Monday Message

"Our Heavenly Father created this beautiful earth, with all its abundance, for our benefit and use. His purpose is to provide for our needs as we walk in faith and obedience. He has lovingly commanded us to ‘prepare every needful thing’ (see D&C 109:8) so that, should adversity come, we may care for ourselves and our neighbors, and support bishops as they care for others." (All is Safely Gathered In pamphlet)

I have been feeling that we need to be stressing thrift and frugal living, and storage and skills very strongly in preparing for what is ahead. I have no idea what it is, just a feeling we need to do these things quickly. It is just a nagging feeling I have. Sometimes it means the Shooks may have troubles ahead or all of us do...sometimes, in the past, I would get them just before we had a job loss or some other hard time like replacing a car or some such thing. But it is a very strong nagging feeling.

So, that said, we will learn how to stretch a penny till it screams. We will learn skills we can use to help us to save.

We will learn scratch cooking and batch cooking and very budget type cooking.

Planting a garden, and while I hate gardening, it saves us so much on veggies and hopefully we will get watermelon and muskmelon...so far so good.

Take special notice of the surrounding grass. We are in a drought! So I am not watering grass only the garden and stingy with watering that as well. All the yards look like this. Very crunchy to walk on. We got about twenty raindrops yesterday, not even enough for the grass to green up.

This heat spell isn't doing us any favors.

I watched two podcasts this week, one the lady was diagnosed with Lyme disease and is in much pain and grieving for not being able to do what she always did. This will alter their income I am sure as well. So while things are seemingly good they can change in a moment.

The other lady was telling how she has hashimoto's and she said it often is tied closely to problems with gluten intolerance. She has an autoimmune problem too. She is a young mother and knitwear designer. She said she has to cook everything from scratch - everything! So she said she cooks for her family and for her, she cooks large amounts and freezes them so if she is tired she can pull them out because she can't eat out. She also said she used to work at a gluten free bakery. Of course, she had no way of knowing she would be needing this knowledge someday in her future. I am glad she got these skills before she needed them.

https://www.allrecipes.com/search/results/?search=salon+seasoning - thank you Mary Ann for sharing this great site with us!

https://www.elefantz.com/2014/08/tutorial-sew-sweet-roses.html - beautifying our homes doesn't have to mean spending a lot of money. There is something soothing about doing embroidery. It calms one.

I took it a step further. I saw someone on a podcast, she was talking about cross stitch so I searched around the house for the items...

The pink cloth that is so pretty was from a yard sale. I am going to stitch the pattern on a mask pictured here....do you spy the duckie? That is why I gathered things I already had to make this, it is called a pin keep. There are two magnets, you can see the magnet on the bottom and there is one on top and to that one I glued on a button and the duck was left over from another project, I glued him or her onto the blue button.  

The magnet is strong enough that it holds the needles as I do not want to step on any. You can move it to any spot or even undo it and set it on a table. This was made with just what I had on hand. This was a frugal thing...so before you run to the store, look around, you may already have items on hand that you can put together.

These are Easter lilies from many many many years ago. Someone mentioned you could plant them, so I did.  Every year they put on this pretty show for us. They were gifts, all of them, so free flowers. Think about putting in free flowers, there is alway someone who is thinning their flowers and plants. You could put on freecycle or on your town page that you are looking for plants. I once asked if I could get a rhubarb start and a lady said she threw one in her compost but it wouldn't die and I was welcome to it.

As long as I am talking about freecycle or town pages, that is how I got some canning jars. So use that to find canning supplies.

Don't forget about yard sales...

Years ago when my kids were little I went to a yard sale and found this teapot (the smaller one in the picture).  A few weeks ago our youngest daughter and her husband were visiting and we went to a yard sale and there was the pitcher (the larger one in the picture). What are the odds of that?! Fun finds for sure! But as I mentioned in the last blog post, do not dismiss yard sales and thrift stores.

https://www.budgetbytes.com/pizza-melts/ - here is a budget dish, we do this even with flour shells.

https://www.utahmoneymoms.com/home/food-storage-on-a-budget - here are some food storage ideas on a budget.

Missy says to look through cookbooks to get more frugal recipes.

Gus says if he only had thumbs he would embroider.

So keep plugging away in all those areas that will help your family the most.