Lowering My Grocery Bill

 

I was surfing around checking out some of my favorite blogs yesterday when I came upon this idea.

Let me back up some…. as you women know if you’re the one that shops for the groceries for your family, you can eat up your grocery money in a hurry by having to buy cleaning supplies and paper products or non food items. Every two weeks I have to buy bath tissue and paper towels and they’re not cheap as you know.

So I have been trying to figure out HOW I could avoid having to buy soooooo many paper products. When we’re out of napkins we use paper towels for napkins so the paper towels don’t go very far at all when we do that. Hubby can use 3 napkins at each meal and sometimes we (our daughter and I) have to have another one as well. I like to buy the paper towels for draining fried foods on so we can get some of the oil out, so that’s really why I buy those.

So when Gina over at HOME JOYS BLOG SPOT posted her idea I knew I had something I could do.

What Gina’s idea was is this. She had been wanting to make them some cloth napkins but just never found the time to get it done. She’s another very busy lady. So one day she thought about this one that wouldn’t take her so long to make. She had some old dish towels she could use so she split them into 4 napkins and just zig zagged the edges right quick so they would have cloth napkins to use. She still plans on making the others when she finds the spare time to do so.

So when she said old dish towels it hit me, I have a nice thick blue house coat someone gave my daughter. She was there when they were cleaning out their closet and the neck was messed up on the terry cloth bathrobe so they gave it to her. I guess she was going to use it for the cats or dog to sleep on or just bringing it to her Mommer as she calls me, since she knows I can find another way to put it to good use.  I guess I’m a little like my Maw Maw since I am frugal. The cloth is still good and nice and thick like I said before. I just tossed it in the sewing room knowing there HAD to be a good use for it.

So I sit down today and started cutting out small napkins from the old bathrobe. I made them about the size of bath clothes since I hate those old huge cloth napkins. I surged the raw edges of them with my serger. I didn’t have the blue color thread but did have some black so that’s what I used.

I wanted to share with you all just how I went about it just in case you to have an old bath robe or some other piece of clothing you could use and not throw away.

First I took the pockets off the front of it with my seam ripper. It didn’t have pockets in the side seams. They were on each front panel. This is the size I chose to make my napkins in the pic below. This is one of the sleeves I cut out and cut open. As you can see on the right side, the piece wasn’t quite as big as the napkins I was cutting out. BUT I went with it and used it anyway since it was SO close to the size. I just cut as close to the arm hole seams as I possibly could to get the sleeve off and then opened it up cutting as close as I could to the seam up the arm as you can see on the right edge of the pic, the seam is still there.

In the pic below you can see me cutting off the band down the front of it again cutting as close to that seam in the band as I could so I could have a wide enough area to cut out more napkins.

I put my pattern right on the bottom hem and started cutting the napkins out up the front side panel of it until I had used all the fabric on the fronts. In the next pic you can see where I cut the hem at the bottom. Now I can go and rip out the back piece on the hem to get it off and that way I didn’t waste that area where the hem was. I got seven napkins from the two sleeves and one of the front sides!

As you can see I got quite a stack of napkins from this old bath robe. By the way I DID wash the bath robe but when I got finished surging the edges I washed all the napkins so they would shed all their pieces of fabric (from me cutting it up) and it wouldn’t make a mess on our table every time we used one. In fact they are washing as I make this post. I had 3 or 4 of the napkins I had cut out with the hem on them that I had to cut and then get the seam ripper to. It didn’t take that long. I probably have about an hour to an hour and a half in it all.

Here in the next pic you can see one of them I have surged the edges of.

And here they are finished. Like I said I got 20 napkins from this bath robe. There are two smaller ones that I folded in front of the others.

I hope you can also find ways to save money on your grocery bill and I hope this was helpful to someone.

Now maybe we can keep some of that cash we were spending on napkins or paper towels for FOOD.

 

Thank you Gina for sharing your idea!

Rose

Master Bath Wallpaper

I have finally started working on getting that wallpaper off our master bath room wall. I started working on it yesterday and then stopped. Then last night when I was SUPPOSE to be in bed like everyone else, I worked on it some more. Was almost done with it but knew I needed to get some sleep.

Then early this morning I had to get up and go to potty and you guessed it, I started working on it again. I lack 2 really small areas and I will be done with that. One spot is behind the toilet so I will have to take the tank off to get at that. I peeled the top layer off the wall paper and now I will go back with the steamer and get the bottom layer off. I FINALLY figured out this way didn’t tear the sheetrock up! The bottom layer is really thin so it will come off in large sheets and not take any amount of time to finish with the steamer. This is the ugly wall paper that was on EVERY wall in there. Yep I know, ugly and mega outdated!

This is the wall behind the door. In some areas the backing came off on it’s own. This little cabinet here is my sink but the sink doesn’t work so I am really thinking about taking it out and put another board on top so I can cover it with tiles or something to have an area to sit things and also maybe do something like a wooden bookshelf above the sink to put things we use into. We just have NO SPACE in here for sitting our things.

Yep I really messed up on this next wall. I was using the steamer to and it just WOULD NOT come off! Going to TRY and spackle it and then prime the wall. I think that’s the reason it was SO hard to get off because they didn’t prime the walls first. I will also need to sand the walls to.

Over his sink. I removed all the mirrors so I could get the paper from behind them. I will have to remove the towel holder and the rod for the shower curtain and get it out from behind those to.

Close to the shower stall. We have marble up on the walls in the shower. I am thinking about putting some long narrow mirrors I have up on the walls above the shower, all the way around it. That way it should reflect more light into the shower for us I think.

My plans as of right now is to paint the bathroom to match the bedroom which is a light sky blue with white trim. It’s a coastal beach theme and I want the same for in here to. Just trying to decide if I want to paint all the walls in here the sky blue or some blue and some white. Going to paint the trim white and the cabinets white so I’m afraid that might be TOO much white if I paint the walls white to.

 

I also got some things I needed today from town to finish those recipe notebooks with so I will be working on that along as well. Had to rest up some today from the wall paper stuff because getting up and down from that chair so much has got my leg to feeling tight. Sure don’t need to get down in my back, that’s for sure!

What kind of projects you all working on?

 

Rose

Recipe Binders Organization

We meaning my daughter and I got to work on getting those poor recipe binders organized last night. Took us a few hours but we got it done. I NEEDED to do this because….

Since going Wheat Belly, (By Dr. Davis) we have changed our eating habits and are eating no breads from flour or wheat or potatoes. We use almond flour or coconut flour or flaxseed etc. but no wheat. So I have lots of recipes now in this eating lifestyle and I have a whole lot of recipes I need to try out and see which ones we like and toss the ones we don’t. So this is WHY I have SO MANY recipes at the moment.  Then the second reason…..

I had NO IDEA how to go about getting them organized so in came Wonder Woman with her wonderful organizing skills!

third reason I would have put recipes in places I would have never remembered where they were. Some of the recipes could go in at least two places but she thought of a way to be able to remember what category they were put in. For instance, I had put ALL the bread recipes in a bread category and I had HERDS of bread type recipes. I’d been there for days just looking for ONE recipe when I got ready to cook it. She told me, if it was a bread but was sweet, lets put it in a sweet category but said the word sweet is broad so lets break it down to make muffins, cupcakes, pies, etc. in the category so it wouldn’t be so hard to find. YEA! I KNEW I NEEDED her help!

Then fourth reason it would have taken me forever just to get it done that is IF I didn’t just give up on it out of complete aggravation.  Then it wouldn’t have been THIS organized since I miss those skills!

As you will see soon we wound up with several binders and still probably need to break one or two of them down a little more. (wink)

This is two that I have made but need to do the category tabs now inside them. She did me some sheets so I would know where each category started since we went ahead and put the recipes in the protective clear sheets and then put them in the binders they go in. All the binders will be color coordinated to match these two.

This is seven binders. See how LARGE this table is? At one point last night we had it FULL bumper to bumper with recipes lying out in their categories to see what all we needed to do. She was running it all since I have NO clue!

 

Then I have this red one I used to use for ALL my recipes that I am going to use for herbs, health, etc. info. It wont be put with the others so it doesn’t have to match them.

 

So you see we got a bunch accomplished last night. Now all I have left to do is make the covers for them and the end parts on the binders so when they’re stood up in the cabinet you will be able to see which recipes they are.

Rose