Wedding dress from Forest Hill Salvos: $69
Dress alterations: $60
Waiting for my mum to turn up at the wedding venue on time: priceless
Category: Buy Nothing New October
Parental thrift
I had planned on writing a post on discount movie tickets tonight but got waylaid by my parents. Dad wanted to show me a couple of outfits he was thinking of wearing in October.
Unlike Mum, Dad hasn’t bought anything new for my wedding; he had hoped to wear his suit from 1989, the same suit he wore to my sister’s do. We matched the suit with a Givenchy tie from the same decade, and a shirt Dad had bought at a sale a while back. The only new thing he will be sporting on the day is a pair of flat-soled shoes for the lawn bowls green. Continue reading
A stylish lesson in how to make do: Flea Market Style
Most books on interiors encourage readers to buy in on a certain trend. Flea Market Style is no exception with its double-page spreads of what could only be described as Frankie chic.
For most of the book, stylist Emily Chalmers, interiors writer Ali Hanan and photographer Debi Treloar focus on how to recreate ‘flea market style’; after all ‘there are guidelines and quiet rules that any decorator wanting to attain that shabby-chic look must follow to avoid falling into the dreaded “anything goes” trap’ (Andrew Ritchie from Martha Moments). There’s sections like ‘Furniture’, ‘Pattern and colour’, ‘Lighting’, and ‘Collections and display’. Pictures and words are also grouped according to space: living, dining, sleeping, etc., making the book more user-friendly for those needing help with a particular room. Continue reading
Buy Nothing New October, Gardening on a Budget, My Suburb is My Gym, Second-hand Scavengers, Thrills without frills
Frugal thrills: spring in Melbourne
It’s past the midway mark for spring and the weather is finally warming up in Melbourne. Time to try 5 outdoorsy activities:
1) Bike it, hike it
Grab your bike, a mate or a date and pedal along the Capital City Trail, the Merri Creek Trail, or any other of Melbourne’s dedicated bike and pedestrian trails. For details on specific routes in and around the city, check out The Bicycle Network’s Melbourne’s Metro Trail Network page.
If you prefer a slower travelling pace, put on the hiking boots and explore one of the region’s many walks. I haven’t done Werribee Gorge yet, but apparently it’s a stunner.
Bike it, hike it, whatever you decide to do, don’t forget to take drinks and food so that you’re not spending a fortune on lunch along the way. Continue reading
On knives, kitchen gadgets, & bad boy Anthony Bourdain
I’ve been reading Kitchen Confidential, a reveal-it-all memoir written by bad-boy chef Anthony Bourdain. According to him, we clever cooks don’t need a 9-piece knife block:
No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes. I wish sometimes I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers — all those medium-size ‘utility’ knives, those useless serrated things you see advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless-steel garbage, those ineptly designed slicers — not one of the damn things could cut a tomato. (via Kitchen Confidential)
His rant got me thinking about the number of useless, single-purpose-only kitchen gadgets available in the market. Continue reading
