Sweater Blanket in Honor of Grandma Rose

You know when you have an idea for a project, and you look online and see that pretty much no one else has done it, and then you think: Maybe there's a reason no one else is doing it this way?

Well, I'm happy to say that I did my project anyway and got away with it!

This is kind of a quilt in that it has three layers: old sweaters, an old wool blanket, and old sweaters.  The reason that you're probably not supposed to do this is because the sweaters were made out of different kinds of weaving -- close weave, loose weave, everything in between -- and they are likely to pull, warp, and generally not hold their shape.  I decided to reduce the risk by doing WAY more ties than normal.  The usual rule of thumb, according to the collective wisdom of the internet anyway, is to space them so that whenever you put your hand down, you cover at least one tie.  I did a lot more than that, and I increased the frequency of ties around the edges.

 The resulting quilt/blanket is HEAVY.  It was a gift for my husband and he really loves it!

 

Above is the worn-out wool blanket with holes that I used for the batting.

I ended up just cutting off a section because it had too many holes.

 

Unwanted sweaters and a scarf from my husband.

I did lots of pinning.  I was worried about the stretchiness of the knits leading to lots of warping.

I just serged the edges.  Not at all the correct way to bind a quilt!

 

 

2024 Strawberry Total

 The results are in!  This year we harvested 17.4 pounds of strawberries from our backyard!  At a conservative $1.99/lb for fresh organic strawberries, that is $34.62 worth of strawberries.  I have been freezing whatever doesn't get eaten right away, and hope to be adding garden-grown strawberries to my oatmeal for weeks.  :)

Last years harvest was 13 pounds.  This is all from 12 strawberry seedlings we bought in 2022 for $9.96.

Next up - planting runners in little yogurt dishes so that we can transplant them wherever we want.  I'm hoping to keep refreshing the beds this way and never have to buy new strawberry seedlings again.

I will say that strawberries are fairly labor-intensive.  During the peak of the season I've been known to spend two hours harvesting, coring, washing, weighing, blending, and freezing them.  But so worth it!

2023 Garden Totals

 

Carrots: Your size may vary....

Very tall sunflowers....

 

We didn't weigh sunflower seeds, mostly because we were unable to get to them before the birds and squirrels did.  But sunflowers were about the only thing that did really well this year.  I guess beans did OK. But I planted a lot of them. Strawberries were impressive.  But some of our regulars were duds.  Glad I'm not depending on the garden to get us through the winter.....

Totals, in pounds:

Asparagus - .5
Purple Beans - 21.1
Potatoes - 2.5
Cherry Tomatoes - .1
Tomatoes - 99.7
Okra - 0  (First total fail on okra EVER!  Normally, you just toss the seed over your shoulder and walk away.  We replanted THREE times - no success.)
Garlic - 1.6
Squash - 15.2
Carrots - 1.5
zucchini - 15.8
Kholrabi - 8.1
Peppers - .9
Beets - 8.7
Radishes - .3
Armenian Cucumbers - 3.7
Strawberries - 13.2
Leeks - 1.4
Watermelon - 23.4

Total - 217.7 pounds

Expenses, including absurdly expensive watering cans and self-watering tubs that required potting soil to work (boo!), more PVC hoops, binder clips, a new leaf chopper and a soil test: $607.50.

Normally, the garden isn't nearly that expensive.  But anyway, the total was $2.79 a pound, which if you consider that all of that is organic and fresh, really isn't that bad.  But I'm hoping for much better the next time we garden.

My Christmas letter had lower totals because I had forgotten the leeks and the watermelon.

Don't Throw Away... Old Calendars

 You can use old calendars as wrapping paper for small gifts.  I like to find a theme and chose a month that matches the recipient.

Gardening to save money?

I spent an hour gathering these beans this morning. I'll probably spend another half an hour processing them. I could buy the same amount for about $5, which makes my hourly rate pretty dismal.

Now granted, these are tastier then what I get in the store, and probably healthier as well since these will be more fresh when they are eaten. (Most of them will be frozen and eaten this winter, but even then, I am guessing freezing them right away preserves more nutrition then what probably happens to commercially processed ones.)  They were not harvested by children or people being exploited. And it is quite satisfying to eat food you have grown yourself.

But if you are in it for the money, I'd just get a part-time job

Garage Sale

I promised AFTER photos so here they are:

We used 15 tables of varying sizes, plus a door placed between two tables, PLUS boxes of books on folding chairs.  And we needed every inch.  We got rid of a LOT of stuff!

The garage sale went quite well.  We made $537, although probably half of the items that brought in big money were from other people.  The dialog went something like this:

ME: "My husband wants to have a garage sale, although I keep telling him we don't have enough stuff."

FRIEND/BOSS/RELATIVE: Oh, I have some stuff I was just going to drop off at the thrift store.  Do you want it?

ME: Sure!  Do you want half the profits?

FRIEND/BOSS/RELATIVE: Nah.  Just keep it.  I was just going to donate the stuff anyway, and garage sales are a lot of work. 

So that's how we got the Wii, the steam mop, the party dresses, and the scooters.  We did have some big things that were ours: the bodhran, the pull-up bars, and the small table.  We probably priced things way too cheap, but, hey, they are out the door.

My biggest garage sale tips are:
1) Join a neighborhood garage sale if possible
2) "All unmarked items .25" - or .50, or whatever.  Saves SO MUCH time!
3) Signs: "All plants $3"  "All books _____" "All fabric = make an offer."
4) Start working on it a few months in advance.  It's still way too much work for the $ you'll get, but you won't notice as much!
5) Try to have at least three people there for safety as well as convenience.  Oh, and occasionally bring the profits into the house in case you do get robbed.
6) If someone does want their profits back (or part of their profits back) then they need to do their own pricing.

I actually rather enjoyed this garage sale.  Most of the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and it felt good to get things out of the house.  We made more than enough to pay for the freezer.  People were quite pleasant despite the heat.  I like sales.  It was all good.

It's still my last one, just because there are other things I'd rather do more.  But it wasn't a bad experience.

Paying Off the House Part II: How We Did It

Warning: This really isn’t all that dramatic.. but it’s not that hard, either.

Here's what we did:

• We paid off our credit cards every month and never had to pay interest on them.
• We lived slightly better than we did as college students.  We avoided lifestyle creep, where you gradually buy nicer and nicer things, go on bigger and better vacation, have to have the latest greatest bill-in-the-blank because you are able to.  I think lifestyle creep is a huge reason that many middle-class folks people don’t save much.  (“Let’s buy it because we can afford it now” is such a bad idea!)   We pretty much do it our way, and spend money where we value it, and not where everyone else says we should.  That is enormously liberating and really cheap.
• A lot of being able to pay off the house early came from a total lack of interest in keeping up with the Joneses.  Our friends are ordinary folk, many of whom are also pretty frugal, usually so that they can afford to have a stay-at-home parent.  I don't try to keep up with our wealthier friends.  It helps that I don't particularly want expensive clothes or electronics — I’d just get chocolate on the clothes and break or lose the expensive toys!  (I’m very fond of chocolate — and really, really clumsy!)

Example: I work in an office with lots of elegantly dressed women. However, I own only two pairs of black shoes, black flats and sketchers.

• We spend money on the stuff we truly enjoy like travel and board games, and sometimes biking and gardening. We don't spend it mindlessly or on autopilot. I have thrift store clothes but I joined my mom and sister on a trip to Europe one year and the next spent five weeks in Croatia, including nine days on an island in the Adriatic with my in-laws.  The fact that I do the one makes the other one much easier to afford.  Plus I don't feel deprived because I get to do want I really want to do.
• What we do to entertain ourselves is more active.  We create things.  We do projects.  A bonus is that that helps us solve problems, like we’ll build our own shelving that is custom-designed for what we want to put on it.
• We don't spend money we don't have. We save up or do without.
• We avoid monthly bills.  I have a smart phone, for example, but it was a gift from a wealthier relation who is upgrading, and I've never gotten a plan for it because I don't want to pay that data plan every month.  We don't avoid monthly bills entirely, of course – who could?  But our little flip phone doesn't cost much.  (Actually, we should probably reevaluate that at some point and make sure that that is still true!)
  
• Leisure doesn't have to be pricey.  We enjoy books and movies from the library, which is free.  My hobbies, at least, tend to be pretty inexpensive like crafting from recycled materials, as opposed to shopping, golf, etc.  We like to geocache, which is free after you've bought the GPS.  (We have had the same one for 20 years.  It still works.)

Example: On Sunday we spent time with our dear friend Anne.  We talked, we went for a walk around a lake, we got groceries and then made dinner together.  After dinner we played a board game. It was a lovely day and far less expensive than dinner and a movie for three people, or chatting over cocktails.

As far as the more extreme things, like gardening to grow some of our own food and sewing to make some of our own clothes, I think those helped more as a reminder of our frugal identity than as a whole lot of actual cash savings.  Yes, making or growing what you want instead of buying it is cheaper.  But it's more along the lines of: "If I'm the sort of person who spends all day Saturday making a skirt, it doesn't make sense to blow $200 on leather boots.” Plus I enjoy sewing and gardening, and I have deliberately cultivated hobbies that save money.

Paying off the house was really slow, really steady, really not all that dramatic.  If it is something you would like to do, you can start the way we did — by putting a little extra towards the mortgage every month.  We made exactly two normal mortgage payments the entire time we paid on the house, and that was because my husband was out of work.  Every other payment was something extra, even if it was only $100.

Paying Off the House, Part I: The Big Picture

About this time last year, we paid off our house!

We purchased it in September 2009 and paid it off in August 2018, which I thought was pretty good.

This is the part where most bloggers announce something dramatic, like living on Ramen noodles and dandelions, or the opposite – they casually mention that they're both computer programmers making big salaries.

Sorry to disappoint you, but neither of those is true.  We lived a pretty ordinary lifestyle which is frugal, but not extreme.  And during the time that we were paying down the mortgage, we never even made six figures… combined.

Now What?

And so we are coming at last to something I have longed for, something I've wanted for many, many years: normal.   My husband is ill and my belly-button is still not healed but soon, please God, those things will be behind us and ordinary life will be in front of us.  Right now, I don't have to stress about money, or work, or really anything at all.  I have less time, but it doesn't really feel that way as often as I thought it would because work stays at work for the most part.

So what shall I do with the free time that I have?  What do I do with all this drive, passion, and energy?

Before I used a lot of my free time for money-saving activities and money-earning activities.  I did freelance writing, I did crafting, I did penny-pinching.  But I don't really need to do those things now.  Yes, that sort of thing will help me pay off the house a little bit sooner.  But is that little bit worth it?  If I did all of those things when would I ever relax?

I'm sure many of the habits of frugality I have contracted will remain.  And because I was too sick to go to the craft fair this year, the stuff I made for it also remains.  Do I go next year?  As I get farther and farther away from that other life that I wanted to escape from so intensely, crafting starts to seem kind of silly.  I knew that I could work all afternoon making gift bags and earn five dollars, but I was so eager to do any little thing I could to escape my situation that I didn't really mind much.  It will be interesting to see if all of that gradually fades away.

More importantly, I think when we have a big change in our lives is a good time to think about our values and our spiritual goals.  So the question I'm asking myself is also: What can I do for other people?  How can I get into habits of generosity?  What would happen if I used what little free time I have now to make other people's lives brighter?  I have that gift – the gift of lighting up a room when I walk into it, of making people feel more cheerful, of making them feel special, of helping them to see their gifts.  I suppose most noble thing to do would be to work for the poor and downtrodden, but I'm wondering what I can do for friends and family first.

I guess what I really thinking about is how I can make my new goals match my values.

Budgeting: Some Lessons

Lesson #1: Check the cost of benefits when applying for a job.

My husband's salary didn't change much.  But because his employer pays much less of his insurance, our income took a nasty hit.  (Previous two employers paid 100%.)  I went from part-time to full time so my income jumped significantly, but because his went down so much, our net gain is $200 a month.  Yup.  Not happy about that.  An expensive lesson.

Lesson #2: Transportation matters

BEFORE:
His commute was 59 miles one way.
Mine was 22 miles one way, but my expenses were lower due to carpooling.
Total transportation expenses for a month:  $197.97

AFTER:
Our commute is about 3 miles.
We both biked to work for a month.
Total transportation expenses for a month: $35.20

We aren't going to be biking during the winter, but we plan to start up again in the spring.

Budget Update

Amazon portal revenue this month = $1.18.  Thank you for your purchases through our portal!

I got my last paycheck from my former teaching job a few days ago.

Today we made a budget for our time when I am between jobs.  It involved things like paying the minimum on the mortgage and not putting anything in investments.  More drastic cuts were things like 'no spending money' and trying to cut our food budget down to half of what we usually spend.  I'm now trying to drink more water and less milk and asking myself if I can afford to take my niece swimming.

The most draconian budget we can come up with still leaves us $400 short.

I did some temp work in June, and I have some scheduled for July.  And we have a healthy savings account.  However, we don't know how long I will be out of work, or if my new job will pay decently, so we are going to try to live as frugally as possible and try not to touch the savings. So it feels like we are "playing" at what it would be like to be poor.  There will be an end to this.  We won't always have to say 'no' to what we want to do.  But some people live this way their whole lives, always scraping and pinching, and saying 'no,' and still just one disaster away from wiping out.

It's been oddly thought-provoking.

Plus there is this unsettling feeling: What if it stays like this forever?  What if I can't find anything and I have to scrape by with temping and freelancing for years?  Unlikely, but not impossible.

Trusting in Divine Providence is proving most difficult right now when it is most necessary.

The Answer

A. $7.51.

Hence I'm no longer dumpster-diving metal.  It's just not worth it.

I am going to keep collecting pop cans, and I'm going to finish stripping a nice big pile of copper wire, though.  The pop cans are easy and copper will surely go up in price by the time I get through that pile.  (Plus the copper I do on my commute--he drives, I strip, since reading in the car gives me a headache.)

But scooping up random metal things on the curb?  No, not worth it.

Guess How Much

Q. How much do you think this pile of metal was worth?  (The tent poles are aluminum, so that will help a little....)

Tune in tomorrow for the answer.

Sometimes Thrifty, Sometimes Not So Much

My beloved husband bought a bag of potatoes....

.... right when we are ready to harvest potatoes!

How is gardening going to save money on groceries if he does that?

But he did get these special demitasse coffee cups at the thrift store.  He's pretty jazzed.

Don't throw away.... eggshells!

Belovedest found a link with unusual ways to use egg shells.

It didn't list my favorite thougth: art!

I haven't tried this, but I think it would be fun.  Although I suppose I'd have to collect egg shells for six months first!

The Fun of Cleaning with Cloth Rags

My husband initially resisted the idea of using old T-shirts for rags until I cut them into uniform shapes and told them he could pitch them if they got really, really gross.

I think he might be more convinced after Saturday cleaning--- You can’t skate around the floor like this with paper towels!

Today's Adventures in Gardening....

Leeks were supposed to be transplanted April 1.  But they are such tiny little things!  (Plus I forgot about hardening them off.  Yes, the perfect bloggers are NOT at this URL….)  So today makes, I think, day 3 of hardening off.

Can you even see them?

Plus I covered the bed where they are going to be planted with plastic to warm it up.  The leeks HAVE to go in the ground by April 15 because that is when we are starting tomatoes and we need the pots that the leeks are in!

Supposedly this process, if done for a few weeks, will also make the weeds sprout so they can be eliminated before you plant anything.

This bed is waiting for potatoes.  (Plus shows me being frugal by using the clothesline!)

Belovedest cut them up yesterday and they are supposed to scab over a little so they don’t rot.  He wants to plant them today but I am going to try to persuade him to wait.  You are supposed to wait 3 days after you cut them.

We didn't actually buy seed potatoes.  These are just ones from the grocery store that we set aside....

How does your garden grow?  What are you up to?

Cost of Contacts for a Year

I was curious how much contact solution I go through in a year, so I wrote the date on the bottle when I started using it:

I finished it off this week.

So since it lasted 7.5 weeks, that means I need to buy a bottle roughly 7 times a year.  At $9.27 a bottle and 52 weeks in a year, that means I spent about $64.89 a year on solution.  That's really not that much.  But if I spend the same amount on the cleaner, I might want to see how much it would cost to get an updated prescription for my glasses.

This obviously isn't a solution to all of your financial problems.  But it would be an easy way to figure out how much you spend a year on everything from cereal to toothpaste.  If you are trying to decide if you want to make your own _________, this might be a useful exercise.

Life Hack #10: How much does _________ cost me a year?

I wanted to find out the cost of contacts versus glasses by figuring out how long one bottle of contact solution lasts, but you could apply this method to everything from cereal to sticky notes.  Just write the date on the item when you start using it, and then note how long you used it when you threw it away.

Don't throw away..... Old Bath Towels

We have a box of old bath towels in the basement.  They've come in handy multiple times, notably during the Great Basement Flood of 2013 and the Unfortunate Washing Machine Event of 2014.

Here's another option: Turn them into hand towels.  

They are great for drying dishes.  What isn't good enough to be on display, so to speak, in the bathroom where every visiting guest will see it can be just fine in the kitchen.  Alternatively, you can discard the one quadrant with the stain or tear in it.

I edged these with the serger, but you could also use double-fold bias-tape, a zig-zag stitch on an ordinary sewing machine, pinking shears that will make a zig-zag edge, or just cut them.  They won't last as long just cut, granted, but you'll get a little more use out of them.

Frugal and easy!