Saving...Part 2 Do it yourself

You may have noticed, I'm a bit obsessed with cost analysis.  Part of that stems from a desire to save save save, and the other part from the fact that I just went from a nearly full time, classroom situation, to working one day a week at my job.  We made this change as a family in order to homeschool and allow for me to spend more time with the kiddos. So here are some ways we save money by doing it ourselves.

1) Laundry soap.  It takes almost the same amount of time to make as it does to take it off the shelf and at a savings of /load, it's a real bargain.  It even takes paint out of clothing!
2) Baking and Cooking.  We make our own everything here, bread, pie, cookies...we eat homemade dinners, pack lunches, cook breakfast.  I have even started making yogurt (more on that another day.)  We try to keep it simple, healthy, and nutritious.  At times we don't succeed at this, but we try to keep it good for us at least 80% of the time.
3) Canning, Freezing, Dehydrating.  You've seen about many of the different things I've done here from the Rose Hip Jelly to the Applesauce and many others in between
4) Fixing.  Mend what needs to be mended, maintain things to make them last longer.
5) Don't be afraid to ask questions, ask for help, and ask opinions.  Others have done this before me and I often ask what they think about what I should do.  We've saved ourselves lots of problems this way.  We are also always open to helping hands!
6) Raising chickens (Country sister does this and more! check out each word) for eggs and occasionally meat.
7) Our garden...our connection to the land, food sources, and lots of tomatoes

date is wrong!

Sorry about the lack of pictures in this one, I gave you links to the archives instead of lots of picts of all this stuff!

What are some other ways we could do things ourselves to save?

What are you doing?

Fall Cleaning...Step 1

Fall is here...I feel it in the crisp mornings, the tomatoes deciding to all turn red at the same time (all the better for me to can you my pretties), the desire to wear sweaters...and the desire to purge the house.  After several weeks of looking at the massive pile of "to iron" clothes, I broke down and spent the evening ironing while the hubby read books and told me interesting tidbits about them to make the dreaded task go quicker.  As I ironed, he also would look up and say, "That doesn't fit." or "Don't you see the stain on that one?" or the "Those cuffs are horrible!"  These I put aside for another purpose.  We then went through each of our clossets and drawers and purged further.  Then we made piles of all the clothes we had purged.  Two grocery bags went to St. Vincent DePaul's.  The ones that were too stained, ripped, or otherwise unable to be given away, went to the scrapyard.  I cut all the useable fabric out of the various shirts and pants to be used in later projects.  I also had a pillow that had bust it's seam.  This pillow got a bizarre makeover.



Before the project



First I took the shirt and cut off the arms.  I left on the seams for the arms thinking it would help keep the integrity of the fabric.  Then I turned the shirt wrong side out and sewed up the arm holes.



Arms sewn up



Then I used a different part of fabric (the sleve of hubby's shirt) and sewed it into the neck of the shirt since it was a v-neck and I couldn't just sew up the neck hole.

Cut to fit.

Then  I put the pillow in the new sack and sewed it up.  Others may have used buttons or a zipper to make it removable, I just wanted to get the job done.  It looks weird, but as W. said, "It's like mommy is on the couch snuggling me anytime I want."

The finished product

From the fabric I also have a few more projects in mind...I may just share with you.

A future...