September is…..

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Barb

I can feel it in the air: it’s a little cooler in the mornings and evenings, and the bright green of the trees is starting to fade to yellow. Fall isn’t far away, and it’s back-to-school time.

Like most people, I went to school as a child, so I grew up thinking September was the time for a fresh start each year. Even after I graduated from college and began working, September was the time when everyone was back in the office after their summer vacations, ready to start work on the new sales campaigns and catalogs.

Once I had children, all of whom I homeschooled, September was still back-to-school time, even if we’d been homeschooling all summer, because the neighborhood kids went back to school and our subdivision became very quiet during the day.

Now my youngest is in his 20s, and it’s been several years since we finished homeschooling. I’d like September to become just another month. But the sign out front of the neighborhood school says “Welcome back!” and the stores are filled with displays of school supplies on sale. There’s no escaping it: even if we’re not back to school, the rest of the world is.

Blast from the Past: Frugal Tools: Sewing Machines

Posted on June 29, 2015 by Barb

In Stitches by Susan Eby Glass
In Stitches

Being able to use a sewing machine is such a gift. I learned to sew at the age of 12, and I can’t even imagine how much money it has saved me over my lifetime. I’ve made my own clothes as well as clothes for others. I have no idea how many window treatments I’ve made over the years.

Being a quilter, I’ve made dozens of quilt tops, including many that went to poor families in other countries after the ladies at my church and I added batting and backing to them, so I don’t even know where they are now.

It frustrates me when someone says, “I wish I could sew, but I can’t.” That’s just an excuse. Sewing is as easy as driving, and a lot safer.

Once you know how to use a sewing machine, you can save all sorts of money. We live in a society where most people pitch things and buy new instead of fixing what they have, but I think taking care of what you have is going to come back into style by necessity before much longer.

Think about your bath towels. You know how one side will come loose and get stringy? And then the strings get caught in the washer, which makes the situation worse? If you have a sewing machine, you can hem that side as soon as it starts to come apart so that your towels stay nice and you don’t have to replace them. All that takes is a straight seam…no big deal. But it saves money, because new towels aren’t cheap (at least they aren’t if you like them nice and thick like we do!)

What about hems that come apart on shirts or dresses? It’ll take longer to set up your machine than to sew a hem back up. My son is short, and even the shortest men’s jeans are long on him, so eventually the hems become frayed. My daughter can trim them and sew them pretty quickly on her sewing machine (a job that would take too long by hand and wouldn’t hold up nearly as well either).

Sometimes I use my sewing machine to make one thing into another. A while back I was out shopping and saw a set of three linen dishtowels on clearance for $4. One of the towels was striped, and the other two were in a coordinating print that really caught my eye. I have a pillow at home that had faded quite a bit, and I decided I’d like a new pillow out of those dishtowels, which I bought. I made a nice pillow cover out of the two matching ones, and use the striped one in my kitchen. My newly recovered pillow looks so pretty! Not bad for approximately $2.66 plus tax, and it’s very sturdy because dishtowels are made to get a lot of use.

I’m carrying on the “remaking” tradition from my grandmother, who was a single mom of four small children during the Great Depression. People sometimes gave her hand-me-downs, and she found that when she was given coats, they were women’s coats, not children’s coats, perhaps because the children had worn out their coats while the women took care of theirs.

In any case, she needed coats for her growing children much more than she needed coats for herself, so she accepted every woman’s coat she was offered, cut apart the pieces, and then laid out pattern pieces for kids’ coats on the cut-up coat pieces. She cut them out and sewed them together. In this way, her kids were always kept warm in nice, “new” coats and the only cost to her was her time.

(Once you’ve remade things a few times, it’s funny how you look at everything with an eye to how you could use it to make something. My grandma never did shake the remaking habit. By the time she was a great-grandma, she had begun buying up all the 1970s polyester pants she could find at garage sales and thrift stores. She cut them into strips and wove them into braided rugs. Let me tell you, they are indestructible. We have two that she made for us in the 1980s and they’re still holding up well.)

(Originally posted 1/28/09.)

Blast from the Past: Lovely Leftovers

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Barb

Go to your wallet, take out two or three dollars and throw them out in the street.

Sounds silly, but that’s what you’re doing when you pitch leftovers.

Leftovers get a bad rap, but when you throw out leftovers, while they’re fresh or once they’ve gone bad, you’re throwing away your food dollars.

I think leftovers are wonderful. I often double a recipe I’m making for dinner and we eat it two nights in a row. My husband doesn’t mind (he loves home cooking), and it means I only have to reheat dinner the next night instead of making something from scratch. Since I work at home, I’m always looking for easy, economical ways to make dinner, and leftovers fill the bill.

Yesterday we had a wonderful rump roast with mashed potatoes and peas for dinner. Afterwards, there were no veggies left over but quite a bit of roast. So I cubed the leftover roast, added the drippings, and put the cubes in the fridge.

Tonight I nuked some potatoes, then sliced them and fried them in a little oil with some leftover onion slices. I added half of the beef cubes and stir-fried them until they were hot. Topped with Trader Joe’s organic ketchup, it was a delicious dinner.

I put the rest of the beef cubes into the freezer. The next time I make noodle soup, I’ll toss them in, along with any leftover celery, carrots or onion I may have sitting in the fridge at that time.

I do that a lot with meat. If I’m oven-frying chicken pieces, I like to cook extra (the family packs are always a better price anyways) and freeze the uneaten chicken after stripping it off the bones. Then it just waits in the freezer to be added to soup or chicken tortellini salad.

Sometimes I forget what I have left over in the fridge. I used to be afraid to use old leftovers because I wasn’t sure just how old they were. But I got in the habit of writing down menus ahead of time, and now I just look at the calendar to see which day we had the pork chops, or whatever. I’m pretty strict about leftovers; once they’re four days old, I’m afraid of them. So I make a real effort to use them up before the fourth day.

Often, I find weird odds and ends in the fridge and wonder how to combine them. An omelette serves this purpose pretty well. All sorts of veggies or meat taste good in a cheese omelette. A little leftover cheese is good in muffins or bread. A couple of lonely hot dogs can be sliced and stirred into a pan of homemade cornbread. Mmmm….there’s never any leftovers of that stuff!

On the rare occasions when we go out to eat, we always bring the leftover part of our dinner home with us. Restaurant portions are so huge these days that you can’t finish dinner anyway, but they taste even better as the next day’s lunch. I’m not embarrassed to ask for a take-home box. If anyone who sees me with it thinks I must be cheap or tacky, that’s only fair, because I think people like that are stuck-up and very likely not debt-free like we are. 😉

Whether your leftovers come from the fridge, the freezer or the restaurant, the most important thing to remember about leftovers is that they’re like money…if you lose track of them, it costs you. Leftovers can really stretch your food dollar by making sure you don’t waste anything.

(Originally posted 1/21/09.)

Blast from the Past: Woodworking with Dad

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Barb

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Now that our son is not a little boy anymore, we’ve been getting him involved in useful projects that require him to work with his hands.

A few weeks before Christmas, my husband asked dsds15 if he’d like to make his gifts for family members in the workshop. Of course, he got a big yes, because what boy doesn’t like working with his dad?

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The project my husband chose was a pencil holder (link includes plans) made of pine, a soft and pretty wood that’s easy to work with, which is especially important if you’re new to woodworking. The two of them spent several afternoons working on six pencil boxes, which turned out very well. The recipients were quite pleased, and our son was so proud!

In difficult economic times, working with your hands is quite the skill to have, making a person more self-sufficient as well as more useful on the job. I think we homeschoolers need to make sure our kids can work with their hands so they’re prepared for whatever our economic future holds.

(Originally posted 1/13/09. Our son is now in his 20s and still enjoys working with his dad in the shop. They even built a desk for his room together.)

The Duggars: When Homeschool Idols Have Clay Feet

Posted on May 23, 2015 by Barb

Though I’ve never watched the Duggars on television, only a hermit would have to be unaware of them, because they’re all over the Internet too. And we’ll be inundated with Duggar reports now that the media has discovered an unreported scandal in the Duggar family some years ago.

This large Christian homeschooling family became idols for some people, who were stunned by their ability to raise children who were so different from the rest of the world. But now we’ve learned that they’re not so different after all; they have clay feet like everyone else, and the specific incident that has caused all the commotion was actually criminal in nature.

I have strong opinions about what went on with their eldest son, but my purpose here is not to air them. I’m more concerned about what this revelation will do to the average person’s conception of homeschooling, and the average Christian homeschooler’s perception of what a homeschooling family can really be. I hate that this news casts a negative shadow on homeschooling. But many in the homeschooling community have asked for this by putting these people on a pedestal.

Indeed, since homeschooling began getting major attention 20+ years ago, some Christian homeschooling families have put themselves up on pedestals, just as the Duggars did, and in every case I know of, they eventually came crashing down, leaving disillusioned homeschoolers in their wake. Without naming names, I’m thinking of a Christian homeschooling mom who was a gifted public speaker with a hidden dark personal life, a Christian homeschooling dad who ran a successful business but let his weaknesses take over and destroy his business and hurt his family, a man who ran an empire that mesmerized many homeschool families while he took advantage of young women volunteering for his organization…..so you see, the Duggars are just the latest in a series of people in the homeschooling sphere who become idols, gain tremendous popularity and then disillusion those who admire them by crashing and burning in a spectacular way.

If you’re one of the disillusioned, please don’t let it sway your good opinion of homeschooling. For every one of these people who give homeschooling a black eye, there are hundreds of hardworking parents who are giving their kids a healthy, happy home life along with a solid education. They don’t go about trumpeting themselves, and they avoid pedestals, but their families are living proof that homeschooling works. Maybe you’re one of them. 🙂

My hope is that more and more homeschoolers will learn to trust their own instincts instead of looking for high-profile homeschoolers to imitate. Maybe this latest episode of “Crash and Burn Homeschoolers” will convince them to change the channel.