What Makes life GOOD?

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Southern California Zone 9
I am a stay at home mom raising two boys Ethan and Eric. My husband Brandon and I, raise our family in a christain home and have simplified life as mush as we can and hope our boys will love the simple things in life. Our favorite saying is Life is Good!! And life is truly good. I have a garden and hope that with lots of love this year it will have a good return of tomatoes, squash, beans, egg plant, peppers, melons,pumpkins and much more. We are looking forward to the warm weather so we can start our camping adventures and a little traveling. Hope you enjoy your visit on my blog and hope you will want to simlify your life a little and enjoy my project, recipes and tricks. Remember God created all and we do all to glorify him!!! God has truly belessed us!!!!!!

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Put Your Family on a 21-Day Spending Freeze

I found this great Post on Mommysaver.com
 I Challenge everyone to  do this!!!!

Brandon and I love to do things like this for the following reasons:

To Get accustomed to using up what you have and making do without, which will help exercise your
        creative muscle and become more resourceful
Reinforce the difference between wants and needs
Practice delay of gratification 
Reducing temptation and finding other forms of “entertainment”


Start Your 21-Day Spending Freeze

What is a spending freeze? To put it simply: no more unnecessary spending. You’re not allowed to spend money on anything but necessities. Use up the food you have in your cupboards. Your grocery budget is now limited to what you must buy (milk and toilet paper, for example). Think of it as “Mommysavers Survivor” except the only prize at the end of the game is the money you’ve saved.
A spending freeze is not a long-term lifestyle by any means. The main goals of the spending freeze are:

Why 21 days? Research shows it takes approximately 21 days to make something a habit. During these three weeks we’ll be practicing the following skills:

Questioning the Difference Between Wants and Needs

During your spending freeze you will need to question the difference between wants and needs. Some things will be clearer than others. Yes, chances are you need gas to get to work. No, you don’t need a new necklace to match the sweater you got for Christmas.

… But what about the things that aren’t so obvious? Do you really need to birthday card for you brother-in-law, or can you make one? Do you really need to get your hair colored? Those gray areas (pun intended) are where your challenges lie. Try to anticipate the decisions you’ll have to make in the next three weeks. Are you going to be invited out to lunch? If your child needs money for school lunch, will you have him brown-bag it instead? What will you do?

Learning to be Resourceful

Waste Not, Want Not. You may be familiar with this phrase if you had a parent or grandparent who lived through the great depression or experienced war rationing. Prior generations demonstrated that philosophy numerous ways and learned to be resourceful with what they had. But in today’s world of abundance, why would we want to live that way?

You tap into your creative side when you have to make do with what you have. It forces you to look see things in a new light, and you’re forced to use your imagination. You see the something’s hidden potential. You’ll also experience more satisfaction when creating something out of nothing. There’s another great byproduct: you save lots and lots of money!

Imagination and creativity are both traits that everyone has; whether they think they do or not. Like with most skills, they get better with practice. Unfortunately, the “quick fix” of being able to run out to the store to buy whatever we need can smother our resourcefulness. The best way to get back in touch with your creative side is to put it into practice each and every day. Once honed, this skill can apply it to other areas of your life: your career, your hobbies, and even your relationships.

Practice Delay of Gratification

There are always a million things that come up on your way to achieving your goals that could distract you. Learning to just say no when you can’t afford something is a skill that requires practice, but can be learned.

Financial self control isn’t just a skill reserved for those without a lot of money. In fact, if you haven’t mastered this skill early on in your financial journey your problems are likely to only get bigger when more money comes your way. It’s a big reason why people who suddenly come into a lot of cash find themselves bankrupt a few years later. They haven’t learned impulse control and how to wait for the things they want. Their pocketbooks may have expanded, but their temptations also get bigger. Since they’ve never mastered the skill of delay of gratification they will always have problems with money.

There are all sorts of hidden benefits from delaying gratification. Food tastes better when you’ve waited for it. Buying a piece of furniture feels more rewarding when you’ve saved for it rather than put it on plastic. Relaxing in the evening feels better after putting in a hard day’s work. In short: when you’ve earned something, you derive more pleasure from it.

The harder you work for something, the higher you tend to value it. Quick-fixes are rarely satisfying (think fast-food, shoddy repair jobs, etc.). Imagine your child comes to you asking for a new bike. She’s old enough to earn the money herself by saving birthday money, babysitting, or doing other odd jobs. Do you think she’ll take better care of the bike if she earns the money for it herself, or it is simply given to her?

Delay of gratification is an extremely important thing to put into practice when you have children. It’s one of the biggest indicators of success in life, so begin helping them practice at an early age.

Once you start seeing the connection with delay of gratification and increased satisfaction and enjoyment, you’re more willing to exercise that skill and put it into practice on a daily basis. It will not only improve your financial life, but every other area of your life as well.

First Step: Create an “Approved Spending” List

Think of all the things you think you will need to purchase in the next three weeks. You are only allowed to purchase the bare-bones minimum, things you cannot get by without. This isn’t the time to hit the Target clearance rack or to stock up on kids’ clothing for next fall (chances are they’ll have enough anyway). This is a time for you stay out of the stores and to question what is truly a necessity.

Now get going… write down everything that is on your “approved” spending list for the next 21 days (or, use the Mommysavers.com Approved Spending List Spreadsheet). As things come up within the 21-day period, decide whether or not they belong on the “approved” spending list. You may unexpectedly run out of laundry detergent two weeks into the spending freeze. It’s OK to add it to your approved list when the need arises (or, you may decide to really challenge yourself and make a homemade version to get you through).

By participating in the spending freeze, hopefully many of you will learn that you can get by (and be content) with less in order to achieve your goals.

You’re not going to be perfect. You will be tested. Sometimes you’ll be strong, other times you won’t. The spending freeze is more about the process rather than how much you can “be good” or how well you can “stick to the rules.” Some of you won’t spend a dime, but may not learn much. Other members will be tested and fail, but really learn a lot.

 It’s what you learn from your own personal journey that matters.

Friday, February 25, 2011

Sally's Skirty Purse

 I bought this Shirt on a 5 for 99 cent rack at my favorite thrift store.

This is the skirt I picked out off the 5 for 99 cent rack.  I got a  little girls skirt, I think the size is just right for a small hand purse. Also I am trying to wear  less Black so I thought the brown would be fun.

I got the lining and the ties made out of the  shirt. One cool detail of this shirt is it had 3 large cloth covered buttons. I think I will  make a fabric flower and use one of the buttons for the center.
 Can you tell what I made the pocket out of. Your guessed it the  sleeve of the shirt. I took advantage of all of the finished seems which makes this  project take no time at all!!!

 The teal color welting was already a nice detail of the shirt. Again  less sewing for me!!! I

Scraps and Shirttails

 My Mom told me about this book and  suggested to me to start collecting shirt for the fabric. So for the  last  few years I have been  collecting all of my  husband's and kid's shirts and  I have about 2  trash bags  full of old dress shirts. Remember the bigger the shirt the more fabric you will get so look for the 2x or 3x shirts.










When I was at my  favorite thrift store's 1/2 off Saturday  sale I picked up 16 more shirt. They are all Light blue, green, yellow, and tan. The fabric I got out of the shirts was about 12  yards of fabric and was about $1.60  a yard. What a good deal!!!!  I will never buy quilt  fabric ever again. It also is a good feeling that  I am reusing something that has a already been used!!!

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

  Ehan sends his Love
Skirty Purse

I love this Idea!!! I think I am going to work on one of my own today!!!!


Here are the instructions for making a Skirty Purse
From:  http://whipup.net/2008/11/07/tutorial-skirty-bag/

Start with a mini skirt that is on the smaller side and has some pleating. Pockets and other detailing makes for a really unique bag as well. Cotton, corduroy, line or wool skirts are usually easier to work with than denim, unless it is really lightweight. I used a size 7 fine wale corduroy skirt with two side seam pockets and a side zipper. I removed the zipper and sewed the seam back together. If you like, you could cut the skirt apart where the zipper is and sew it back together if it doesn’t work to take the zipper out, or alternately you could add a secret pocket that is accessed through the zipper.

Next, turn the skirt inside out, press the pleats so that they lie evenly, and pin the bottom right sides of the skirt together. Stitch along the bottom of the skirt. If the hem appears too bulky, you can trim it and ziz zag or serge along the bottom to finish the seam.

If you want to add more depth to the bag you can box the corners by aligning the lower edge with the adjoining side edge to form a point, then stitching across the point forming a triangle. Turn bag to right side.

To make a lining, lay the bag on two layers of lining fabric and cut around the bag, leaving 1-2 inches around the three edges and and about 5 inches along the top edge. Sew the lining right sides facing and box the corners. Turn lining and insert into bag, wrong sides together. Fold over lining and pin so that the top edges are even, or leaving a small bit of the lining showing. Set aside.

Sew handles by cutting two strips of fabric and medium to heavyweight interfacing 25″ x 4″ each. Lay fabric right side down, place interfacing on top and fold in half lengthwise. Press, forming a long strip. Open and fold long edges in to meet center fold, hiding all raw edges. Stitch along the edges and down the center of the handle a few times. Attach handles to the bag on each side in between the outer and inner layers. Stitch all layers together following the stitching lines of the skirt’s waistband.