Make, do, and mend

THE VIRTUES OF THRIFT:WE ARE seemingly returning to the things our grandparents did to save money: knitting, needlecraft, market gardening and a bit of DIY around the house.

Over the boom years most people forgot about these skills. It isn’t that we were lazy, it’s just that it made more economic sense to concentrate on our “real” jobs, and hire, consume, and discard according to our whims. In this we were just obeying what’s known in economics as “the law of comparative advantage”, which basically says that it only makes sense to do a task if the cost of getting someone else to do it is more than your hourly wage.

In the boom times, with competing chainstores and a globalised economy churning out cheap mass-produced clothes and food, and full employment and wage inflation ensuring padded wallets, it was difficult to economically justify any sort of DIY. But times have changed.

“We have nearly 100 groups and around 7,000 members around the country that meet once a month to talk about aspects of growing their own food and to learn from one another,” says Michael Kelly, a member of a registered charity called Grow It Yourself (GIY). “In the past, people were coming to us for all sorts of health and environmental reasons. In the last year or two it’s more often people who want to save money.”

For Kelly, economising by growing your own food is a no-brainer. “If you don’t have a spade, you have to buy a spade,” he says. “But beyond that it doesn’t have to cost you anything except the price of seeds, and you don’t need a lot of garden. It’s estimated that a family of four could be more or less self-sufficient with a 10-by-10-metre vegetable patch, but you certainly don’t need that amount of space to start saving money. We have members who operate from apartment balconies. I bought a packet of cucumber seeds for €2.50. It had seven cucumber seeds in it and each one of those becomes a cucumber plant. Each produces 40 to 50 cucumbers over a season. So from that €2.50 investment, you have 350-odd cucumbers. The other day in the supermarket I saw a small tub of pickled organic cucumber slices for €4, which I’d say was half a cucumber.”

Of course, this doesn’t take into account the investment of time – “About an hour a day in total, but at this time of year that would be down to nothing,” says Kelly – or the fact that over-enthusiastic beginners can put a lot of initial effort into what eventually becomes a perfectly rectangular patch of weeds.

“That can happen,” says Kelly. “In our first year we made loads of mistakes. I was getting 50 heads of lettuce at once, which is great if you’re catering for a wedding, but not otherwise.

“At GIY groups you can barter any excess and you learn about planning and general knowledge about doing more successfully. I always advise people to start small and that if you stick with it, it really can save you a fortune.”

There has also been a resurgence of other skills that aren’t so straightforwardly cost-effective. “There are knitting groups all over the place and you’re seeing people knitting on the bus or in bars and libraries,” says Lisa Sisk, who teaches knitting classes at her yarn shop, This is Knit, in Dublin’s Powerscourt Centre.

“But with knitting you can’t compete at the level of the chain stores. It’s fairer to compare that jumper you knitted yourself with the one you could buy in Brown Thomas than the cheap item in Penneys. For a jumper made with a merino and cashmere blend, you’re talking about spending maybe €60 or €70 on the wool, but it would maybe cost a few hundred euro for something of that quality in a shop like Brown Thomas.

“And it’s something made to your measurements which will last for a long time.”

There are, she says, other benefits. “The nights out people once had in the theatre or restaurant aren’t an option for them now, and with knitting groups, people can go along and have a cup of tea or a glass of wine. It’s a way of socialising on the cheap as well as being a way to create quality clothes.”

Kellie Dalton is at the forefront of another crafty trend: up-cycling. With her organisation, Re-dress (re-dress.ie), she teaches people how to mend and customise old clothes. “With one course people gain the skill to be able to change the clothes they have and give pieces new life,” she says.

“We do up-cycling classes where we encourage people to bring in stuff from the back of their wardrobe and then we change them into brand-new outfits.

“We also have clothes swaps, because one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.”

In the recent past one man’s junk was every man’s junk. “During the Celtic Tiger, people threw everything out,” sighs Peter Dolan, marketing manager with Woodies DIY. “Perfectly good, but slightly broken, things were filling skips all over the country. People are now repairing dining chairs, whereas before they’d have said, ‘ah, sure we’ll just get new ones’.

“The average homeowner spent €345 on DIY over the past year. The minimum call-out charge for a lot of things is €50, so of course people are now giving it a shot themselves. What can go wrong with putting up a shelf or painting a room? Painting a skirting board isn’t going to bring the house down.”

Okay, there are some things that could bring the house down, but that’s why Dolan advises people to ask advice of hardware providers such as himself before, say, attacking a supporting wall with a lump hammer. We should all, he says, get into the habit of doing our own DIY.

“Everyone has a medical box in their house, even if they’re not doctors,” he says. “Your tool box should be exactly the same. If something goes wrong, you have your tool box.”

Beyond the immediate cost savings, the return to self-sufficiency could be seen in the wider context of a generally more engaged attitude to consumption. Kellie Dalton suggests that these activities might even make people better shoppers.

“What we do makes people think more about value and appreciate quality,” she says. “After a few weeks on one of our courses you can spot how seams are put together and can appreciate garments on a more than just a ‘that’ll be good for Saturday night’ level. You can spot quality.”

And there’s also clear psychological benefit from these activities. Even as some of these tasks are making the transition from hobbies to necessities once more, study after study has shown that the short-term happiness that comes from shopping compares very badly with the more sustaining contentment people derive from creating and fixing things. Arguably those who engage in these activities might also be saving a fortune on therapy.

Michael Kelly of GIY certainly has reason to be happy. “There’s nothing like going into a supermarket and seeing trays of food you don’t need to buy,” he says, “because they’re waiting for you in the garden at home.”