Wonderful Ways to Save Money. Part two

 

Saving money at home works a bit like an onion!

You start with the outer layer and that’s all you can see right now. Underneath that are deeper richer layers as yet undiscovered. Your outer layers of money saving ideas are good enough to begin with, because as you peel that back, you will easily see the next layer.

Home Economy 

Really what we are talking about here is far richer than simply “Money Saving”. It is Home Economics. That was the name of our school classes where we learned how to shop wisely,  to select and buy inexpensive nutritious foods, to store it to keep it at its best, to prepare and cook it, use the oven economically, menu plan, organise the kitchen and the home ( so we don’t spend half our time trying to find things), to maintain routines that keep our homes clean and comfortable…

If this all seems impossible and you are saying “Yes, I would love to do all those things, but I can’t do them. I am just not domesticated!” You are not lacking in the domesticated gene and you don’t have to be a natural in any of this. As Flylady used to say; Babysteps, babysteps. You cannot rush this. Like rushing around in this digital era, rushing is not healthy, it only leads to stress.

What small step can you take today in your own private home economics class? 

Buy a simple magnetic tear  off pad that sticks to your fridge, and use it to jot down menu ideas. This one has a shopping list beside the menu plan so you can take it shopping with you.

If you plan a delicious and economical slow-cooker casserole, put it on the counter the night before before. If you like, you can chop any vegetables the night before and pop in the fridge in an airtight container. The aroma in your kitchen will be amazing. What a lovely welcome for you and the family. Freeze any leftovers even if it is a small amount. This will provide a portion to refrigerate and eat the next day, or a wonderful stock for your next cooking adventure 

Braised beef and vegetable casserole , with mushrooms and 2 tablespoons of dried red lentils added about 40 minutes before the end. In my freezer I keep a few baked jacket potatoes. If you put a small to medium frozen jacket potato on top of the gravy line, frozen, at the time everything goes in, it will be fully hot and taste really nice with the casserole 

The quality of your food will far surpass what you can buy ready made. In total this hearty meal, fit to generously feed a family of four, or two people with at least a single portion to freeze or have from lunch tomorrow, costs less than £5 or $6 , and you could certainly cut that down by gently tweaking the recipe.

PS. If you want the quickest way to hear your husband say. “Give up working outside the home, darling. I love coming home to your smile, and your dinners!”, use your slow-cooker regularly 😊

PPS. You don’t need to buy fancy flavourings, seasonings or lots of ingredients. They are unnecessary and will add to the cost. I flavour my casseroles with things like a good squirt of brown (Daddies Sauce) and a shake of Worcestershire sauce. The meat and vegetables keep their flavour in the slow- cooker because there is no evaporation 

I welcome kind comments or questions.  Although I am British, I can understand American very well 😁 

The “Good Life” Key is in Your Hand

 

So many things that we would dearly love to have in our life, we already possess (if only we take the time to see it, instead of chasing around wishing it were so)

I have realised this wonderful truth as I have become older.

The sad thing is that the younger people of today, the wives, the husbands, the children, can take no time because they are chasing their tails and becoming completely exhausted and unhappy. They do not believe that the good life is possible any more. But it is. 

Not too long ago, although families had their difficulties and worries, one thing they had was a naturally- paced, home and family focused lifestyle. It was the norm for many, many people back then. Today the media tells people continually that we must always be entertaining or improving ourselves with gadgets, screens, labour-saving shoddy items because it will make us super-happy. Hmmm, do you know anyone who is super-  happy living this way? I don’t.

That lifestyle and believing is making us sick, morbidly obese, sleepless, poor, frightened, afraid, isolated from everybody because we have become addicted to screens and texting. We are lonely and anxious, and can’t even eat at the table without checking  phones and stressing about whether people think we are good looking, intelligent or accomplished enough.

When I was growing up, we did not have a perfectly functioning family and it wasn’t always fun. But life was calmer, we could think, we took breaks, we slowed down to smell the coffee and so did most people around us,  friends, relatives, neighbours.  Compared with today they were rich, golden days. They were the true Good Life ways,  and available to us now, right now if we choose to begin to live them. The miracle is, that as wives and mothers and potential homemakers, we are the only ones that have that golden key to bring the Good Life in, bless ourselves, bless our families, bless our neighbours…

Many women don’t believe that they can be holding a golden key that will unlock the “Good Life” that we used to know back then. The trick is NOT to THINK about it, but to actually DO it. Try the key. 

We have to bypass analysis BECAUSE we have been trained over decades and through the immense power of media, that what I am proposing is preposterous and won’t work today! 

So, if you would like to try it for yourself , I strongly suggest you don’t spend anytime worrying about  whether it is possible (it is). Try the experiment for yourself in teeny tiny ways and remember you are in charge of what life choices you make. I am not your guru 😁 and I am certainly not advising you to do or think anything that you don’t want to do. I am not a therapist. If you are working but would like not to work, for example , just put a few of these things in place and don’t be in a rush.

The blog below is a great place to start. It’s a wonderful inspiring story that has been continued by a blogger. I think we can learn quite a bit about the Good Life and how to attain it. 

www.whenqueensrideby.blogspot.com

Principle #1

We are the ONLY one who has to change.

Therefore we are fully empowered. As a wife, mother or homemaker our quiet influence affects our home and family, and they WILL reflect that influence back to us, slowly (sometimes fast) and surely. 

This blog post is getting a bit long. Perhaps you can understand this more by reading the story and blog I linked above. But here are one or two simple ideas to get you started. Be careful - and avoid playing the martyr. That’s definitely not what I am suggesting.

1. If your goal includes being at home as a homemaker, you have to start learning now how to run a home and really make a difference. Think about the atmosphere and comforts of home that you as a homemaker can bring. It takes time, but start by maybe thinking about a very simple, easy to prepare,  inexpensive meal that you can cook at home for your family. Don’t insist on telling everyone what hard work it was. Just enjoy the meal. 

2. Smile. Yes, smile! If you are married smile and greet your husband as though he is valued and dear to you. Smile and hug your children or just say “Good to see you home, get changed and I will make you a hot drink”. 

You are setting the tone. 

I hope you have enjoyed this post. 

 

Wonderful Ways to save Money. Part One

 

It is hard for people to grasp this truth, but the amount of money the housewife and homemaker can save is staggering. 

And Yes, I do believe it is possible to become a full time wife and homemaker in a modest income household, even today. Stay tuned.

I would like to make a whole series of posts, giving tips and ideas on this subject. In my experience it is much easier to get the most out of these if there are not too many suggested at once. All these suggestions will be pleasant and rewarding. The idea is that we get a sense of joy and contentment and also a sense of satisfaction as we begin to reap the rewards.

I am fortunate enough to remember how life was before the Internet. There were lots of housewives back then. They enjoyed their homes and their family life.  They didn’t work at the pace of today where there is no time to think or sit down with a cup of tea and a bit of knitting or to write a real letter to a real friend (as opposed to a quick text or posting a selfie to your Instagram page).

1. Get good at what you do by getting off the internet 

We all know deep down that the internet, particularly social media is now engineered towards getting you addicted. That’s why we can’t get off it. Notifications and toxic news especially are giving us high levels of anxiety and stress. We are so frazzled that it’s hard to think straight. We begin to react to everything instead of pausing, before deciding the best way to respond sensibly to a particular situation.

But as we have observed, getting off the internet is not a simple matter  The anxiety stays with us for a quite a while when we switch off from all the fast stuff on our screens. We have to think first about what everyone did when there was no internet at all. When there were no mobile phones. 

So my first suggestion is to think about things you enjoy, or might like to try, that are mainly home-based, and don’t involve screen time. 

Could it be baking or cooking and making simple but delicious meals or cookies for the family?

Perhaps, reading a real, physical book from your bookshelf.

Taking up crochet, knitting, a bit of sewing, making cards, drawing, or other craft you can do at home. 

Could you start a little bit of a garden?

Listen to relaxing classical music or learn about the great composers.

(Have you noticed a problem about these suggestions? Hmmm. How can you learn to get good at any of these if you don’t go on the internet? )

I suggest that you don’t have to get immediate answers. Don’t go straight to Google or YouTube for your answers. Think a bit about how pre-internet society learned these things. One extremely popular way they learned things was to go to the local library. They are usually free, and they can order books from other libraries for you too. Libraries can be addictive but in such a nice way! 

Be intentional about what you go online for. For instance, once a week I go  onto YouTube specifically to watch the new video by the channel Frugal Money saver. The link to this channel is at the top right on this blog. Or go to YouTube directly and type Frugal Money Saver Channel into the search bar. Have your notebook and pen ready to note down ideas and recipes you like and check out the wonderful comments under the videos posted by viewers 

Trot along to a thrift store or charity shop. Here you can often discover helpful books. (Vintage are usually better than modern). Old style cookery books especially the hardbacks are illustrated so beautifully and you can browse them at home like magazines. You can also often find craft supplies like yarn and fabric.

Get to know your neighbours. Many neighbours already have experience of the pre-internet activities that you want to learn, and would be happy to talk and show you about them. 

Another way to learn is almost lost art. And that is to think it out yourself. Try out ideas, and make notes about what works and what you want to tweak for next time. This is the way many people learned to do things in the past and it gives tremendous confidence over time. For instance, many mothers and homemakers could sew clothes and bake cakes without using a pattern or recipe book.

Most of the things listed above will be very inexpensive. By doing these things you will be less likely to go internet shopping, or impulse buy, of run out for entertainment outside the home. You will already begin to save a lot of money.

Until next time, thank you for joining me today. 

Please leave a comment. I would love to hear from you. 

 

Simple Sewing. Couple of small projects and a surprise for me!

 Thank you for joining me today,

I am continuing to find ways to use up the small pieces of fabric in my box. 

I had a dark blue strip of cotton and wondered what to do with it. A while ago I had knitted a cosy for our cafetière. It had begun to stretch slightly, so I decided to line the inside of the cosy with the fabric. This would give it strength and help insulate the coffee better.

First, I pressed the fabric under a damp cloth to get any creases out. N

Next, I folded over a quarter of an inch on all sides, and then folded them over again a quarter of an inch. I gave another press with the iron for nice crisply folded edges. 

Then I lay the Fabric on top of the wrong side of the cafetière. The  hems are facing the cosy so you won’t see them. I carefully hand stitched the fabric to the cosy.

This little bag/purse is for my granddaughter. I had some small bits of bee printed fabric to give a bit more interest. It was a case of folding the fabric in different ways to see what style I could come up with. I folded in a section as you can see to curve the edges at the bottom.

I think my little granddaughter will love her bag. Next time I would remove some of the bulky edges as they were difficult for my machine to get through. I overstitched the curved edges by hand and that came out nicely.

The surprise 

Just as I was almost out of fabric in my box, A friend emailed me to say she was having a clear out of her fabrics and hopefully I wouldn’t mind, but she has sent me three packages of fat quarters, and various offcuts of cotton fabric, large and small!

It looks like I am going to be sewing again very soon.

Knitting. Jean Greenhowe Free Toy Knitting Patterns

 

Here is my William the Snowman, finished today. He will be a Christmas Present for my grandson.

If you enjoy knitting toys, here is the free pattern you can download from Jean Greenhowe. There are quite a few others too.

 The late Jean Greenhowe designed the most delightful, simple, easy to use toy patterns. She was beloved by many knitters, and her famous booklets are still available to purchase also.

https://jeangreenhowe.com/patterns.html 

Simple sewing. Hemmed table mat

Recently I have been wanting to use up the little pieces of fabric I have. I don’t have much fabric at all, but am planning to sew some simple dresses and maybe a skirt or two in the future. I will be buying fabric for each project as I go, which is a nice calm way to go about things.

A housewife’s fabrics are resources, to be enjoyed - and used. Otherwise they can cease to be a resource, and morph into burdens, that will not benefit us.

I began to look at my unused or half used fat quarters, one at a time. There was an attractive green floral FQ in the box which seemed a good place to start

The above planning sketch was not intended to be a work of art 😊 

I used a hot iron on the steam setting,  to press all the creases out, then folded over about a quarter of an inch on all sides once. Then folded  over again and pressed to get a nice crisp fold

At this point I could have hand stitched along the hems, but decided to use my old Bernina mini-matic sewing machine to sew them, on the straight stitch setting. Then I pressed all around again to “set the stitches”. 

I hope to post more simple projects if you find them interesting 

You Don’t Need a Schedule

You Don't Need a Schedule.

Do you need a schedule to observe a flower's bloom?
To rest your eyes on soft blue skies,  or hum a happy tune?
Is a grand plan necessary to read that cheering book?
Or at a golden setting sun , to stop and have a look?
Or wear that lovely floral skirt  that makes you feel so pretty?
- You only need a schedule for the boring and the gritty!

The world of work must use them, along with motivation
to knuckle down (and pray that it's soon time for your vacation),
The world of work demands  we work at such relentless pace
No time to think of life and love, no respite and no grace.

But housewife dear, the thing is clear
Our natural way is not
to rush and push and stress ourselves
until we're super hot!

Slow down and smell the coffee! The home-made cakes and pies
And see a pretty, tidy home, appear before your eyes.
Read stories to the children and listen to their worry
Mummy makes it better when she isn't in a hurry,
Greet dear hubby at the door, the man you love and married,
You cannot do these things at work, or if you're rushed and harried.

You do not need a schedule to love your housewife day,
There is no rush - it does get done, and you'll have time to play,
Many joys await you and contented moments too,
But don't expect the world to understand the things you do.
Turn off the computer, and the mobile and TV,
Take time, enjoy and potter round - and have a cup of tea! 

ⓒ Lesley Bambridge 2018

If you would like to use my poetry please ask me first and attribute me
You may save and print out all posts on this blog for your own personal homemaking use only. Thank you.