Category: Reviews

Reviews, Thriftster weddings

Let’s make it personal: Offbeat Bride (2nd edition)

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Most how-tos read like recipes, deconstructing the Heston’s Feast that is a wedding into the main ingredients, dumbing it down for homely brides-to-be who just want to recreate a traditional dish. Catherine Yarnovich Risling’s Pretty Weddings for Practically Pennies is one such book: a series of craft projects, including place-card holders, boutonnieres, and confetti cones. Kelly Bare’s The DIY Wedding: Celebrate Your Day Your Way is another, giving lip-service to the personal touch with little personality between its covers.

Attempting to ‘encourage contemporary brides to feel good about their less-than-traditional wedding choices’, Ariel Meadow Stallings’ Offbeat Bride: Creative Alternatives for Independent Brides, on the other hand, is autobiographical. Continue reading →

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Money Matters, Reviews

Subverting Cosmo: The Savvy Girls’ Money Book (1st edition)

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The Savvy Girls’ Money Book by Emily Chantiri offers financial self-help for the likes of Carrie Bradshaw, the kind of ‘girl who thought she could never get her head around money issues’.

Such girls are expected to able to get their heads around Cosmopolitan, however. Chapters from The Savvy Girls’ Money Book read like women’s magazine articles: ‘The Cinderella Conspiracy’, ‘The Sealed Section’, and ‘Keeping Up With the Hiltons’. Kylie Minogue and Delta Goodrem’s battles with breast cancer get a mention and so does Princess Mary. There’s even a horoscope section Continue reading →

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Buy Nothing New October, Reviews, Second-hand Scavengers

A stylish lesson in how to make do: Flea Market Style

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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 →

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Money Matters, Reviews

There’s no trick to it: Save Money on Your Mortgage

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If you’re serious about saving, you should look to your mortgage. After all, according to New Zealand finance writer Martin Hawes, the ‘mortgage has more scope for saving and adding to your net worth than any other area of your finances’ because most mortages cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, leading to ‘possibilities for making big savings’.

In his book Save Money on Your Mortgage, Hawes shows how loan size, loan period, interest rates, repayment size and frequency of repayments affect the overall cost of a mortgage. Continue reading →

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Clever Cooks, Going Green, Reviews

New bag, old tricks: Frugavore

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Organic food. People are either for or against it. Organic converts conscientiously object to the overcrowding of livestock, genetic modification, the use of antibiotics and other chemicals in conventional farming, whilst skeptics will insist that the organic food’s claim to superiority is purely anecdotal, even mythological. Whatever the case may be, there are some of us who want to eat organic. Unfortunately, ‘organic’ is often a byword for ‘expensive’. So how does one eat well without a) spending a fortune on groceries or b) going Gourmet Farmer? In Frugavore, nutritionist and slow-food advocate Arabella Forge shows how it can be done with a mix of recipes and practical advice. Continue reading →

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