I’m not sure how so many of my clothes end up with bleach stains, given that I don’t use much bleach around the house. But they do. Thankfully, many of the clothes that end up with these stains are black.
“Wait! That’s good?” you say. “Bleach stains are terrible on black!”
Yes, it is good. Because there’s a really way to fix them.
Since much of this blog is about thrift, and I’ve talked about free and cheap educational opportunities here in the past, I’m sharing an entry from one of my other blogs about policy changes that make some “massive, online open courses” no longer free.
Remember the halcyon days when MOOCs (massive, online open courses) were going to revolutionize the world, eliminating barriers of class and geography that were preventing hardworking, intelligent people from receiving—and benefitting from—an education?
Over the past month, Coursera has quietly implemented a huge policy change that gives up on that dream.
It will no longer be offering free Statements of Accomplishment to students who successfully complete (pass) Coursera courses.
If you’re a student who wants to share your achievement with current or potential employers, you’ll have to pay for that certificate.
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I’ve had a cute little short-sleeve sweater I haven’t worn for a while because of a missing button and a hole in the front. It’s been sitting at the bottom of the sewing pile; this week I pulled it to the top.
I didn’t have a matching button to replace the missing one, so first I removed the remaining three.
I forgot to take a photo of the hole before I started mending it. This is what it looked like a bit after I’d sewed for a few minutes. My approach was to use a color of thread that close-to-matched the sweater yarn and catch the frayed ends with the needle, then bind them by looping the thread over those frayed ends. This shrunk the hole by about half. Continue reading
I found some lovely bird prints at a stuff swap hosted today by the local timebank. At a stuff swap, you bring things you no longer want or that you have too many of, and take stuff that you like. There’s no money involved, and in the case of this swap, no one keeps track of how much you’ve brought vs. how much you take. The idea is for each person to make that decision for themselves based on their own situation and what seems reasonable to them, and the self-regulation works out well: there’s always an abundance of stuff at the end of the evening that gets saved for the next swap or donated to a local charity thrift shop. Continue reading
I love caramelized onions. Sweeter than sautéed onions, they make a great topping for pizza and a nice addition to soups and sauces.
Caramelizing uses low, steady heat to break down the onions’ starches into sugars. Continue applying heat, and the sugars turn golden and more mellow in flavor—just as when caramelizing crystalized sugar. The challenge is that it’s easy to mess up the process on the stove top, either by using too-high heat and burning the onions, or by getting impatient and not cooking them for long enough.
Since my earlier experiment with sautéing onions in the slow cooker turned out so well, I decided to give caramelizing a try and was very pleased with the results.
I went garage saling today. A lot of it was overpriced junk, but I found a few gems here and there: a four-outlet USB charger for 25 cents, a couple nice picture frames for a dollar a piece, and the Robert Fagles translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are renowned for not being as dull as dish water.
I also picked up these cute spice tins, which were thrown together in a gallon Ziploc bag. The whole bag was $2. I got them because I love having small tins to stow things like miscellaneous sewing supplies, ear plugs, and earphones, and these ones fit the bill of being both adorable and cheap. I could tell by the weight of the bag that some still had spices in them, but I assumed they would be so old they would be useless at this point. Then I got home, opened the bag and immediately began sneezing. The allspice, at least, has many good days left in it.
Like any true garage saling experience, this one had its moments of sorrow, too. There was one horribe encounter at the beginning when a woman snagged a KitchenAid for $100 from out under my nose. Now, after the passage of several hours, I can calmly reason to myself that I already have a Vitamix, which mixes bread dough just fine thank you — or at least is supposed to do, though I’ve honestly never tried it.
Also, it was probably one of those cheap, Target KitchenAids where the reviews complain about the motor burning out. Yup, I’m going to keep telling myself that.
My favorite coffee shop recently featured tomatillo soup for lunch. It was delectable and inspired me to create my own version at home. Because I keep cooked beans, caramelized onions, cooked grains and vegetable stock on hand in the freezer, the preparation was incredibly quick and easy. (You can find my directions for making big batches of beans here, caramelized onions here, and veggie stock here.)
For those who don’t keep these ingredients on hand, I’ve provided a list of substitutions below the recipe. Continue reading
