Monday Message

"Let us be in a position so we are able to not only feed ourselves through the home production and storage, but others as well.” (President Ezra Taft Benson)

Start now to create a plan if you don’t already have one, or update your present plan. Watch for best buys that will fit into your year’s supply. We are not in a situation that requires panic buying, but we do need to be careful in purchasing and rotating the storage that we’re putting away. The instability in the world today makes it imperative that we take heed of the counsel and prepare for the future.” (L. Tom Perry)

How are you coming on your skills? We need to keep building on basic skills and expand from there. Baking bread, knitting, sewing, cooking from scratch, living within our means, getting out of debt, canning, dehydrating food, all kinds of home production, gardening, crocheting, budgeting, this list goes on and on.

I push skills on you all the time. Having skills helps to stretch your budget.  It helps your family.  It is not busy work. There is so much out there that is trying to grab your attention. If we try to learn these skills whether you feel you need them or not it will be a huge blessing to you and others.

Living frugally is a goal we should all want.

When we have needed things, we looked for them used first. This has been a huge stretching of a budget and a blessing for us.  

Trying to be frugal….

When our girlies were just tykes the sewing machine I was trying to learn on was in just rotten shape so we looked for a used machine. We found one in the paper. The lady could not take it with her as the place they were going was a different electrical. It has been a work horse for me for years and years and years and it's my favorite still. It was ten years old when I got it and since which is thirty more years.

Look at yard sales and thrift stores…

Here is my thrift store blender. It was like new. A couple weeks later I happened in there again and still in its box (pictured on the left) was the food processor attachment. I'm still using them now. If you look under the jar you can see my waffle iron which came from a yard sale. 

I have found two food savers at different yard sales. This one was brand new and still in the package. The other is like new and is a newer one. So you see buying used has served me well.

All my canning supplies are bought used except for new lids.

I found a shower curtain at a yard sale and turned it into kitchen curtains that cost fifty cents. This definitely saved us money.

Every one of my bread pans came from yard sales, most for ten cents. Which brings me to another skill, making bread….

I pushed on learning to make bread. I watched others how they made bread and made it a priority to learn.

So when I push skills it is because I have learned them and they have blessed us. I keep on learning!!  Also buying used has helped us over and over through the years and when I use my ten cent bread pans I feel happy that over the years I got them at yard sales.  I would get the kids’clothes for school used. My reasoning was you can buy a brand new pair of jeans for your kid and one romp outside and they are used jeans. So a quarter beat ten dollars in my book and if you knew how to sew you could be creative in sewing on patches as the need arose.

What frugal things have I been doing this week? I was blessed to pick apples from friends.

I made apple rings. If you have a peeler like this you know it peels and cores and slices the apple in a coil. If you cut top to bottom on one side you get individual rings if you cut in half you get pie slices. After doing the rings I put them in water with lemon juice then into dehydrators. Yes, this year I had 23 trays on two different dehydrators going.

If you look at the top pic the basket is empty. The apples from this bushel fit into this bucket. I did this three times and have three buckets of dried apples.

I picked the peaches and they were about 3/4ths of a bushel, yum! So I will be having to start jam.

These things have kept me busy and sore but remember my deal, if Heavenly Father sends me produce I will happily put it up as my own gardening did not net much for us this year.

I found these great videos to teach you to knit in time to make a knit scarf for winter…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3uEnbYqZSk - slip knot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn3V2KHZSIc - this shows how to cast on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBx5PTdcXdg - how to knit 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j3oOv-ygQk&feature=em-uploademail - purl

So this will help you build a skill. Practice it and make scarves for gift made by you.

So this blog post was heavy on frugal and skill building. I hoped to show things can be gotten used that are very helpful to us and our budget. 

When we first moved here we had no refrigerator and no stove and no money. So what we did have was a microwave, a crockpot that sat on a base, and a freezer. We went along like that till we got some pay. We could spend a hundred dollars for a stove or a refrigerator but not both. So I chose a stove. We borrowed a truck and I looked in the paper. There was a yard sale that had refrigerators for fifteen dollars. They were perfect for worms they said. We bought the better one. It was so old it was from the fifties. So we got the stove and this worm fridge, cleaned them up and felt like we arrived. So you see used things have blessed my family

Keep working on storage. Frozen veggies are on a really good sale. They are my favorite to dehydrate as all the hard work is done for you. Just open and dump on trays and dry. Mushrooms are on sale again. I will do more of those, dehydrating them as I showed before.

I will be doing peach jam.

Tell us what frugal things you are doing :)

Do the best you can!