New Year’s Resolutions – 2016

Happy New Year!!

It’s not the most original opening to my first post of 2016, but it’s sincere. I hope that you have a fantastic and fulfilling 12 months ahead.

I am starting this year full of hope. I have concocted five goals that I want to work towards on the blog – some build on my previous efforts towards creating a more sustainable lifestyle, some are new, but all (I hope) will bring new and exciting opportunities to learn. Equally as important is that they are all absolutely achievable, as long as I’m willing to put in the effort – and I am! I really am!

So, without further ado, here are my New Year’s Resolutions for 2016…..

1. Increase my blogging. I’d like my posts to average out over the year at 2 per week, therefore I’m aiming to end in December around the 104 mark.

I love my blog, I really do, but I’ve found that without disciplining myself to write, it’s the first thing to fall by the wayside when life gets busy or stressful. I miss writing though, and without the motivation I get from publicly sharing my progress, I’m in danger of achieving less. I’m also missing my pals in the blogging community, so for lots of reasons, it makes a lot of sense to breathe some new life into my blog. It’s good to be back!

2. To build on the good work I did last year when I learned to sew. I want to save more clothes from landfill by altering them or upcycling them into other items. Where I do make clothes from scratch, I want to start using some organic fabrics.

My motivation to learn to sew grew from my decision to take a step back (if not completely away) from the fashion industry. I don’t want to support slave labour or environmental damage. I want to use my new sewing skills to extend the life of the clothes in my family and ultimately prevent them from being left to rot and leach chemicals into the earth. By increasing (from nothing!) my use of organic fabric, I will – slightly – minimise the negative environmental impact that producing those materials cause.

3. I will continue to learn to knit, with the aim of being able to produce items that can be gifted.

Last year, while doing really well with my knitting, I got carried away learning some complicated techniques. This year I must focus on producing pieces that can be given away as lovingly made and thoughtful presents, which have been created as ethically as possible.

4. I will dramatically increase the amount of food that I cook from scratch, using organic ingredients where practically possible, with the aim of reducing the packaging I contribute to landfill.

I failed in my goal to keep reducing my rubbish last year, and I’m sure the amount of ‘convenience’ foods I bring into the house contributed to this. It’s time to reduce our rubbish and improve our diets! This will also help with goal 5…

5. I am going to provide healthier and more varied food for my family.

I am bored of the food I cook, bake and buy. When the kids complain about the same old stuff, I tend to agree rather than reprimand – it’s got that bad! I amn’t keen on cooking and creating food but I’m going to grab the metaphorical bull by its horns and throw myself into this challenge. It’s time to cook new meals, bake (some of) our own snacks and find out what it is that those self-proclaimed foodies love about meal times. I want my family to look forward to their meals and be excited about what delight is served. I would like someone at some point this year to ask for seconds!!!

Good luck to everyone out there hoping to live your dreams in 2016, you can do it!

If you want to see how I got on in achieving my New Year’s Resolutions for 2015, check out yesterday’s post.

2015 New Year’s Resolutions – how I got on

It’s that time of year again when I like to post a round-up of the progress that I have made on the blog in the last 12 months. Today I will be revisiting the five New Year’s Resolutions that I set myself one dark night, as 2014 drew to an end. I’ll also share with you how I got on by marking my own work pubicly (oh yeah!).

Usually by this point, readers are fairly up to date with my progress, but this year I’ve been decidedly crap on the blog – a meagre 24 posts. All of this is soon to change as you’ll see in my next post, but for now, let the 2015 assessment begin…

(Resolutions in bold, assessment below)

1. Buy a very limited number of clothes for me, and a (less) limited amount for my children. I’d also like to avoid buying clothes to give as gifts. My aim is to prevent supporting the (largely) unethical fashion industry (see my post from 2014) Where I do purchase clothes I will endeavour to use tools, such as The Good Shopping Guide, to buy as ethically as possible.

I am still putting in a really good effort at keeping my clothes consumption to a minimum. When I decided to buy no new clothes for myself in 2014, I didn’t expect to be doing this well two years later. The items I bought for myself this year were mainly basic items that ‘supported’ the rest of my wardrobe – tights, underwear, a neutral pair of shoes, black leggings and a swim suit. The swim suit was the only purchase that fell into the categories of fashionable or luxurious. I purchased it in Fat Face, which does pretty well in terms of ethical High Street shopping (see link), and it was the only new item I bought for a family holiday.

I pretty much failed in my quest to buy fewer clothes for the children. I do try to buy them stuff in a bigger size so that, in theory, I’m buying less in the long term. I also use the Fat Face sale in an attempt to make some of my purchases more ethical, but I can’t kid myself – my efforts in this area are lacking (plus I really like Fat Face!)

While I definitely bought way fewer clothes as gifts (80% less?), I didn’t manage to cut them out completely. Especially when friends have babies, I find it so convenient to buy clothes as they are useful, easy to post and exchangeable.

Overall score: 6/10

2. Learn to sew. The aim of this is to allow me to efficiently mend the clothes my family already has, plus – in time – try my hand at adapting the children’s clothes so that they might continue to get wear out of their outfits as they grow. One day I’d like to attempt making my own clothes from ethical materials, but I accept that this may not be something I achieve in 2015.

Ok, I’m shoving my modesty aside here to announce that I totally rocked this resolution! Within the first few months of the year, I’d made a dress and on Christmas day, I wore a much more complicated little number that even involved full lining! I’ve upcycled, adapted, mended and invented. I’ve even managed to sew some things as gifts for Christmas. I found I quite like sewing, which definitely helps 🙂

It is with relief that I realise I wasn’t expecting to make my own clothes from ethical materials this year. Although I have upcycled fabrics, and made use of some offcuts, I have yet to purchase any organic materials – this will feature in 2016’s goals (with no allowance for failure!)

Overall score: 10/10

3. Learn to knit. I would love to master this skill. Ideally I will learn to make gifts for others as well as household staples such as socks, using UK wool. For 2015 I will aim to be able to produce a few basic items that would be of a high enough standard to give as presents. This cuts out poor worker conditions, and reduces the air miles my finished items have travelled.

I did well on this resolution. I started on a high and made a pair of mittens which were duly given away as a birthday present. I got somewhat distracted from my goal of being able to make household staples by falling in love with an intarsia cushion cover pattern – much more complicated that was necessary at this point in my knitting career – but I’ve stuck with it and learned a new skill and yes, I did use UK wool.

Overall score: 9/10

4. Go supermarket-free for Lent. This will be the third year that I’ve given up supermarkets for a specific period. Each time I do it, I learn more and get less dependent on using them. I like to support local businesses and opt out of the poor environmental practices that are rife in the supply chain of supermarkets. You can read how I got on last year in my concluding post and please, if you’d like to, join in!

I completed this task with only a small blip when I used a supermarket chemist to pick up a prescription, realising too late that it was a supermarket-related (it was a stand alone shop, not a counter in a supermarket!!)

My blogging on the subject was pretty sparse and my shopping unadventurous so I’m dropping this from my blogging goals for 2016, in the hope that my writing will be marginally more interesting than watching a wall of wet paint dry. I will however, continue to go supermarket-free for Lent this year, so the subject may be alluded to.

Overall score 9/10

5. Reduce my rubbish. I will continue to monitor and reduce my use of single-use plastics, plus I will aim to put out less rubbish – half a black bag per week would be a pleasing reduction. My local authority is finally due to collect food waste in April so I should be able to get rid of all food waste (as opposed to the limited items that can go in the garden compost) so with a boost like that, I have no excuses!

While I have done a fair amount of work in the past on reducing my rubbish, I think it is safe to say that I made little (if any) progress this year.  In our household we recycle everything that the Council picks up and we are now able to recycle food waste fully.  We still have our faithful veg box which comes in (almost) zero plastic and we’ve stuck to a lot of the changes we made for Plastic Free July but I can’t think of anything we’ve done this year to specifically reduce our rubbish.  I’m awarding myself points for keeping up good habits but, as no progress is made, I end on a depressing end result of…

Overall score: 4/10

Despite the ups and downs in my scores, I’ve enjoyed reflecting on my progress, and am aware of just how powerful writing goals down can be in terms of helping to turn them into a reality. I’m currently working away on my list of New Year’s Resolutions for 2016, which I’ll be posting in the next few days.  Next time there’ll be no fails!!

How did you get on with your goals for 2015?

My 100th blog post

‘If I sink without trace, at least I’ll know I’ve given it a shot!’

Elizabeth over at Margot & Barbara wrote this in her post advertising the start of her blog link-up called The Good Things. I enjoy Elizabeth’s blog and applaud the sentiment of focussing on positivity. I also admire her for initiating something new. It’s brave to invite others to join in with you and, when I read what she had written, it made me smile and I wanted to jump into the water with her for the adventure!

What could I write about though? I’m all about becoming plastic-free just now on my blog, but to try to work that into a topic about ‘the good things’ seemed a bit contrived – not to mention self-promoting!

But I care about my plastic-free topic, and I care about my blog and actually, it makes me happy. Really happy. In my life, this blog truly is A Good Thing!

Then suddenly I remembered that my next post (this very one that you are reading!) is my 100th blog post! So here it is, a post celebrating my blog and everything that goes with it. My good thing!

When I properly discovered blogs – loads of them, on all different topics – I realised how significant blogging was. People out there were doing exciting things, and had big opinions, and they were sharing. What an amazing way to learn. Suddenly I had access to opinions that weren’t delivered via media companies with hidden agendas.

Hilariously…as a direct result of all of this blog-reading…I was quickly contributing meaningfully to conversation about current affairs that I was having with friends and family in real life, with – I like to think! – fresh, clever and valid points. Some I’d formulated myself from these new sources of information, and others were stolen sourced from what others had written. Previously, at best, I knew what the news headlines were. I enjoyed noting the surprise of those around me at my newfound knowledge. *Shhhh, don’t tell!*

After being a busy career girl, embroiled in a hands-on job that I felt made a difference in my community, being a stay-at-home-parent was a big shift for me. While I actively embraced the choice I made, I didn’t feel I was contributing to the world in any meaningful way, outside of my own four walls. This was the only part of my new full time parenting role that I wasn’t that keen on (baby sick aside). Starting a blog was a way to participate meaningfully in the world and keep my brain exercised.

As Elizabeth feels about her link-up though, for me blogging felt like a risk. What if I failed? My biggest worry was that I’d peter out….maybe write a couple of posts and then stop. Was ‘putting myself out there’ too big a challenge?

Happily though, the more I wrote, the quicker the ideas came and I loved that other bloggers welcomed me into this new world I’d stumbled into. I hadn’t expected to be part of a community. Writing for me has always been a solitary activity but, being partial to a bit of socialising in real life, it was a welcome perk.

My blog has evolved since its creation in early 2013. There have been good posts and bad. Weeks where I’ve worked hard on it and weeks I’ve absented myself. I’ve improved in some areas (I use photos now! And links!) while I’ve pitifully stood still in others (you still can’t subscribe by email…) but my blog makes me happy.

It has led me to experience things there is no way I’d have done if I didn’t blog. Has anyone else found themselves in someone’s hallway buying local produce when they actually thought their destination was to be a huge market?. It was totally bizarre, but our hosts were lovely and we discovered the chocolate coated rice cake for the first time – it’s a keeper!

That experience was part of my experiment to give up supermarkets for 28 days. I thought it’d be something interesting to write about, and hoped that it would keep my blogging momentum going. I’m not sure I really had any understanding at the time that, ethically, ditching the supermarket is an excellent thing to do. It ended up being a huge and really important step towards me becoming much more environmentally aware.

On the back of the supermarket posts, I was invited to blog to promote Zero Waste Week 2013, which opened my eyes to the issue of food waste. This got me cooking much more and made me realise that cooking isn’t just something people do because they have…well, sorry!….too much time on their hands! I now realise that the ability to prepare food is actually a life skill and that – even without a glass of wine – it can be a teensy bit enjoyable.

And it reduces your packaging waste. Who cares about that though?! Not me, until I read a blog post about Plastic Free July. Total madness, I thought on first read. Total crazy madness. But then I read more and it made sense dammit, and, you know, I was looking for something to write about and (oh bloody hell!)… why didn’t I just sign up for July 2014?

So here I am, a few weeks before July and I’m going try and go (disposable, single-use) plastic-free next month. But, do you know what? I’m glad I’m doing it. We live in a fragile planet, facing scary environmental issues and I’m actually making a small effort to help. Me. That makes me happy.

Without my blog I’d never have attempted any of the above and I wouldn’t have connected with any of the lovely, caring, funny, sensitive people who read my posts and let me know their thoughts and ideas. Sometimes they even share them on social media and I feel a little humbled. All of that makes me happy.

So there you go, 100 posts in, and I’m glad I’ve got my small space on the internet. I’ve got ideas. I don’t always articulate them perfectly, and I don’t always get things right, but I’m putting those ideas out there and even more importantly I’m learning from others. It makes me happy and that’s got to be a good thing, right?

Meaner Greener Me: Small steps for 2014

I like to make New Year’s Resolutions every year. Not many of them survive the full 12 months but last year’s were to start tweeting (as oppose to just read on Twitter) and to create a blog, and post on it at least once a month. These worked out pretty well and have added a whole new dimension to my life that I’d find near-impossible to give up!

So, it is with optimism at the start of 2014 that I document my New Year’s Resolutions, or rather my goals, for the next 12 months.

1. Throughout January, I am going to cut down on the amount of laundry I do. I am guilty of tossing anything that has been worn or used into the washing machine without first considering whether it is actually dirty. Plus (I’m whispering this) I don’t always fill the drum to its maximum capacity. This means that for my family of four I often run the washing machine twice a day.

I will give myself a ‘washing allowance’ of one load per day and do everything I can to put clean clothes back in the wardrobe as well as use other household items, e.g. towels, for longer. I hope that this will prevent me wasting electricity and stop excessive amounts of washing powder going into the environment. Also, I think it is enough time to retrain myself on how I think about the laundry – the hope being that I can carry any good habits I acquire through the year.

2. I am not going to buy any new clothes for myself for the whole of 2014. I have blogged about this here. In summary, I reckon I have enough in my wardrobe to see me through the year, and if I feel I need an item of clothing, I will either try to buy it second hand or borrow it.

The aim of this goal is to prevent me contributing to the environmental impact of the production, distribution and disposal of clothes; to ensure that I am not purchasing clothes made by employees working in unsatisfactory conditions; and to avoid supporting companies who use Workfare.

3. For lent this year, I will be giving up shopping in supermarkets. I am hoping to revive Supermarket-Free Me and blog about my experience. I am always sceptical of committing to projects too far in advance, with my absolute priority being to look after my young children, but let’s think positive and say I’ll be blogging as much as I can over Lent and tweeting about it too. If you’d like to join me then please do read through my archives (the first post is here) and find out why this might be a good thing to do! The more of us doing it, the more fun this could be…

4. In July my goal is to give up single-use plastics. I am currently ‘in-training’ for just now – if you scroll back a few posts on the blog, you will be able to read about my progress so far.

Plastics have a huge negative impact on the environment for a number of reasons, including their failure to decompose at the end of their ‘working lives’ and the harmful chemicals they are composed of. By giving them up for a month and by finding small ways to banish them from my life, I hope to reduce my contribution to the damage they cause our planet.

5. Throughout the year I will be trying to reduce my rubbish as much as possible. Having implemented some new green habits in 2013, including composting and taking part in Zero Waste Week, I began to see the amount of junk I put out for the weekly bin collection decrease. I found this a little bit thrilling. In the last seven months I have gone from throwing out approximately three bin bags per week to one. I think can improve though. Hopefully I’ll work out how and be able to share it on the blog.

If you have any of the same or similar goals for 2014, I’d love to hear them!