*Life Goes On

It’s been a while, I know. I do apologize, I was so hoping to start my new installment with “The house is officially sold and we’re on our way!” But this is not to be the case, as it turns out having a willing buyer is only a small step in the sale process. The bank has all the say and our buyers’ bond wasn’t approved. So we start all over again. House selling is not for sissies. 

But life goes on. As Christmas creeps nearer I am drowning in orders, mostly wholesale at the moment so each order is large. Which is good. Every hour of every day is full up with cutting and stitching and communicating with clients, while keeping the shop going at the same time. If I was ever unsure if closing the shop was the right thing to do, I am now convinced I can’t do it all. It doesn’t leave much time for living at all let alone living lightly. And really, what is the point then?I have got a little bartering done since last we chatted. It is a hard thing to get one’s head around, especially trying to make sure the trades are fair. The way I see it, as long as both parties are happy your trade is a success. First I traded a bunch of fresh beetroot from one of my fellow Nitarah veg box customers for a bottle of pickled beetroot. Then I traded with Siobhan at Wimze - two old printer’s trays and a couple of craft mags for chain and charms for a new project I have planned for next year. I also traded a bespoke Kisma Kreative handmade folder for a stash of bits and pieces of jewellery from Sarah at      G-Town Gems. These will be used for the same project. Intrigued? Good. You should be. Watch this space!

I’m getting the hang of it but it is sometimes awkward to suggest trading to people. Not everyone gets it and would prefer the black and white simplicity of cold hard cash. If anyone in Grahamstown has green thumbs 

and you have too many potatoes, tomatoes or onions I’d gladly discuss trading for preserves, pickles, or maybe a trade from my veg box? Beetroot for onions, etc? Or maybe there’s a Kisma Kreative design you have your eye on? Let’s chat. 

I’d best get back to it. So many orders, so little time. Have a beautiful day and remember to smile - it’s contagious!

*PS - I’m Just Like You

I feel the need to tell you a little bit more about myself. I need you to understand that I am by no means the most perfect greenie or eco-friendly person out there.

I want to be. I think about it a lot. I mean to be. But I still buy chips in plastic foil bags made with Amazon-destroying Palm oil when I can’t fight the urge. I might buy veggies in sea-creature-strangling plastic when I’m in a hurry. I will buy loose potatoes and then pop them in a million-year-to-biodegrade plastic bag because I still haven’t made the reusable net ones I have in my mind. I mean to eat beans and tofu instead of chops and chicken legs. But I don’t. I want to recycle but sho - it’s so difficult to get to the recycling drop offs on time - maybe next week. We did start a compost heap - but that’s just what it is, a heap at the top of the garden. It’s very natural. Just doesn’t have fancy worms or a tap were you can run off … whatever it is you run off of a proper compost system. I know solar is good, and expensive, but I’ll read up on it when I have time. I try to remember to turn the geyser off – but I always forget to turn it back on.

I don’t plan on giving up TV, Wi-Fi or good food. But I am hoping to find a practical way to live better, more consciously and with less stress within this mad, mad world we call home. I’m going with a ‘less is more’ philosophy. The less you have, the less you have to be worried about - right? Home-grown, home-made, less preservatives, fewer ingredients I don’t understand, less stuff from far, far away and origins unknown, back to basics, within reason. Does that make any sense? I’m like you, I want to be less selfish and demanding of the planet but I don’t want to live in the dark ages either. Surely we can find a practical, happy medium? That’s my goal right there I think. A practical and happy medium to Living Lightly in the real world.

As I am moving my studio back home and my work hours become more flexitime I will be able to test out all the recipes, building plans, suggested alternatives and green options out there. I hope to figure out what is practical, affordable and what will make an actual difference, no matter how small, as opposed to the crackpot plans that are out there on the net. Electricity from a coke can or Internet out of old CDs? I dunno, maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I have come to the conclusion that I am limited in the amount of income I can bring in doing what I do so another part of the experiment is to discover how much I can save by living lightly - and in this way contribute to the household income. We all know the economy is wobbly in the world and especially in South Africa just now. Nothing is for sure at the moment. This is my backup plan. A lifestyle that is efficient, less stressful, more healthy, economical, and planet friendly. I mean, isn’t that what we all want?

I hope you’ll follow my journey and help out where you can. I’m sure there is a wealth of knowledge between us - things you didn’t even know you knew, things you didn’t think had any value. Things you forgot you knew. I’ll be needing your advice and help along the way - it’s going to be easy to get lost in this story.

*And So It Begins

The first big steps to streamline how we live have begun. We have just sold our 3 bedroom house and bought an open-planned house instead. By ‘open plan’ I mean one big room. WOW! Dedication, right?  Well, I’d love to say that but really the house situation kind of came first and kick-started the whole realisation that we were using up so much unnecessarily.

Feeling restless, we casually started looking around at what kind of houses were available in our price range. The more we looked the more we felt that nothing really worked for us. Three rooms, a guest room, study - do we need a work room in the house for me? Maybe a garden flat? Oh, and a big lounge with a fireplace maybe. But none of the houses felt like us. Even though they had all the things we thought we wanted.

It was around this point that we started to pare down what we really needed and wanted in our home, and discovered that we really didn’t need most of what we thought we needed. It’s funny how you just get used to the way things are. We looked at our current home and realised that we live in the kitchen mostly. It’s fairly large and sunny and it leads onto our beautiful back garden, so when we have guests we all gravitate to the heart of the house, our kitchen and garden. So this is an important room for us. Tom is a writer and amateur photographer. He needs his study - and I need him to have his study! So that’s the second important room. What happens in our lounge? We watch TV. That’s it. A whole room just to watch TV. There is our bedroom were the bed is, obviously. And then another room that was a guest room but so seldom gets used we tend to fill it with stuff that doesn’t go anywhere else.  I wonder if we would keep that stuff if we didn’t have the room to keep it?  And a bathroom. I do need a bathroom. With a door.  I’m not that much of a hippy.

Having just decided we wanted one room and would find a way to build it we met the perfect estate agent who swept us up and showed us this house that had not even been listed yet. It felt like it was meant to be. It is basically one big room with a bathroom off the side and a scullery type space on the other side.  It looks small, but I really am pretty sure it is more or less the same floor space as we  actually use in our current home. It is on the edge of a beautiful large property - so much outside space! A panhandle property, it’s tucked away behind the front line of houses. We plan to build a wooden wendyhouse on the other end of the property for Tom, a proper man cave. There are already two smaller wendyhouses on the property, one for garden storage and one for all my stuff!

The next big step is that I have decided to close my shop and studio in town now that I will have space at home to work. I do prefer the scatterbrained way of working on my designs while stirring the stew for supper. My business will be run from my online website and I will do select markets and festivals as opportunities present themselves. This evolution of Kisma Kreative will allow me more flexible time and I can run a more efficient household and business in my own unique way. I am pretty damn sure I can save us loads of money on the grocery bill by having the time to think about how we use what we purchase.

I really am quite excited about our new adventure. Now while we wait until the house is ours we will have to do some cleaning out, passing on and jumble sales to make sure we only take what we need with us into the new house.

*Live Lightly

Hi there. My name is Tracy and I’m a closet tree-hugging, barefoot, hippy creative. Last month I turned 40. ‘The Big Four Oh’. ‘Life begins ... ,’ and all that.

Now, I’m not one to worry about getting old and I’m not prone to major epiphanies and the like, but something about this birthday has set me thinking about life, the world and my place in it. Do I really want what I think I want, or do I want it because I’m supposed to? I must want these things because that’s the way it is and you have to work many, many hours, make some money and live in a 3-bedroom house with two children, two dogs, a cat and a bond - regardless of what it will cost you, your children, your neighbors or the Earth.

Well, I don’t want that. As it turns out I want to live simply. I need to live lightly.

My husband Tom and I already try to be careful about bringing home plastic shopping bags, we turn off lights when we leave a room and we compost our perishables. We talk about taking our own containers to the butcher, or getting another bin so we can separate recyclables easily, but never really get there. I want to see if we can do more, so I am starting an experiment to find out:
Is is viable, affordable, healthy and sustainable to live lightly in the real world?

What do I mean by live lightly? The main idea is to have as little negative impact on the world as possible. We will try to reduce, reuse and recycle as much as possible. We will make do and mend. We will try to support local business if we have to buy new.  We will try to buy only fresh local farm produce instead of  shipped-in, plastic-covered, factory-made perishables. We will try to find alternate energy-saving sources of power (we don’t have much of a choice with this one anyway, what with load shedding every other month). We will try to live in a way that works for us, the planet, and our community even if it goes against the accepted norm of things. That’s kind of the fun part.

We are planning a few big changes to start with. I have no doubt it will be hard and we will cheat a bit along the way, maybe even come close to giving up. I hope not. I look forward to the challenge and hope you’ll come along with us on this adventure.