Margot Teller

Theft is the part people underweight. A cracked screen you can budget for; a phone taken on a night out is a bad week and a €900 problem if you're on a current handset. On a two-year-old phone worth €300, though, I agree with everyone else here.

Whatever you choose, check whether the card benefit requires you to be the named primary renter. Booking in your name and letting your partner drive has voided more claims than any exclusion I know of.

Paste the board rather than the paper if you aren't already. Less water goes into the sheet, the sheet stays dimensionally stable, and you get one clean placement instead of chasing a floppy wet endpaper across the bench.

Ambulance cover varies by state and catches people out constantly. Cheap to add, expensive to discover you didn't have it.

Yep. I compare warranty language before I compare fabric now. There are brands that will just fix the thing with no receipt and no argument, and once you have used one of those it becomes very hard to pay more for a five-year limited.

If you want a genuinely full pen, eyedropper it. Silicone grease on the threads, fill the barrel, four or five times the capacity. Only works on pens with no metal parts inside the barrel and no vent hole, so check first.

Let the cut piece hang for 24 hours before hemming. Cotton-lycra grows under its own weight, especially on anything near a bias curve, and if you hem it straight off the cutting table the length is already wrong.

The tear test is good, the wet test is more definitive if you're unsure. Cut two 2cm strips at right angles, wet them both, the one that curls more across its width is running the other way.

Worth knowing that some blue-blacks are iron gall or partly so, and those behave differently: drier, and much less tolerant of sitting unused. If yours is one, don't leave it in the pen for weeks at a time.

Expect the first FBA to look alarming on paper. The dart it adds is bigger than you think it should be and it's usually right.

One-time, for as long as I own the place, does change how I read the number.

Before you unpick, check whether the sleeve head is now sitting differently. On a lined jacket, taking in the body drags the armhole seam and the lining will tell you. If the lining is pulling at the underarm it needs releasing and re-hanging too, otherwise it'll bind even after you fix the shell.

One-time, for as long as I own the place, does change how I read the number.

This happened to me and I wrote off a perfectly good food over it. Second attempt at three weeks instead of one, same brand, no problem at all. Slow means slower than the bag tells you.

Noted. Thin passes, patience.

Ordered the Klucel. The box-and-stop option hadn't occurred to me and it's probably right, it gets opened about twice a year.

Two weeks off, change nothing else. That's a cleaner experiment than what I've been doing, which is changing two things a week and guessing.

Hadn't considered the base at all. Reading the ingredient list now and it's fairly heavy.

Doing exactly this. Hems this weekend, one pair to the tailor to see how it comes back.

Good point, I'd assumed. Asking tomorrow.

Half toiles. You almost never need both sides. Cut one side, fit it, and you halve the fabric and the sewing time. Save full ones for something asymmetric or a final check.

Make paste in small batches and keep it in the fridge no more than three or four days. Most paste problems are just paste that's a week old.

Also just contact the retailer. Above 20 pounds, most decent sellers will exchange or have their nib person look at it, and scratchy in one direction is a normal thing to ask about rather than a complaint they'll find odd.

Note it in seconds rather than better or worse. It's the only way to tell slow improvement from wishful thinking.