was all going well until it started making a “chunk chunk chunk” noise, and I noticed that the nut holding the wheel on fell off. It seems to only have a problem when I’m plying (spinning counter-clockwise), but it is fine when spinning (clockwise). Weird. So I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye on that.

There’s nothing for me to do at work lately, because that’s just the way the workload has fallen at the moment. It’s very frustrating because I’ve also been sick again. So I have to show up for work, with my head pounding and nose dripping, because I’ve already been told off for taking too much
sick leave, and when I get there, there is nothing for me to do and no real reason for me to be there.

In guinea pig news, everything is good. Since Homer died, Spike has been a little bit off. He’s been kind of touchy and not as affectionate as he used to be. But for the first time since last summer, this week Spike has seemed more like his old self. He’s been pretty much the old happy snuggly Spike. And he and Elvis are still fighting, but not any more than any pair of guinea pigs stuck in a cage together. But Fudge is the really amusing one at the moment. We gave him a little wire ball that hangs from the ceiling and holds hay. He’s nuts about that thing. He won’t touch the hay in his hay rack, but he’ll clear that thing out in an hour, and then hop around like it’s his birthday when we refill it. Last week he was trying to yank the sheet off the bottom of his cage because he likes to crawl
under it, making a mess in his cage and making him stinky and gross. So just to distract him, I threw a small towel in his cage. Now the towel is his new best friend. He snuggles with it and burrows under it and drags it around the cage. It’s very cute.

Outside of work, crafting and rodent wrangling, I’ve also been working on the beginnings of a few more projects. They are not ready for the public yet, but I dream that someday they’ll be successful enough that I can quit my job and spend my days at home doing stuff instead of in a cubicle, doing
nothing.