Sugru and other squidgy mendy stuffs

I have been quite busy recently with a home made version of Sugru.
While i love the idea of Sugru and think that the inventor is a clever old clog, I cannot warrant spending £8 or £12 on a few tiny little blobs of it when I can make whole blocks of it If I want just by going to instructables or Youtube and typing oogoo into the search box.

Anyway.

Oogoo or Sugru is a silicone based putty  which sets in the air and becomes flexible and rubbery.

It can be used to mend many things and is quite strong and waterproof.
Stands heat and cold well and can be made to be almost any colour.

The official version Sugru  is available in lots of places and comes packed in foil with a 6 months life span or 18 months if you keep it in the fridge.

• I have used my homemade version to mend a dustpan.
• Make it a new squeegee edge.
• Make hooks for the kitchen
• Pan lid holders
• A knob for a saucepan lid.
• A handle for my deep fat fryer
• hooks in the bathroom
• Some washers
• A holder for my wifi dongle so it sits on top of the monitor
• Buffers on the top of our old loft ladder so it doesn't scratch the wall paper.
• A Grip for the flask lid which gets too tight to undo
• Mended the  end of knob on cup rack
• A new cover for a penknife which I found trodden into the mud when we were out.

Future plans are

• More bathroom hooks
• More kitchen hooks
• More pan lid holders
• Tidier way to fix the laptop connector on two of the fixed laptops
• Some rubber stamps for craft
• Fix my yarn winder to be more robust
• Fix the seal on the double glazed sliding door that leaks

I'm sure I will find other uses .
So far that is 13 things mended and 7 planned.
I don't know how many packets I could get through of the commercial version.

If you are interested in using the sold stuff.
Consider looking around the house first and finding all the things you want to mend with it.
Write a list and what colour you would need.
This stuff comes in black,white ,yellow,blue and red which are all the primary colours meaning you can mix almost any colour with them.

The home made version is slightly more versatile because you can of course make any colour you have in paint , including I think gold,silver and fluorescent and with glow in the dark powder, there is that option also.

Samba broadband dissolved and my already earned credit is now non existent

A couple of weeks ago, Samba broadband folded.

At least they didn't exactly FOLD.
What they did was to stop the service and email everyone to tell them that they had ceased trading.

They actually are still a company and apparently are running in another country but as far as the UK is concerned, they are no more.

Their email pretty much said that they could not negotiate future prices to be as competitive as they had previously been doing and so they were stopping .

I actually expected the broadband credit that I had accrued, to continue to work because I had earned that previously and as far as I was concerned, that would have been earned and credited to my dongle (run under subcontract presumably with Three mobile broadband) .

That is not the case however and my dongle which I hammered hard all day on the closing day to at least use up some of my credit (I had 15 GB saved on it) now does not connect to the internet with Three . I can get on Three's site but I apparently have no credit.
I guess I managed to use about 800 mb that last day.

Thanks Samba! You apparently did not actually have any kind of agreement then with the members but only with Three whom you decided not to pay out of your profits from my and a few thousand other peoples viewing of your adverts.

My 15 GB of non expirable credit stayed in Samba's pocket along with the major earning they got from all my viewing of adverts.

To put it into perspective, each video was 3.5mb that works out that I watched  4388 advertising videos.
A while ago I worked out that we were paid about 1.5 pence a video and so they had 65.82 of my earnings because they just wiped it out on closure.

Plus at least 65.82 they also earned as profit because lets face it, they weren't a charity, I think it was most likely more than that but so what?


I did email to ask about it but they only have an automated reply stating they are so sorry but they have closed due to mean old Three not letting them have such good prices any more.

I am one of the lucky ones.
My Sim cost me £1 and my dongle was free as we unlocked one we got from somewhere else.
Some poor saps had only just bought a Samba Dongle, literally the day before their 'closure' and some people were using their regular 'top up' with cash .

They stated they would reimburse the cash top ups if they had been bought in  that month .

Anyway..
I was not impressed by the deceit. They could easily have put up a message online to say they were closing and people would have used up their 'credit' and no one would have ordered more top up credit or bought a dongle for nothing.

If you are in a different country and Samba is offering free broadband for watching their adverts, think carefully about it before deciding to go ahead and certainly be very wary about actually buying anything from them with 'real money'.

.

Ovivo is dead

Sadly the Ovivo mobile phone connection provider went out of Business on Friday.

I have one phone that was using an Ovivo sim and after hunting around for a cheap PayG sim,I decided on Three's 123 sim and hopefully will be getting one in the post in the next few days.

Ovivo were very good while they lasted and I didn't pay anything out other than the initial £15 for the sim 5 months ago. So my own use worked out at £3 a month.

I think they shot themselves in the foot really because the sort of people looking for free mobile use, are not going to be doing an enormous amount of topping up or buying offers from them so most of their income was likely to come from their advertising on the free data they offered .

I imagine any user not using an android phone or smart phone probably wouldn't get to see the adverts (which would have accrued most of the revenue for ovivo). I certainly never saw one .

Altering a Bra and other articles of clobber

Altering clothes for the frugally challenged.

I have been busy recently with my sewing machine.

I took in three pairs of shorts that I made about 8 years ago and were a good 4 inches too wide for me having lost weight and got fitter.

They are 100 cotton and dark blue with tailored waist band,inseam pockets and patch pockets.
That meant that I had to completely rip out the side seams after removing the patch pockets and rework them with new seams and seam pockets.
I decided not to remove the whole waist band but instead cut into it at the side seam as it was going to be so much narrower overall and incorporated it into the side seam as I machined.

One pair was shortened by about 3 inches, one pair by 2 inches and one pair by an inch.
The longest pair are going to have belt loops added so that each pair is slightly different.
I reattached one patch pocket on each pair but kept the second for using as material for the belt loops.

It took a good while but thankfully I have a very nice sewing machine so it was fun too.


Then I mended 6 pairs of pants( underwear) where the elastic had parted company with the material due to very cheap manufacture.
These last were done by hand because the material is thin and soft and the elastic although sound, is narrow and obviously stretchy.

I also had 4 quite nice bras that I bought back when I thought I was a 36 B
Unfortunately I am not a 36B and probably never was (MUM!).
The big TJ Hughes in town closed and their sale had several 34C bras which I bought to see how they fitted.
They were exactly right for me so I resolved to alter my other bras to fit better too.

I cant do much about the cup size but the chest size is doable.
Here is a diagram of how to do it incase anyone fancies having a go on their own.

 This was 

a really easy project and saved my bras from the dustbin. 

I remember when I first got a bra,Mum was in no rush to spend money on clothes and so it was after much pleading that I was given one, it was mums cast off and was way past its best.

If I had realised how easy it was to adjust the girth size back then ,I probably would have snaffled a needle and thread and got to work to make my ghastly acquisition a bit more acceptable .

As I did not, I went to school wearing it and other similar cast off s with over stretched straps and material and suffered the mirth of the 12 to 16 aged girls during many a PE lesson.

Bleaching T shirts

I found an interesting article on instructibles by a member called stinkymum.

She describes using Bleach in a tie dye fashion to alter dark T shirts.

This was very interesting to me because one of my favourite T shirts is black with a cheetah on and has become faded under the arms which looked horrible.
I also have a T shirt that OH gave me . It had been thrown away still in its packet because it was a small and didn't fit any of the beefy coppers.
When I wore it the first time, the black came off on everything.

So anyway I read through her instructions for various folds and chose two I liked the look of in her pictures.

The bleach went into a large bowl. I did 1 large yog container of bleach and 5 of water as it was wilkos thick bleach.
Then after folding and rubber banding my shirts ,I put them in and went off to do something else.
20 minutes later I took them out ,unbanded and rinsed them.
They had started to change but not very much so I had to carefully fold them back as closely as possible to previously and put them back again.
I gave them another 20 minutes because she had quoted 1 part bleach and 3 water and I had diluted mine by a lot more.

The second attempt was much better.
I rinsed like mad then when the rinse water  seemed to have cleared of browny colour, I put them through the rinse on the washing machine.

The manky underarm is gone from my cheetah shirt and the other shirt looks very cool going from a light mushroom brown to its original black in an interesting fadey pattern a bit like stained glass.
The cheetah is silk screened and so has not been affected at all and now sits in a shadowy shady mottled background. The underarm staining which was really I suppose natural bleaching from sweat and age, is just part of the bleach pattern instead of standing out screaming old and manky.