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Thrift-store raid
I can never go into a thrift-store without buying a bunch of stuff. So I am equally thrilled as terrified by the fact that here in Sweden thrift-stores (called “loppis”, short for “loppmarknad” = flee-market) are all over the place. I kid you not: even when you’re driving on the loneliest road through the woods you’ll find signs (some hand-made, some “real”, like the official signs for a town or something) saying “loppis”.
I have, however, found a solution for my problem. Not going in. Yes, unfortunately that is the best thing I have come up with so far. The positive thing with my addiction is: it is relatively cheap. I regularly find myself with a basket full of stuff in the line for the cash-register, preparing myself for the supposedly inevitable heart attack I am going to have when I hear the total. Kind of like at IKEA, you know, where you end up picking up a bunch of small items on the way, which you never planned on buying but now that you’re here, and they’re so cheap, and then at the cash register you find out that you misread the price (or rather: the tagging on the shelves was misleading), and everything is much more expensive than you thought but you don’t feel like bothering with returning the stuff now that they’ve already scanned everything – you know what I mean?
Only, that at a Swedish loppis that’s not how it turns out. I am surprised every time by how a ton of stuff can cost so little. Everything is really expensive here (well, I guess that’s relative, I suppose the Norwegians would disagree but compared to Germany it is – and I do still compare, even after two years, sigh) – except for thrift-stores. Those are really cheap, and the only chance of me dying of a heart attack there is from the anxiety I build up myself while waiting in line.
So, yes, there are a lot of things that are great with thrift-stores: it’s obviously better from a environmental/consumption point of view if we re-use stuff that already exists, instead of throwing away old stuff and producing new stuff all the time. It’s cheap, so I can afford buying a ton of stuff even when I don’t have much money (which is most of the time). And it’s fun. The less central/known the location of a thrift-store, the higher your chances of finding real treasures. Even better when the people working there have no idea what stuff is worth (well, better for me, that is, I guess).
But regardless of all the pros – stuff is still stuff, and accumulating it, no matter where you get it from, still clutters your home. Consumption is consumption is consumption … If I didn’t restrict my visits to these places, and my “feng shui bible”, I might as well be one of those hoarders that you see on tv.
This week, I broke my self-imposed prohibition. I have been to three thrift-stores, it cost me 316 SEK (ca. 50$ | 38€), and here is some of my booty:
Lately I have been buying a bunch of plates … Because I am obsessed with (making) these three tier servers:
Obvs also made from plates found at various “loppises”. 
Yes, I am aware that we have no possible use for more than two of these, so anything I am making from now on, I will somehow have to get rid of … 
I especially dig plates with this kind of delicate flower pattern. 
This lovely can was only 5 SEK ( = 80¢ | 0,60 €), and I thought it would be perfect as a gift – filled with some chocolate chip cookies, maybe? 
Both Peter and I have been wanting to have these kind of spoons for when we eat sushi. Well, actually we don’t want the spoons for the sushi but for the miso-soup that comes with it. 15 SEK ( 2.60 $ | 1,80 €) for 4 spoons. Not bad, eh? 
I bought two of those brass forms … … because I thought I could use them when I try this recipe for making your own bath bombs.
Oh yeah, and the tea cups I got because I want to make …
… these kind of candles. This retro beauty is for my sister, if I can find a way to mail it to her safely (she lives in Jena and used to live in Mainz – how freaky is this?):
Hm, you can’t see it in this picture but it also has a stamp that says “Schott Mainz”, so … I also broke my biggest no-no: I am not allowed to buy any new fabric until I have made something from the tons that I already have hoarded. But I just couldn’t walk past this:
50 SEK ( 7.80 $ | 6 €) … 
… for about 1,5m x 3,2m (1,6 x 3,5 yards) 
Now all I need is an old arm chair that I can make over! Or professional help … Or professional help re-doing an old arm chair!
Like so. Also, I bought …
… this enamel-coated plate … 
… at 40 SEK ( 6.30 $ | 4,80 €) one of the more expensive purchases. But I just HAD TO. Why? Apart from that I think it’s adorable, I want to exchange all the plastic dishes with enamel (both for health and aesthetic reasons) in this lovely picnic basket:
Do I need to mention that this is also from a loppis? 50 SEK (7.80 $ | 6 €). My best buy this year so far. Now you know the severity of my condition. If you know of any cures or remedies – please don’t tell me! I can’t imagine my life without loppis treasure hunts.
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No poo – tested for you
Well, ok, it wasn’t a completely selfless act, I do dig these kind of diys. I have been meaning to write this post since last Wednesday (that’s when I tried some recipes) but I wanted to wait till I had some pictures. As most of the times, I am not completely happy with them but I am afraid if I wait until I am, I will never share this with you. And that would be sad because trying out these recipes really was a revelation for me. So: do try this at home!
I tried some of the recipes from this ByzantineFlowers post, namely the soap nut shampoo, the green tea conditioner, and the coffee scrub.
Soap nuts The soap nut shampoo I simply did because I had those nuts (that are berries) at hand. It’s actually what we’ve been using to do the laundry with, I had no idea you could use them as shampoo. Boiling the soap nuts in water for 30 minutes, preparing the shampoo every time you want to use it rather than storing it – the procedure is simple yet somewhat time-consuming, so I am not sure I will stick with this one in the long run. The liquid does have a distinct smell, which I find neither particularly unpleasant nor particularly pleasant. It’s ok. As to whether this shampoo worked or not – I find it hard to say. I mean, my hair did get clean and looked nice but I can’t say for sure that it was the soap nuts, or simply washing my hair (after all, some do use water only), or …
… The green tea conditioner. Now this one I loved. My hair usually is very hard to comb (I don’t even use a brush). I have gotten used to it and don’t even think about the discomfort anymore but those days are over! I was skeptical, and wondered how this was supposed to work, after all, the green tea is water, and won’t that just run down before I even got a chance to rub it in? I have no clue how it worked – but it did. My hair was super-easy to comb, and it did look nice (again, I can’t know for sure what to contribute that part to).
Green tea The real revelation however was the coffee scrub. It is easy to make, relatively cheap yet it feels really expensive (which is the best, right?), feels nice, and makes you smell so good! I only deviated from the original recipe in so far as I used coconut fat instead of olive oil. Again: because it was at hand – and also because it is supposed to be good for Pitta (yup, I just had to sneak in something Ayurveda). Also I used vanilla sugar instead of regular since I had prepared a jar full a while ago (you just put a vanilla bean in a jar with sugar and let it sit), which we don’t use anymore (the sugar being white). Same goes for the coffee: we haven’t been drinking any lately, so this is the perfect way for me to enjoy its smell anyway.
In the original recipe it says it’s against cellulite but I just went ahead and used it as a full body scrub. Peter was concerned that maybe that way I’ll just end up spreading cellulite. Very good point, so I will keep you posted as to whether I suddenly develop cellulite on my nose or something.
I have been combining using this scrub with the Ayurveda massage technique from the morning routine, so I fancy myself getting the benefits from both. I am no expert though, so I don’t know, I am just going with my gut here. Another thing that’s great about this scrub (yes, there is more!) is that the coconut fat (or whatever fat/oil you’re using) keeps your skin from drying out in the shower. At the same time, you don’t get so sticky that your towel or clothes feel greasy after using them. Your skin just feels really nice and smells like coffee – how cool is that?!
Coffee scrub FYI: all this coming from someone who normally doesn’t use more than shampoo and soap in the shower – read: I don’t get excited about beauty products very easily. Yesterday I even managed to get Peter excited about this coffee scrub. His only concern was that he was going to a lecture, and that the coffee addicts among the guests might be tempted to start licking his skin. No reports of the sort have been filed, so I guess this delicious scrub is safe for use in public. Well, maybe not the actual use but you know what I mean.
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Show me your true colors
Part of me wants to just continue with an entry about my spring cleaning mission, post a picture about how great everything looks. That wouldn’t even be untrue, since it does look a lot better in comparison. Looks can be deceiving, if anyone knows, then it’s bloggers and readers of blogs, right?
It is easy, and thus tempting to make yourself look good on the web. It’s not even like you’re really lying about who you are: you’re not making up the great things you do, you just kind of leave out the things that you’re not so proud of. In a way it’s even wise because why should you make yourself vulnerable when you don’t even know whom you’re “talking” to?
I have felt hurt and/or humiliated many times because I just couldn’t keep quiet about something that didn’t technically need to be said. It was only I who felt like I had to let these things out of my head (or was it my heart?). Like telling someone straight out I liked them when I didn’t know whether they did – the humiliating part being that they didn’t, and that after I had said it it became clear to me that all the signs actually had pointed into that direction the whole time.
Or writing a letter to my dad, telling him how things he did made me feel, which led to the most horrible fight. I had not seen that coming, which today seems naive. I was fourteen then, so it made sense. I could go on with examples but you get the picture, right? For the longest time I thought that I needed to learn not to do that. Not to reveal so much of how I feel, and how/who I am.
I know now that I had drawn the wrong conclusion from these experiences. The lesson here isn’t not to show yourself. It’s not about not making yourself vulnerable. It is about realizing that no matter how much our ego gets hurt, our true selves cannot be destroyed. In fact, the only chance we have of truly being recognized is by showing ourselves, rather than hide behind a façade of how we think others want us to be.
I cannot claim that I have been very good at this myself. Enough though, to know that I am right. I remember one incident in the very beginning of a relationship. He texted me, asking if and when I wanted to meet up again. I answered “As soon as possible”. A friend who was with me wanted to know what I had answered. When I told her she completely freaked out, and said that you CANNOT write such a thing, that it sounded desperate, that he now must think that I wanted to get married … ??? Needless to say that this line of commenting made me feel stupid, and it made me doubt myself. At the same time I was irritated – because this is exactly the kind of thing I am not interested in: having to follow a bunch of rules, pretending you don’t want something in order to get it. Some part of me felt that if he’s going to read me the way she did, then he wouldn’t be right for me anyway. We have been together (and happy!) for five years now.
I have spent a lot of time in my life trying to figure out how the people around me expect me to be. A lot of decisions I have made about my own life were based on that. Like I wrote in the about section of this blog, I have felt the longing to finally be me, to show myself, and to take the risk both of being rejected for that but also of being liked for who I truly am. Both seem scary in their own way but I know that either way, the only significant impact approval or rejection can have is on my ego. None of it changes who I really am.
So here are some truths from the past few days that I don’t have to share here with you but that I want to because I do think they pertain to the purpose of this blog. After all, what kind of soul-searcher would I be if I saw the potential for growth in success but not in failure (if it’s even useful to think in those terms):
- After having read so much about Ayurveda and the significance of eating right, I came home from a three hour yoga class on Saturday and stuffed my face with an entire pizza AND half a chocolate bar (the first half I had eaten on the way home from class). Our yoga teacher had told us about Durga that day, the Hindu Godess that, if I understood this correctly, represents the force in our life that gives us a good punch in the face when our ego gets bloated, to remind us that we are not better than the rest but part of it. So I choose to look at this pizza incident as an act of Durga. It was called for because:
- Writing this blog and getting so much (well, that’s relative, I really don’t have a frame of reference here) positive feedback does make my ego feel flattered. Like, a lot.
- I obsessively check the stats for this blog like 19,364,920 times a day.
- I spent more time fighting with my better half over how to re-organize the kitchen than cleaning and reorganizing it.
- I haven’t tried out a single no poo method on my hair yet although it seems so easy. I just love the smell of the poo I have right now.
May we all feel free to be ourselves a little more each day.
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No Poo!
If you can’t eat it, you probably shouldn’t put it on your skin, either. That’s the philosophy behind “No Poo”, which obviously both stands for “no shampoo” and/or shampoo without “poo”.
I learned about No Poo in the current issue of åter (meaning “back”, “backwards”, “again”), a Swedish magazine about self-sufficiency and alternative life styles. Although I didn’t find out about this concept until yesterday, I am not surprised that it exists. As a lot of people clearly do, I have been thinking along those lines myself: when you are concerned about your health, you realize after a while that it’s not just about what you eat.
The stuff we use on our body is as important as what we put into our body, since that’s actually were it all ends up. (I am not even going to open the can of worms that is the clothes we buy which are treated with all kinds of chemicals – another reason for buying second-hand.)
When I still lived in Germany, I was really excited when organic became popular and affordable thanks to franchises like the dm-drugstore or the Alnatura organic super-market. Being on a university student budget, I was glad that I could buy organic food and cosmetics (not all the time and all my food/products, but still). I became aware that these products weren’t ideal, and that the whole franchise concept of these stores also meant that they probably weren’t as humane and great as they seem.
You shouldn’t fool yourself, these kinds of stores and their products really only fulfill a minimal standard. I don’t know about dm, but I remember that Alnatura seemed less great to me when a friend told me that the notes with customer questions (Alnatura apparently has a blackboard for comments in their stores) about the wages for Alnatura employees always disappear “mysteriously” – and unanswered.
Still, I thought, as long as I can’t print my own money, getting the stuff that at least abides to a minimal standard of eco-friendliness is better than no standard at all. (I am aware of the issue with small producers not having the financial means to get their products certified as organic, and the possibility of certified organic stuff being a bluff – but for the sake of keeping one train of thought, I don’t want to go into that right here right now, either)
After I moved to Sweden, where everything is more expensive in comparison, and a lot of organic products I see in stores are actually imported from Germany, I started stocking up on organic cosmetic products (not that I use a lot, mainly shampoo, conditioner and some mascara) on every one of my visits to Germany. Friends and family knew, so whenever I get care packages, they’re filled with organic soap, tea, deodorant, all that good stuff. I had a box in our bathroom cabinet filled with alverde stuff to last for years.
You read right: had. Like I said, I already knew that organic products that only have the EU certificate that guarantees a minimal standard are not necessarily ideal. There are all these rules like if so and so many ingredients are organic, the product is organic – meaning, there can be crap in there but they can still call the product “organic”. Then Peter told me about one ingredient, sodium “something” sulfate (the “something” being interchangeable), which may cause cancer. Although the fact that this may be didn’t come as a surprise, having heard someone (whose judgement I trust) say it so straight out made it impossible for me to shower and not think about it. First I cracked jokes about my “cancer soap” and my “cancer shampoo” but then I stopped. Stopped joking AND and I am on my way of stopping applying poo, too. Even if I believe that the equation isn’t as simple as shampoo = cancer, why take a risk?
Another reason for why I have been wanting to make my own shampoo (and other related products) is: I like making things myself. So in a way this really doesn’t feel like it’s going to be a sacrifice but one more fun thing to do.
For those of you who speak Swedish, I cannot recommend åter, and Tanja Thuman’s No ‘poo article in the current issue (1/13) highly enough. Same goes for (her?) website, nopoo.se (also Swedish). Obviously there’s lots of stuff in English to be found if you just search for “no poo”.
Here are just three links that seem interesting and inspiring to me (note though that I haven’t actually tried any of this stuff yet – feel free to beat me to it and tell me about your results):
Teeth whitening and hair care – Yolanda Bertaud’s blog is full of health related recipes and diys – love it!
The Oil Cleansing Method – No poo skin care.
Skin Deep – A database with lists of ingredients for skin care products and their health risks.
