Living Green and Frugal

I’ve been working toward living a more frugal life. Not including craft supplies and yarn! Wouldn’t want to give the Compadre any ideas! As a result – we’re living a more “green” life too. Some of the things I/we have been doing for a long time and some we’ve started more recently. We try not to waste food, we drive small cars, we wear our clothes until they wear out, we grow some of our food (sometimes successfully, sometimes not!). And now that I’m retired and we don’t have kids at home I have more time to do some things that I just couldn’t have done when the kids were all home and I was working. I’ve been washing our clothes with homemade laundry soap and for more than a year now we’ve been hanging them to dry – outside in the summer and inside on a wooden drying rack in the winter. The Compadre isn’t fully on board on this – he’s been known to dry the clothes in the dryer when he does the laundry and isn’t fully supervised. But I can’t complain – I’ve got a husband that does laundry!!

This Christmas I tried something new in the frugal department. I wrapped many of our gifts with fabric squares in the furoshiki method. Basically if you know how to do a square knot you can wrap gifts in fabric squares. There are several good websites that show how to do it. I made my fabric squares by using my serger and doing a rolled hem edge on all four sides. I found that the most useful sizes were 28 and 22 inches. I made one that was 37 inches for a bigger gift and a few that were 18 inches using fat quarters. The advantage of using 22 inch squares (if they fit the package) is that you can get two pieces from the width of standard fabric. Of course this method is more expensive in the short run but over time I expect that we’ll reuse the fabric many times and it will be free from now on. I told the giftees that they could give me the wrap so I could reuse it myself or they could reuse it themselves. That of course makes it part of the gift! I stocked up on Christmas fabric after in the after Christmas sales – 75% off!! So I’m all ready for next year. One hint about the sizes of fabric needed. If you’re making the squares as you’re wrapping the gifts – check to see what size you need before cutting it. It’s surprising that I didn’t need many large pieces. Oh, and here’s a tutorial for you if you don’t have a means to make rolled hems. A little more time consuming but it works too. I think that wrapping gifts in fabric is easier too – I never was much good with square corners and tape and all. By the way, we really noticed that the Christmas garbage was much less – I’m sure the garbage man was happy with our house!

Of course there are many more things that we could do and I’m sure I’ve got my blind spots about some ways we live life, but I’ve got some more ideas for things that I could do to live greener and more frugally. First up is composting kitchen scraps. Let’s see if I can get the Compadre on board!

I'll leave you with a cute picture of newborn baby Jordan in his car seat.

More About Soap and Saving Money

I got a lot of response to my soap recipe. It was one of the topics of conversation at open knitting last night at DE and it seems that people are willing to try it! But apparently washing soda is not available as easily as I thought. Here in Minnesota you can get it in some grocery stores but not all of them. I did some googling and found that in some areas of the country it is very hard to get. Washing soda is sodium carbonate, baking soda is sodium bicarbonate – they are not the same thing. But one on line source said that you can get sodium carbonate at pool supply stores. Haven’t checked but it’s worth checking if you’re in one of those areas that doesn’t seem to have the Arm and Hammer brand. And as always call ahead and see if a store carries what you want rather than driving all around to find it. Even though gas has come down in price it still costs money to go from store to store.

One other thing that I forgot to mention about the laundry soap, put it in the washer and let it dissolve before putting your clothes in. And the original recipe called for grated Fels Naptha soap but I used both my homemade soap and a couple of bars of hotel soap and it works just fine. I can’t make more homemade soap until I find a source of lye – the stores don’t carry it anymore because there are people that make bad things with it. Grrrr. It was fun to make – as long as I followed the directions exactly. I did have one batch where I mistook the temperature and started combining ingredients at too high a temp – big mess. Good thing that was in our old kitchen and it didn’t matter too much.

I just thought I’d mention one other cost savings I know about. Some of you make your own bread like I do and need to buy yeast. I was in the local grocery store with my son and since he expressed interest in making some bread I thought I would encourage him and buy him some yeast. Not at those prices!! I’ve always bought my yeast either through school or at Sam’s Club now that I’m not working for school lunch any more. So I did a little price comparison. It was about a dollar and a half for 3 tiny packets of yeast or 4 something for a 4 oz. jar at the grocery store. Yesterday I did my shopping at Sam’s Club and bought 2 pounds (yes I did buy 2 pounds – it lasts a long time. Just keep it in the freezer after you open the brick). Sam’s Club price was $4.16 for the two one pound bricks. That’s 8 times the yeast for about the same price as the 4 oz. bottle!! And I was asked recently why I still shop at Sam’s Club even though there are only two of us to shop for! Actually the main reason that I keep up my membership is that the price of hearing aid batteries is half of what I can find anywhere else. That pays for my membership right there. I would caution you that some prices at Sam’s are not as good as what you can find elsewhere – soda pop comes to mind. Again, you need to balance driving from one store to another with the savings that you can get. We usually do a big Sam’s Club run about once a month or we stop in if we are in the area anyway.

I'll leave you with a fun video that I found. And I'm not even a dog person!