Confession time: I’ve got an awful cognitive dissonance thing with buying cheap clothes – I know about the horrific conditions in sweatshops, I know how cotton production is incredibly damaging to the environment, I know how the clothes produced in sweatshops are (understandably) far from good quality and liable to fall apart quickly, I know how much energy is wasted transporting them around the world and I know that shop employees, especially in the cheapest pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap shops, are treated poorly and paid badly – and yet…

I think I got into “buy them cheap when you see them” habits as a teenager when I didn’t have a lot of money and there wasn’t quite as many cheap clothes around as there is now (those quaint days before Primark and £4 supermarket jeans) – I’d always wear black vest tops, for example, so I might as well snap them up when they’re in the sale whether I need them at that exact moment or not. That habit stuck even when I started working and had a bit more money because, well, it’s a bargain, isn’t it? who can refuse a bargain? plus, I’d still wear that black vest top at some point. Once I’d got through the other 30 in my bedroom drawer of course.
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• More and more people seem to be using the patterns from security envelopes for crafts these days – check out these kitchen roll tube & security envelope napkin holders by maya*made.
• Lindsey from SwirlyArts also uses them for gift tags and Design*sponge have turned them inside out for use as better-than-boring-white envelopes.
• Moving onto more fabricky pursuits, CraftyNest have a follow-up tutorial making headbags from the band of fabric leftover from making tank top totes.
• Speaking of using things efficiently, I like how Sadge at Firesign Farm‘s pillowcase-into-an-apron tutorial uses up every bit of the pillowcase, and little else.

Because she’s a keen fixer of things, I told Alice in Blogland about our new “Repair This” feature and she replied that she had something in need of mending, but didn’t know how to go about it:

It’s a pair of waterproof trousers which have taped seams. Basically I bent over in them and the seam split right down the middle, leaving the fabric intact but tearing the seam tape. Can I buy waterproofing seam tape from somewhere? What’s it called? And do I need to sew it in some sort of special way so that it ends up waterproof – if I do it wrong then I guess all my needle holes will let in water!

Any ideas?

This week’s quick link round-up:

• Amber of Berlin’s Whimsy has a tutorial for making washable covers for Swiffer-style floor sweepers out of old towels
• If our soggy garden is anything to go by, it’s possibly a little late for this now but if you’ve still got pretty dry leaves, you can make them into a bouquet of “roses”
• Crafting a Green World has some useful documentation on calculating the fabric yardage from old bedding
• Make candles from old cooking oil/fat – two methods: one using salt, the other using a wire coil to support the wick
• Finally something that both is and isn’t recycling – how to save seeds from this year’s soft veg to plant next year.

It’s Halloween this weekend and the crafting world has been a’flutter with costumes and decorating ideas for the last few weeks – some reusing or recycling stuff from around the home.

• Make a trick-or-treat swag bag out of an old tshirt/vest top
• Make a ghost lantern from an old plastic bottle and a sheet
• Make an owl costume out of old clothes/fabric straps
• Other recycling/reusing Halloween ideas

Don’t forget that while “carving pumpkins” aren’t that tasty for us to eat, chickens (and compost heaps!) still love them — just make sure you remove any dripped wax etc first.