One Woman's Quest To Buy Nothing New For a Year...

Hi! I am Serefina, and welcome to my blog. The idea behind this blog is simple- I want to see if it is possible to go for an entire year without buying anything new! We live in a consumerist society(in the West) and this is having a detrimental effect, not only on the people who produce the items we consume, but also the environment. I have worked in fashion for over a decade, as a designer/pattern maker and have always been concerned about the production of fast fashion, but without actually DOING very much about it... There is already so much 'stuff' in the world. I want to see if I can get by just using that!

[nothingnewforayear]

Here are pics of some of the veg I have been getting in my box each week. It’s great when you get things you’ve never used before...Like Mooli...(The veg on the far left in the top picture)...Looks like yam, but behaves like cucumber!

[nothingnewforayear]

Veg Box Goodness!

It’s been a while since I wrote, namely because I am studying the Charity Apprentice course with Child.org.

This month I have been asked to create a charity challenge, and fundraise as much as possible for it... Fundraising, it turns out, is a full time job! Haha.

My team and I have so far raised £810 for the charity

which focuses on creating sustainable healthcare and educational programmes for kids in (at the moment) Kenya and Uganda. I am super chuffed with what we’ve achieved :) We’ve all given something up for April...My thing was swearing...For me that’s like giving up breathing! Go here to see our official page.

So, for the last few weeks I have been the happy receiver of a veg bag, from a local scheme called ‘Local Greens’... They are near me(based in Herne Hill), and the way it works is that the veg only travel from local farms, the nearest one being just 11 miles away. What you get is a bag of local, organic veg delivered to a collection point of your choosing. It’s tasty, seasonal, lasts longer because it is fresh and

hasn’t been flown around the world....

before arriving on your dinner plate! What’s more, they even transport it from the farm to the drop off point in an electric car! :)

Being a voracious veggie, I have opted for the large bag/no potatoes (I’d rather get more exciting veg than potatoes- sorry potatoes!) which costs about £12 a week, I literally never have to go vegetable shopping and having set ingredients to ‘use up’ actually takes a lot of the hassle out of planning meals each week! Win win :)

It has been a bit cabbage-y over the winter, as they are one of the only things that grow, but this week there were broad beans, golden beetroot, mustard leaves and rainbow chard... Yum!

For those of you who aren’t local to Brixton, check out Abel and Cole or Riverford, they offer nationwide veg box schemes, with great offers and the produce is still locally grown/organic, you just don’t get it delivered in an electric car :)

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Look what I did! Double sided King Size duvet cover, made by yours truly, out of recycled fabrics :) This was actually meant to be for Christmas, but I didn’t say which year! ;)

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When did we become a plastic society?

This video is definitely worth a watch x

[nothingnewforayear]

Upcycled floor to ceiling sound-management :)

[nothingnewforayear]

Soundproofing and Free Staples

I live in a house with 30 people. Sometimes it gets loud. But one of my bedroom walls is made out of something roughly the same density as cereal box card and therefore me and my neighbour can hear EVERYTHING either of us is doing. Even coughing!!

So, I decide I have 2 options:

 I can spend the rest of my days there in cloistered silence, in order not to annoy said neighbour, or

Soundproof the wall in any way I can think of. (Well, there’s 3- move out, but that’s a total pain in the arse and sometimes I believe it’s definitely a case of better the devil you know!!)

I start researching ways to soundproof a wall, it doesn’t seem an easy task, but an idea I come across on various web pages is to use carpet. Either that or fork out heaps for insulation foam, which, to be honest, has very mixed reviews; it doesn’t seem to eradicate the problem and looks like it will cost a fortune in the process. So carpet it is.

First up is finding the stuff. Secondhand is the way I want to go, obviously, but where to look? Ebay brings up search results of literally hundreds of persian carpets, but I am not too keen on the idea of having a carpet hung on my wall(and therefore eye level/aroma height) that has had hundreds if not thousands of pairs of feet and shoes walking all over it. Not really my idea of cosy!

So I look for remnants.

There are carpet shops, but with a bit of research I realise that they just charge whatever the carpet retails for, occasionally with a tiny discount. The wall space I need to cover is 4m x 2m20, so a £5/m carpet is going to cost me about £35, and that’s for the cheapest quality, therefore not likely to be very thick and therefore soundproof.

In the end I find someone selling their offcuts on Gumtree; 3 rolls for £25. It’s a higher quality, thicker pile for the cost, so I figure perfect for my purpose. The only issue being that it’s in Hackney: getting it from there to Clapham without a car is gonna be fun!

I end up taking the bus, a 2 hour journey door to door, but I manage it, albeit with some very strange looks- I’ve for some unknown reason worn heels and a wiggle skirt this day and am dragging 3 huge rolls of carpet, (which in turn is taller than my already lofty 6ft 2) on and off buses across pretty much the full diagonal width of London!!

So now to hang it. I’ve got cup hooks, dowelling rod and expanding foam(all generously donated from my boyfriend’s toolshed). First step is to clear the wall of any shelves, posters and cupboards. Then I have to dismantle the weird little light thing that is on the ceiling(as part of an old peoples’ home, I think its one of those emergency call pulley things that you get in the residents’ bedrooms).

All done, I start drilling holes for the cup hooks. I run them all along the ceiling, and the dowel fits perfectly along that. This was actually the bit I was most dreading, but it all goes without a hiccup and it’s the next bit that takes time: Sewing strips of fabric along the top of the carpet pieces in order to have something to hang it with. I used long strips of calico, about 4-5″ wide and stitched them so that they wrapped over the top edge of each piece of carpet I hung up.

Once I have sewn on the strip (using a backstitch, which takes for.ever)I realise I now need to sew tabs along the top to thread the dowel through, which takes even longer. No point in doing a rush job either, cos the whole thing will only be as strong as the weakest stitch and I don’t particularly want it collapsing on me!

I complete the first section of carpet(it takes 3 hours!) and hang it. Super satisfying! But there is a 70cm gap running underneath this first bit, because the remnants I have bought are not exactly the right size. I have 2 options- hand sew ANOTHER strip on to the bottom of the first bit of carpet, plus an extra strip on to the top of the piece that will go underneath the first, and then sew them together OR find a cheaper, quicker, less ‘spend my time hand-sewing bits of carpet all night’ solution...

My housemate suggests using a staple gun. It seems like a great idea, she has a staple gun. But there are no staples. So I head out to try and find some (whilst avoiding buying something new? Maybe my first serious hurdle has arrived...)

It’s late and the shops are shut, so I head into an off licence, thinking that sometimes these places have random bits and pieces in them and I might be lucky: It pays off! For some reason the lovely proprietor (an elderly carribbean man with glasses perched on the end of his nose who looks a bit like Turtle Man from The Simpsons) won’t sell me any staples, but he will GIVE me some! “to tide you over til morning” he says. Say what??! It’s like he KNOWS! So I head off staples in hand. gun.

Will it be the solution I am looking for?

No. It’s not.

Ha! The pile is too thick, the staples don’t work and I end up gaffer taping the carpet to the wall. Still, I managed the first chunk and was able to shift that half of my furniture around, so stage 1 is complete.

Stage 2 was a little time coming(I say little, it took me another fortnight to get my arse in gear and finish the job!) But I managed to motivate myself and put the rest of the carpet up. The second time around the sewing of the strips was quicker, but there has got to be a better way that I haven’t thought of! Still, at least I know that my stitches are strong and are unlikely to be the cause of any failures.....

After hanging the carpet, (the next 2 pieces were long enough, so I didn’t need to ‘patch up’ any length) I moved all of my heavy, tall furniture in front of it (2 wardrobes and a high cupboard, to be precise) to create a further sound barrier. It’s actually made the room look bigger and I’ve not heard a peep from my neighbour since I did it, so I think it’s a great success,

Not to mention that if I get bored I can lie on my back on the floor with my feet up against the wall and pretend I am Mike from that kids’ TV show Mike ‘n’ Angelo in the early 90′s :)

[nothingnewforayear]

Day 49- Waste Not, Want Not.

It is the eve of day 50 of my challenge, and to be honest, not buying anything new hasn’t caused me much discomfort so far....

Once you get out of the habit of going in to shops to buy ‘stuff’ you don’t really miss it... It felt a little bit like a compulsion for me anyway, so it’s actually a relief to be able to say that I am not going to do it because I choose not to! (And if you really need a fix, you can always go and get something in a charity shop, or on freecycle or somewhere, there are heaps of things that already exist that are just sitting around waiting for new owners :)

There’s also this great Guardian article about alternatives to Freecycle (it has become a little saturated of late, and therefore your chance of actually getting the item you want is significantly lower than it used to be)

I think because of this I am going to shift my focus to the amount of waste that I am responsible for producing. This will be a harder challenge, because EVERYTHING is throwaway these days, food packaging is probably the main one, but things we don’t think about too, like dead stationary, food scraps, old tyres, fabric...the list goes on and on.

For women, a major cause of waste production are the items commonly used during their monthly cycle: tampons, towels etc all end up in the sea or in landfill, contributing a fair amount to the stuff that we throw out as humans. When you consider this together with the fact that the bleached cotton they use for tampons has been linked to Toxic Shock Syndrome-  which can cause death- you can see that there is room for an alternative.

A few years ago I switched to using a sea sponge. It works just the same as a tampon, but you wash and disinfect it between uses and then when it’s at the end of its use(after about a year), you can flush it and it returns to the sea :) It takes a bit of getting used to; there’s no applicator, so you have to get used to putting it in yourself, but it’s super comfortable once it’s in there, and you can even have sex whilst wearing it! Removing it can be tricky (I learnt the hard way, make sure you do it OVER the toilet bowl lol) but you can always sew a few strands of thread through the end to make a string, and make life easier.

Now I’ve switched, I wouldn’t ever go back. There are obviously pitfalls (trying to rinse it out in the sink in a public bathroom for one!!) but you get used to looking for ways to get around these things and after a while it becomes second nature. If you do the basic maths for this, I stopped using tampons in around Jan 2013, so that’s 38 months or so, and each month you’d get through on average 15 tampons... So that’s 570 tampons that haven’t been flushed into the sea by me! Just 1 person, over just a few years!!

There are a few websites that sell sea sponges(as well as other lady-products, such as the menstrual cup) but my favourite one is this one:

http://www.earthwisegirls.co.uk/

OK, got a bit carried away there(I love a good sea sponge ;) So, focussing on waste- So far, since I started nothingnewforayear I have been keeping things that I am responsible for creating, and I want to turn these things into other things, to give them at least 1 more life. These things are:

1 Bicycle tyre(I only changed one- the other is a spare)

Lots and lots of water bottles (as much as I am programmed to dislike it, I have switched back to tap water until a solution can be found!!)

Citrus fruit/garlic bags- in ABUNDANCE! My lovely housemate Karina is now on the case collecting them up wherever she finds them

Wine bottles

Of the above things, the bike tyre and the wine bottles are flummoxing me the most. I don’t have a glass cutter laying about the place, which has prevented me creating a habitat-style wine glass collection, and I don’t have outside space, otherwise they’d make a great flower border(hammered upside down into the earth) or garden lights(with candles or fairy lights inside them) so I have to be a bit more creative... I’ll come back to these things.

I’ll be testing out ways of using these items and posting them on here, as well as looking out for how other people use them. Feel free to add any suggestions, they are most welcome :)

[nothingnewforayear]

Off-Topic- But Packaged Bank Accounts!

This info is all thanks to my Mum! (Who I’ll be taking out for a slap up feed, thank you!!)

So, until January I was paying £13 a month for my bank account with Lloyds. I paid it for 8 years. I genuinely (and repeatedly) asked them if I could switch to an account you don’t need to pay for and each time they said I couldn’t, shouldn’t; I have the best account for my needs, if I switch I won’t get the same benefits etc etc)

Essentially I got 3 types of insurance ‘included’ in the account- phone insurance, car insurance and 30 days holiday insurance. All sounds great, except that I a- until a few months ago didn’t even have a smart phone, b- don’t drive, or spend any time in cars and c- if I go on holiday, it’s usually a one-way ticket somewhere type of affair that lasts for much longer than 30 days. So the ‘benefits’ included were somewhat irrelevant.

My ma said she got a call from one of these agencies that cold call about claims, asking her about ‘PBAs’ and did she want them to look into it? She said yes, they got her a grand back and kept half(which is the fee they charge for writing a letter, presumably pre-drafted).

Did I contact one of these companies? Fuck no! I wrote my own letter, sent it off(on Wednesday) by Friday afternoon I’d had a call from Lloyds to ‘discuss my claim’ which basically meant going over the things I’d written in the letter and by Friday night I had a call back to say that, yes, I had been missold the account and I would be receiving my fees back (£1200) plus 8 percent interest(another £200)

If you’ve been paying for a bank account that comes with benefits you either don’t need, or don’t know about, especially if it was aggressively sold to you(a tactic used in the early noughties which has since been outlawed) it really pays to contact your bank to start a complaints procedure. I wrote my own letter, as I thought it more professional than using a template, but there’s a good one on moneysavingexpert to get you started, just personalise it and away you go :) It’s not buying nothing new, but it IS getting money back!!

Good Luck :)

[nothingnewforayear]

My Solar Charger!! If I can do it, anyone can :)

[nothingnewforayear]

The Eve of Week 6...

Time flies! At least it does when you’re spinning a million plates :)

My focus for this week has been electricity- last weekend I took part in a ‘Build Your Own Solar Charger’ course, and came away with, yep you guessed it- A solar charger that I made myself!

Super satisfying :)

At the start I felt like a bit of a dumb-dumb and wished at least a dozen times that I had paid attention in Science, but luckily the teachers Dan and Ian were really patient, very knowledgeable and more than happy to geek out over the finer details of 12volt electrics!

The course was run by demandenergyequality.org, which is a non-profit company based in London and Bristol whose aim is to empower people with the knowledge and expertise to start harnessing their own renewable energy(or at least make a dent in the wall that stands between you and understanding where the hell to start!).

My brain did hurt at the end, I won’t lie, but I made it, and charging my phone on the thing afterwards was incredibly satisfying! (even if I did have to wait til the next morning!!).

XX

[nothingnewforayear]

This groundbreaking cartoon takes a closer look at how we make, use, and toss Stuff and calls us together to create a world that is more sustainable, just, and fun. Have you seen it yet?

Worth a watch X

[nothingnewforayear]

Meet Penelope!

I Bought her on Ebay for under £90! These usually retail for at least £400 second hand and it’s rare to find them for less than £100.

She’s almost my exact size, so I can use her to do all of the patterns for my label :) :) Happy days I’ll need to re-cover her though, so I will be doing that in the near future and posting the results. xx

[nothingnewforayear]

My sad old boots, pre-vamped...and then revamped...

[nothingnewforayear]

‘New’ (Old) Killer Boots

Part of my not buying anything new, as I’ve said before, is to try and reuse anything that can be. This includes breathing new life into items that would ordinarily be thrown away(and therefore probably end up in landfill). As a pretty strict vegetarian, I don’t like wearing leather shoes, but the problem that can arise through this is that my shoes don’t always last that long(I am also about as lightfooted as a baby elephant, which only serves to compound the issue!)

I bought these boots last year which are super comfy and have heaps of mileage in them yet, but they got scuffed on the toes and look scruffy, and because they’re made from synthetic material, you can’t just polish them to cover up the damage....

So. I took to my haberdashery-stash and decided to get creative with a little cover-up customisation!

Using: 

Shoe Goo (which I already had for previous repairs on my converse trainers, but which I now notice has got “suspected of causing cancer” written on the tube- WHAT THE HELL DO I DO WITH IT NOW??!!)

Lace trim that I’ve had for donkey’s (thanks to my exposure to design companies)and never had the right use for, and:

Some thin black braid(like rope) that I found in my stash;

 I created a new look for my boots. A couple of mismatched boot laces I had in a drawer somewhere complete the look to give a chunky, victoriana sort of look to my tired old friends :)

[nothingnewforayear]

Week 4- 337 days to go....

[nothingnewforayear]

Very interesting what you are doing, and important too if we are to learn how to live with the Earth in a sustainable way. I have a friend who is giving away a ton of fabric if you are able to use it. She is based in Southampton.

Hiya,

Thanks for your email :) That definitely sounds like something I would be interested in... I don’t suppose you have any details about the fabric? :)

[nothingnewforayear]

I found this end-of-roll netting for £4 on Ebay. It’s gorgeous and was going spare :) Watch this space for how I’m going to use it...