Say Goodbye to Wrapping Paper

Merry Christmas! We just got our first snow last night - just in time for a beautiful White Christmas!

We're in the late morning Christmas lull after opening presents. Our daughter is down for her nap and our son is playing happily with a toy. I feel very blessed this Christmas! We tried to keep things simple this year. We only got our kids two good quality toys and one book each. I think it was just the right amount, especially with how young they are. It's so easy to get caught up in the materialistic side of gift giving, but if you make the effort, things can be as simple as you want to make them.

Also, we don't really do Santa, so that, for us, makes it easier and simpler to focus on Christ for the holiday. We used a simple scripture advent calendar which was short and perfect for our young kids.

One of my goals for this year in simplifying was to do away with wrapping paper and to wrap gifts just with fabric bags. They were very simple and fast to make, but I did learn a few things to do and not to do and so thought I'd share. Remember - this is not an exact science! No measuring was done.

1. To start with, over the last few months I slowly collected pieces of the least expensive Christmas cotton fabric at JoAnn's. Searching the remnant bin is key, because you find all sorts of good cotton Christmas remnants of various sizes, and sometimes it's the more expensive fabric for a good bargain. I got various sizes cut: 1/4 yard, 1/2 yard, and 1 yard. It's really whatever sizes you want, but I wouldn't do less than a 1/4 yard because they get harder to sew.

2. When it was time to sew, I just left the fabric folded like it comes off the bolt, cut the widths I wanted or just left the 1/4 yard or 1/2 yard like it was. (For the smaller bags I cut the 1/4 yard in half width-wise and then I just had to add a bottom seam to one of the bags.) Then I flipped the fabric so the right sides were together and sewed up the sides, the salvage edges at the top and left open. Then I folded the salvage edge down about an inch and sewed all the way around to create a channel for the ribbon drawstring to go through. I left a 2" gap near one of the side seams for the ribbon to go into.

3. Then I flipped the bag right side out, threaded a ribbon through using a safety pin pinned into the end to get it through, tied a knot in the ribbon, and then I was done!

4. About the ribbon: I learned the hard way that only two types of ribbon work for this bag - the satin kind and the grosgrain kind. (it's the kind that has a bumpy weave)

Bags

Do not use cording! It doesn't not draw the bag closed very well. And don't use ribbon with any sparkly metalic-looking ribbon. Mine just fell apart! Wired ribbon also probably won't work that well either. These types of ribbon just don't slip smoothly through the channel for drawing the bag closed.

Bad ribbon. Bad! Too much metalic.

Good ribbon! Nice and satiny.
Don't you just love the gingerbread boys? The peppermint candy look so yummy too.

Lots of bags!

5. I also learned that more small and medium sized bags were the way to go. I think we had too many big ones. I did make one large bag made from a whole yard of fabric, but we didn't have any presents that big, so we didn't use it. Most presents tend to be on the smaller side, but it was hard to know that at the time I was making them.

The pros & cons:
The downside to these bags is that there is no hiding what's in there. It's very simple to feel through the fabric unless you disguise the present in something else like a box. Also, the security isn't the greatest. There is no tape keeping curious fingers from slipping the bag open, unless you wrap the ribbon around the top a few times and tuck it in. We put our presents out Christmas morning, so we didn't have that problem.
You also have to store the bags, but they lie flat, so it's not that big a deal.

On the other hand... The great thing is- no clean up! No mounds of crinkly annoying paper to fill up your garbage can or the landfill. You can reuse these year after year and they make adorable bags to give away too. The fabric and ribbon aren't too expensive, especially if you get them on sale or clearance. Also, you can get the cutest fabrics! Just take a look at those adorable snow penguins in the picture above.

Something else we did new this year were homemade gift tags. (You can see them in the first three photos.) There are four of us, so I found four cute Christmas/wintery symbols of the same theme through Microsoft Clip Art and copied and pasted a lot of them into a Word document. (You can search for snowflake, snowman, candy cane, Christmas tree, Christmas ornament, Christmas lights, Christmas mittens, Christmas bell, holly, Christmas candle, Christmas star, Christmas gift, Christmas stocking, and Christmas poinsetta to find ones similar to mine above.) Then I printed them in color onto white card stock, cut them out and punched a hole in each one.

The cool thing, was that the kids didn't know which symbol was theirs. I think this helped with not encouraging the "look at all of my presents" mentality. All we did was put who the present was from on the back of the tag. The kids had lots of fun hunting down their symbol once they knew which one to look for. I just looped the tag through the ribbon using the hole I punched out.

Well, I'm going to go and enjoy my Christmas candy and maybe go out for another round of sledding later. Have a wonderful holiday!

Living on Less

My daughter kneading some bread dough with me standing by to help.

I've always been fascinated with simple living and enjoying simple pleasures. But modern entertainments are very addicting and very hard to break away from, especially when everyone you know has the latest technology and expect you to know what they're talking about. (We've resisted the new smart phones and like using our prepaid cell phones, but for some reason the smart phones don't seem to be going away!) The hardest thing for us to get rid of is Netflix.

I ran across this interesting article that talks about living simply and a couple's story about how they drastically reduced their cost of living. It gets a little soap-boxy toward the end, but I think there are some interesting principles he discusses in there.

"How We Went from $42,000 to $6,500 and Lived to Tell About It!" 

Now that we finally own our little piece of land, we have so many better things to do than to be entertained by technology! Yesterday is a good example. We did a ton of yard work. We even got my garden tilled. Yay!

Other things I got done: I dug up a random round flower bed in the yard, cut out some sod from where I wanted our garden, and laid sod over the patch. We moved big rocks (and broke the wheel barrow - oops!), dug up daffodil bulbs, marked off a flower garden, and transplanted tulip bulbs. I set my 5-year-old son to digging up a line of bricks at the end of the gravel driveway by the house and he really got into it. He was so cute to watch - digging up a single brick, exclaiming how cool it was, and running over to the flower patch at the other end of the yard to lay the brick in the trench I'd dug to mark the bed off. Back and forth, back and forth he would go so busy, busy, busy. He loved it! After awhile he and his little sister were looking red-faced from being in the sun, so I sent them inside to cool off with some lemonade and to watch some "Busytown Mysteries". (alas, that blasted Netflix!) After awhile my son started crying, and begged me to let him go outside to dig up more bricks. Unfortunately, he had finished his job, but I was so happy that he liked the work. I think children need to work, just like adults do. It's so satisfying and rewarding and it can be so fun!

I need to think more about how we can realistically simplify our lives even more, because I know we have room for improvement and there's so many things that I'd like to do, but succumbing to entertainment has wasted a lot of my time. I need to take that time back!

On a side note, I found this site that had a neat list of homesteading magazines.

Simplicity In the Kitchen

Happy Autumn Equinox! Yay! Autumn is officially here! :-)

When it comes to kitchen gadgets, I love them. I've been lucky in that I haven't had to buy a lot of them. I've inherited a lot from my mom and was given a lot of nice stuff at our wedding. What I haven't been given I've found at the thrift shop. (A pristine wood rolling pin for $3!) I'm sure I could stand to pare down a bit with my kitchen stuff (and my husband would whole-heartedly agree). We've been decluttering our whole house and it has been very liberating. I guess I should tackle the kitchen next. And just to point out, I did pare down some of my kitchen things when we moved.

I love this article that I found "A No-Frills Kitchen Still Cooks". The biggest thing that I got from this is that he said you don't need a microwave. *gasp* Are you kidding me? Really? Now, I haven't always had a microwave and growing up we never had one, but those little boxes of magic are just so, so easy to become attached to! It's really a joke that I am so attached to mine. Me, who can cook marginally well on a hearth and over a campfire and can really crank it out on the stove. Living microwave-free just requires a little more preparation and patience and food ends up with more nutrition. And just as the guy says in the article, "Imagine the counter space!" And, boy, could we use more of that! (Our kitchen in this new place is half the size of what we moved from.)
What do you think? Should I give our microwave away? Oooooh, it's so hard! I'll have to think about this one.

Just like he does in the article, I made a list of things I can't live without in my kitchen:

1. my Rada paring knives - We got these for our wedding and I remember growing up with my mom using one. They last forever. All you need is a good sharpener (I have a manual one) and you're good!
2. Jelly roll baking sheets - I try to stay away from aluminum as it's not a good metal to ingest, but these baking pans are totally sturdy and amazing!
3. Food processor - I got mine from my mom and I think that thing is 30 or 40 years old. It's still going strong. Unfortunately, I only have one blade attachment for it, but it still works!
4. Wooden Spoons - I use them for everything except cooking meat.
5. Silicone spatula - these are awesome. They can handle high heat and there are some nice sturdy ones out there.
6. Flexible cutting mats - these are nice because you can bend them to help get your veggies aimed into your pot with out scraping or corralling with your hands. Mine are getting a bit beat up and they have a permanent curve to them. Sometime you have to put them under something flat and heavy to get them to become flat again.
7. Hand mixer - my nice one with a retractable cord broke, so I got a new cheap one. It works. You really can't bake much without it - unless you have amazing wrist strength and a ton of elbow grease.
8. A large pot - great for cooking spaghetti, or making a big batch of chili or cooking jam for canning. The list goes on and on.

Nope, I don't have a bread machine or a stand mixer. I've contemplated getting one of both, but I really don't need them. And I certainly don't have the counter space.

I think I'm steeled for decluttering my kitchen now... take deep breaths, Sarah!

P.S. I would still like an immersion hand blender. How cool that you can blend liquid stuff! And a toaster oven. Then I could get rid of our toaster and save energy when we need to bake little things instead of heating up the honkin' huge oven. Maybe someday! I did get some birthday money.... :-) How lame that I would spend it on kitchen stuff, huh? haha!

Decluttering

I have been in a serious decluttering fit lately. We just moved into a smaller townhome and we've had to seriously start to evaluate all the stuff/junk that we have been hauling around on these moves. Thanks to a kick start from Miss Minimalist's blog I have been going to town!

I find that being thrifty, frugal, and having a go at minimalism is an interesting balance. So, here are two tips that I've discovered so far.

1. "Tools of the trade" - I'm a baker/cook and homemaker. Any books or tools that help me out are things that I keep. Granted, I could get rid of a cook book or two, and evaluate the effectiveness of each of my tools, but I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. So, I have a lot of tools. The key is to keep them organized and if any are collecting dust, send them to the thrift store for another lifetime of use by someone else.

2. Keepsakes - I am the queen of holding onto memories. It was getting to be pretty painful with all the junk I've moved around in my lifetime - useless stuff that was just memory incarnate. Over the years I have been slowly letting go. The following trick, so far, has proved to be the best way (and the least painful) to get rid of memory objects. If I have something that holds a special memory, but isn't a family heirloom or is something that just sits around taking up space (usually in a box!), I take a picture. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but they don't mention that pictures also take up a lot less space! Once I take the picture, the memory is in effect transferred to the picture and I can get rid of the object without guilt or too much regret. Someday I might create a digital photo album full of discarded keepsakes and be able to flip through the pages reminiscing. I'm still in this memory "archiving" process and as soon as I get my camera back I think my wedding shoes will be the next to go...

Do you have any tips or tricks for being frugal, thrifty or cutting down on junk?