feeling frugal

I just made some homemade laundry detergent using grated ivory soap, borax, washing soda, and baking soda. I wanted some detergent that has no dyes or perfumes for the baby’s diapers, but laundry detergent is really expensive, and for some reason the less stuff they put in it, the more expensive it is.  ???  Also, the Dreft brand “baby” detergent they sell is not only ridiculously expensive, but also has perfume in it!  It might have dye too, I’m not sure.  Two completely unnecessary ingredients that many people find irritates their skin.

I’ve been wanting to try making this for a while and finally got around to it.  When I run out of regular detergent I will use this stuff for our clothes too. Well, provided that it works -I haven’t tried it yet. But the recipe has good reviews.

It’s so cheap: I just made a gallon ice cream bucket full of it for about $4, and you’re only supposed to use 1/8 cup per full load, so this batch I made is 72 loads. That is about $0.06 per load.
Compare that to Tide powdered detergent at about $0.25 per load, or All liquid detergent at about $0.20 per load, or Dreft liquid detergent at about $0.30 per load.

It doesn’t seem like much when we’re just comparing pennies but when you compare the price of 72 loads worth, it’s really obvious how much cheaper it is:

homemade: $4.32
Tide: $18.00
All: $14.40
Dreft: $21.60

So, if you use homemade detergent instead of Tide, for example, and you do two loads of laundry every week, you will be saving about $20 in a year!

lol, maybe that’s not really that much, but I think it’s cool.  And I have always been kind of annoyed whenever I’ve had to buy laundry detergent because if you look at the recipt it is like four times as expensive as most of the other grocery items you bought, so it seems really expensive.

This is the recipe:

3 c borax (found at Walmart or Dillon’s in the detergent aisle)
2 c washing soda (the only place I found it was Dillon’s detergent aisle)
2 c baking soda
2 c grated bar soap (two bars of Ivory soap)

Technically it has perfume in it from the Ivory soap.  Next time I think I might try Fells-Naptha bar soap.  It is supposed to be good for laundry.  Also, if you make this detergent, use a food processor thing to grate the soap.  It is really easy and fast!

The other frugal thing I did today was make some cloth baby wipes.  I figured if I’m going to do cloth diapers I might as well do cloth wipes too, and just throw them in the diaper pail with the diapers.  I cut out wipe-sized squares from a couple white t-shirts (knit fabric so I didn’t have to hem the edges).  As soon as I buy a little squirt bottle I will make the soap part (water, castile soap, and tea tree oil) to squirt onto the wipes when they are used.  Or you can just use water from the sink, but I like the idea of having a squirt bottle handy.

Other news:

Samuel spent aproximately 10,000,000 hours stooping over some pieces of wood and some nasty chemicals so he could strip, sand, stain, and varnish a headboard and footboard for (me) our bed.  The headboard and footboard look FANTASTIC, just like I wanted, but when we put the bed together, the side rails were too short for our mattress by about three inches!!!!!!  Boy, I am surprised one or both of us did not have a nervous breakdown.  I felt so bad for Samuel, who really, truly hated the project (the bed has those fiddly little turned spindles on it, which were ridiculously hard to strip and sand) and I know he was really worried that I was going to break down crying, because this was truly a nesting disaster.  The baby is coming any day now, and my mattress is on the floor, and there are pieces of a bed lying around my house.

So we went to the thrift store, and they had dozens of bed rails, but none that were the right type and length (hook-on rails, 80-82″ long).   But today I did some online research and found some that will cost about $50 including shipping, so I think I will use some birthday money that I got, and buy those.

UNLESS SOMEONE HAPPENS TO HAVE SOME TO GIVE US????

I just thought I’d throw that out there because you never know.

more house changes

New changes!

ground floor

1. I removed the side porch and deck, which allowed me to remove the door on the west side of the house.  Then I was able to make a semi-closed office area.  I’m thinking I will have a short bookshelf behind the couch, with a see-through bookcase on top of that, so the office is separate but not totally closed off.

2. I removed the bar w/chairs and used the extra space to make the entryway a little bigger.  It was kind of tight.  There is still a small ledge where the bar was to have a place to put food or something.

3. I made the front porch bigger.

4. I removed the shower in the bathroom and replaced it with a pantry.  Without a shower, the bathroom won’t need much ventilation, so I removed the window too.  Now the north wall has no windows at all and can be completely underground.

5. With that in mind, I moved the kitchen door over a bit so there wouldn’t be such an abrupt retaining wall from the north side being underground.  Now the ground can slope a little more gently before it stops with a retaining wall right before the door.  I had to sacrifice a window above the sink for this (because now that wall is underground) so I put a cupboard there instead.  I’d like the door to have a window in it so the kitchen gets a little light.

6. I put in a little woodshed next to the garage, so it would be convenient to carry wood through the kitchen door to the masonry stove.

7. I added a kitchen garden between the driveway and house, and a larger garden in the front of the house.  Both of these areas will get lots of sunlight, so I don’t want too many trees here.

8. I put trees on the west side to help cool the house off during summer evenings.

9. I switched around the futon and the fold-out cutting table in the sewing/guest room because it seemed to work better that way.

upper floor

1. Because I took out the deck, I was able to make the closet on the west side really big!  It’s got three sets of small double doors.

2. I took out the bedroom closets and put in wardrobes instead.  Not sure if I will keep it that way or not.

We are making applesauce today because I accidentally bought a bag of very bruised apples a while ago.  We ate the ok ones (actually they were really spectacular apples except for the bruises) but there were several left that were really bad.

We’re going shopping to buy toilet paper today, but I just wanted to brag that Samuel and I have not bought anything (except gas and bills) for the past few weeks.  It helps that we get free milk and eggs and stuff.  There are plenty of things that we want or even need to buy, but we simply cannot, and so we don’t.  Samuel still doesn’t have a job and so we have no money coming in.  We can only spend money on the things we absolutely need right now.  I’m not whining, just saying what our life is like right now.  It is surprisingly not that hard and we have become quite inventive.  Yesterday we made dinner out of ground deer, the last tiny amount of homemade spaghetti sauce that nobody wanted, sour cream, and milk, mixed with macaroni noodles.  It was really good.  Today we’re making applesauce out of those apples.  I’ve never made applesauce before, and in the past probably would have thrown these apples out or made some kind of dessert with them.  We get free cereal, milk, eggs, and juice, so we always have good breakfast food.  We’ve got tons of flour, sugar, rice, beans, potatoes, onions, and some pasta, and we’ve been making our own noodles too (SO GOOD!).  The only thing I miss is fresh fruits and veggies, but WIC supposedly will start giving me those in August thanks to a change in the program.  And we’ve gotten some yummy things from my family’s garden.   We also get peanut butter from WIC.  I will be very happy when we have the money to buy some more things, but we’re definitely very well-off right now as it is.   I plan to try and be more inventive in the future, even when I don’t have to be.  It is very fulfilling.

Ridiculously easy ways to go without

ETA update from last post: I have an appointment with the birth center next week!  I am so excited!  I will write a post all about it soon.  Maybe after my appointment.

I was doing some chores today and realized blogging about it might be interesting or useful to some people.

How to not have a clothes dryer

We haven’t been using the coin-op dryer lately, because we don’t have any money.  It’s $1.50 per load and doesn’t even dry things completely.  Some things I’ve learned that make me feel a little more self-righteous -instead of just poor- about not using the dryer include the fact that clothes last longer when they’re air-dried.  Dryers use heat, tumble clothes around,  shrink clothes, and set stains permanently.  All that lint they acquire is the result of clothes slowly being worn thin.  If you own your own dryer, keep in mind that it’s probably the highest electricity-sucker in your house.  It takes a lot to make that much heat and move that much weight around.

So here’s what we do instead:

One load of laundry hung on our shower rod. Ridiculously easy to do. You're going to hang them up anyway. These dry overnight, so make sure no one needs to take a shower before they're dry.

This is the rest of the same load. You can buy these drying racks for a few dollars. It's not really that good for most clothes because it's so small, but socks, small towels, etc. hang really well on it.

Some more tips:

-This only works for one load at a time, unless you have multiple shower rods or other places you can hang stuff.  Therefore, we only do one load of laundry on any given day.  It keeps things from piling up and prevents “Laundry Day” where you spend all day washing clothes.

-If you have tons of clothes, this might not work.  Also, if you put clothes in the hamper when they’re not really dirty yet, this might not work.  There will simply be too many clothes to hang up.  Our example is one load, probably one weeks’ worth of clothes for two people, not including the whites, which we will do another day.

-Ways to dry other things:

-sheets: just put them straight back onto the mattress to dry, and don’t cover them up.  In my experience cotton sheets will take about 5 hours to dry this way.  So make sure you don’t do it right before bedtime.

-towels: hang them on the towel racks.  This will not work if you use a new towel every time you shower, and you shower very often.  Think about it: you’re drying off your freshly cleaned body. The towel isn’t going to get that dirty.  So reuse it and make your life easier.

-of course, the easiest way to dry laundry is to have a nice outdoor clothesline!  A porch or deck railing will also work in a pinch.

How to not have a microwave

Our microwave died a month before we moved, and, almost three months later, we haven’t bought one yet because we have no money.  We recently decided not to buy one at all, ever, because we’ve learned how to live without one and it’s ridiculously easy.  Here are the problems we came across and how we fixed them:

-heating up most leftovers: put them on a plate and heat them up in the toaster oven (This presupposes you have one.  You could use a regular oven, but that might be overkill.  Many things you can heat up on the stove)

-heating up leftover rice: put it in a pot and sprinkle some water over it.  Cover and heat on the stove until it’s steamy.  Seriously, this makes leftover rice almost like new!

-heating up leftover pasta: boil some water and put the pasta in for one minute or so.  Be careful, it gets mushy really fast.  This works best if you mix it in with fresh pasta.  But even by itself it’s fine.

-melting butter, chocolate, etc.: Put it in a baggie and immerse in hot water for several minutes.  Or, melt in a saucepan on the stove.

-defrosting meat: Put it in a baggie and immerse in hot water.  Or, if you’re really on top of things, defrost it in the fridge the day or two before you need it.  I never remember to do that, though.  Unless it’s a whole turkey or roast.  Those are kind of hard to miss.

-making popcorn: Get a popcorn popper.  It’s so worth it, trust me.  Or, you can do it on the stovetop.

-heating up frozen dinners: Sorry, I don’t think this one’s going to work.

What’s happening today

Regency maternity/nursing dress I'm working on. It has a drawstring neckline and waist.

This dress is made out of some kind of shiny polished cotton, with a darker blue silk dupioni for the trim.  And a silver gimp braid.  I want to do something really fancy around the skirt hem but I’m not sure exactly what yet.

kitty wanted me to take a picture of her too

Hair this morning

Lately I’ve tried washing my hair with a minimum of products.  Scrubbing the scalp with some cheap thin conditioner, rinsing with vinegar water, and then oiling with a coconut oil/shea butter blend.  I think I might just take out the conditioner part and see what happens.  Then my hair will be like a salad.  Water, vinegar, and oil.  haha.  Vinegar rinses are amazing, they make my hair feel just like I put conditioner in it.  Who would have thought?  Anyway this is a picture of my hair this morning after washing last night.  Keep in mind I haven’t combed it yet.  I like the lack of frizz that this routine produces.  My scalp hair is nice and clean too.  It’s funny how simple it is to wash and care for hair.  People make it into such a complicated and costly procedure.

By the way, we got on WIC and Medicaid so tomorrow I’m going to make an appointment with the birth center!

Autumn

Samuel and I have decided (a while ago) to try and buy mostly seasonal produce.  Though we haven’t quite worked our way to buying only locally grown produce (which I would like to do) I think this is a good step.

During times of imperial colonization, rich lords would import exotic plants and food.  To serve pineapple to your guests in England was a huge statement about how wealthy you were.  Eventually technology and the rise of the middle class democratized this practice, so that everyone in the U.S.A. and other temperate nations could have easy access to pineapple and other tropical produce at any time of the year.  It is wonderful, but has its cost, including the destruction of ecological systems, the use of pesticides, and the massive amounts of fuel and energy used to transport the food to us.  I haven’t done much research on this, but I have heard that fruit taken from the vine long before it is ripe (in order to keep it from going bad before it reaches us) prevents the development of many of the vitamins that fruit is supposed to have.  To top all of that off, in the Word of Wisdom it says that “wholesome herbs” are to be used “in the season thereof…with prudence” (D&C 89:10-11).

I am not trying to call out other people who eat mangoes or whatever.  This is all my own personal interpretation and my own personal decision.  We still buy out-of-season produce sometimes, but we try for the most part to focus our appetites on things that are in season, because we believe it is healthier and better in many ways.

Here is a Utah harvest calendar I found at http://www.utahcountyonline.org/Dept/Exten/Data/harvestcal.pdf

As you can see, the only seasonal things right now are apples and cabbage.  We did buy those things when we went grocery shopping last week, but also a few other items that aren’t in season….

Some things are harvested at certain times, but can last for months in a cool, dark, dry area with plenty of airflow.  These include squash, potatoes, and carrots.  Onions will also last for a while.  I can’t wait until I have a garden and can grow and store these things on my own.

If you live in a different state, you will have different seasonal things.  Here’s the calendar for Kansas. It has a lot more options, I’m guessing because it is more agricultural, is not a desert, and has a slightly warmer climate.  Or it might be because the people who made the calendar did more research.

Things we eat using the current seasonal produce for Utah (and will eat all winter long):

Stir-fry with cabbage, carrots, and onions
chicken noodle soup with carrots and onions
a million things with potatoes
stew with carrots, potatoes, and onions
squash soup and other things made with squash
pot roast with cabbage and potatoes
chili (only uses onions, the rest is canned tomatoes and dried beans)

and of course there are many other dishes that use no fresh produce but only canned produce, along with grains.

We are lucky to have lots of frozen deer meat for many of these meals.  I hope to always be friends with a hunter.

Actually, I think the main reason it makes me so happy to eat seasonal produce is that it makes me feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder. 

urge to purge

One month until my birthday!  Then I will be 22 years old.  WOOT!  Your age is only a pallindrome every eleven years.  Better make the most of it!

Samuel is gone on another campout.  Luckily though my brother David is here and can hang out with me sometimes.

Since accumulating lots of new clothes at various Goodwills in Virginia, and bringing lots of my old stuff back from Kansas, I’ve gone through all my stuff and come up with two trashbags full for DI.  One of my favorite things in the world is purging my stuff, simplifying my possessions.  I get the “urge to purge” every couple months.  In fact, it’s usually when the seasons change.  I am not as hard-core as some simple-living folks: I believe in having a varied collection of clothes, fabric, books, and movies.  I just make sure that all of the items are things that I either love desperately, or use very often, or both.  But other than that, I side with Thoreau: the things we own often make our lives needlessly complicated.  The more stuff you have, the more time and money you have to spend taking care of it: cleaning it, storing it, insuring it, organizing it….  Getting rid of stuff is a freeing experience –as long as you don’t need it to survive!

Here is one of the first articles I read about simple living and getting rid of stuff: Cropping Our Possessions

House dreams

Note: since writing this my lovely sister Mary has made me a much nicer, to-scale version of the floorplan.  I have now switched the images to these new ones.

While I was in Kansas my sister Mary inspired me with her knowledge of passive solar heating and home design. I used her latest house design and made it my own using floorplanner.com . Someday Samuel and I would like to buy some acreage (at least five acres) somewhere outside a decent-sized city in the Midwest, and build a house. It may never happen, but hey I can dream.

I’d like the house to have a well for water, wood stove and a heat-efficient house design for most of the heating (Samuel grew up with a wood stove–he knows how to chop wood! What a hunk!) We would probably have gas heating too just to keep the pipes from freezing. Also I’d like to have at least partial solar power for electricity. I know next to nothing about solar power, except that it’s expensive to install, but again, I can dream. Who knows, maybe in ten years it will be cheaper.

Here are the plans:

This is a drawing of the side view of the west wall of the house.

The south wall will have the front door, and lots of windows to let in as much sunlight as possible year-round. Solar panels will be installed on the sloped roof eventually, hopefully. The north wall will have very few windows, and will be partially underground to conserve heat. There will be a clerestory window all along the east-west axis of the roof, to let in sunlight, and to let out hot air in summer.

First floor: north=up, south=down, east=right, west=left.

The house is 31×31 feet square, with a small front porch on the south side, a possible side porch/sunroom on the west side, and a garage on the east side (path to garage is pictured). The front door is on the south east corner. There is an entryway with shelves and cubbies and hooks, followed by an open room with a bookcase, piano and lots of plants. On the right is a large dining room with a huge window. On the left is the living room. The wood stove is in the living room in a corner. The tv is in the other corner, computer desk behind the couch. There are windows all around, with short bookcases under them. Further left is a screened porch or sunroom. In the northwest corner is a sewing room, then moving east there is a bathroom, laundry room, and kitchen with pantry. One thing Mary taught me was to have all the plumbing in the same area, if possible along one wall, to make installation easier. The kitchen is on the opposite side of the house from the wood stove to contribute more even heating when the kitchen stove is used (which will be a regular gas or electric stove).

The staircase is in the center of the house. Light from the clerestory above filters down through the stairwell to the first floor, giving the house a central core of sunlight and heat.

Second floor, same cardinal directions

There are six bedrooms (we want lots of kids). Each bedroom will hopefully have a loft bed with desk and/or dresser underneath, or possibly bunk beds if we have more than five kids! There are two full-size bathrooms, one in the master bedroom. Yes, the bedrooms are small, but really all they are for is sleeping, studying, and privacy. You don’t need much room for those things. Again, the north wall has as few windows as possible. The clerestory window will run across the entire house, giving light to the open room at the top of the stairs, the stairwell, and the master bedroom. There is a balcony on the west side, on top of the screened porch/sunroom below. We don’t want air conditioning –again, something Samuel grew up not having. I hate air conditioning with a passion, though sometimes it is tempting– so we will have to use lots of fans, and open the clerestory window to let heat escape in the summer. We might have another wood stove directly above the first floor one.

While I’m at it, I also want to have a dog, cat, couple of horses, an amazing garden, a fruit tree or two, beautiful landscaping, perfect weather, and family close by.

At the very least, when we are permanently settled, I would like to have some kind of decent house on at least 5 acres, with a dog, cat, and a couple of horses. I WILL HAVE HORSES. We had a pony when I was a teenager, so I know basic horse care, and I’ve always wanted to have a horse. It’s one of those dreams I’m really willing to work for.

Samuel isn’t really into house/floor planning, but he is willing to at least look in to building our own house, and he wants to live in the country. He grew up in a house his dad built in the country, so to him it is not an impossible thing.

We’re talking ten years or so in the future, but it’s fun to think about.

I was at work today, handwashing all the corsets that were used in the opera, when suddenly everything went dark. The power went out! The costume shop is in the basement where there are no windows and it was so dark it felt oppressive. It reminded me of the dark room in photography class where we would wind our film onto the spools for developing negatives. Absolutely no light. Soon we were rescued by someone with a flashlight, and he said the power was out all over campus. So we all went home.

On my way out of the building -luckily there were some emergency lights still lit in the hallways- I realized how dependent we are on electricity. I tried to exit through the tunnel, but the door was shut. I realized that if the door had been open, they wouldn’t have been able to close it (it’s a big door like a garage for driving trucks full of hardware into the building). When I got outside, I saw that people were trying to drive out of the parking lot, but the arm barriers would not go up at the exit, so they were stuck in the parking lot. Then, since it’s finals week, I wondered about the Testing Center. If someone wanted to take their final at that time, they wouldn’t have been able to, because the computers wouldn’t work.

These thoughts were all fueled by the paper I just wrote, about technology and education. Here I’ve posted some of my main points. It’s a really fascinating topic!  I apologize for the huge wall of text, but if you have a moment, read it and tell me what you think.  It’ll be nice to have someone read this and not give me a grade on it.

- New technological inventions have always changed our lives. They make our lives easier, and production more efficient, for example. We also tend to think that technology makes us smarter. Each discovery in physics or medicine leads to more discoveries. But are we actually smarter than those who didn’t have technology? Are technological discoveries always good for us? Socrates told a story about an inventor, Theuth, who, having invented writing, said it would cure forgetfulness and make men smarter. He presented it to the king, Thamus, who rejected the new invention, saying that it would actually make men more forgetful because they would rely on things outside themselves to remember for them.
Thamus’ warning applies to most of our technologies: they are crutches for our minds or our bodies. Writing keeps us from training our minds to remember what we hear. Cars keep us from walking, huge corporate farms keep us from growing our own food, to the point where we are barely able to do either. Before these inventions people used their bodies and minds more, it would seem. Are we really smarter than they were? Also, we adopt new inventions so readily these days, it’s impossible to tell what the consequences might be until it’s too late. Literacy took hundreds of years to be accepted. People seemed to know that if they adopted it, they would lose something. They knew that the way that they lived before would be gone. But today people adopt new inventions without thinking about what they will lose. Neil Postman said, “We are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo,” (5). Because of the huge impact that technology has, and the rate at which new technologies are being produced, we need to be aware of the consequences before we accept each new invention.

-M.T. Clanchy gives one example of how a culture dealt with the the new technology of writing in his book From Memory to Written Record. In the book, he details England’s change from an oral to a literate culture. Though writing was used by 1066, when the Normans conquered England, it did not become common for hundreds of years. This is not just because people did not have the opportunity to be educated: Clanchy says that the main reason is that people distrusted written documents. For one reason, they were unaccustomed to fiction, and saw written fictional stories as lies. For another, they knew that official documents could easily be forged by scribes. The act of writing itself assumes that what is written will be forgotten otherwise, and these people were used to remembering those things that were important to remember. To them, written things seemed less important because they did not require memory. For example, one’s word was more official and trusted than one’s signature: “An honest person held to his word and did not demand written proof,” (Clanchy 193). If they used a signature, it showed that they might not intend to remember their promise.

-If technology were allowed to take up more time in the classroom, it would produce a very different student than a traditional education. Since the nature of our technologies today is to produce and make available information, students will tend to gloss over texts in order to read a good amount of what is available. The price of this education is that students, though they may have a broad education, will have sacrificed depth. There are some books that cannot be understood after just one quick reading. Readers need to ponder what they read, and allow the words time to resonate in their minds. A good analogy for this idea is given by John P. Davies in Education in the Electronic Culture. He compares the older, more traditional education involving memorization, deep reading, rhetoric, and so on, to the roots of a tree. Tree roots grow deep into the soil, and anchor the tree firmly. Davies compares a shallow but broad education to crabgrass roots, which only penetrate the first couple inches of soil, but spread outward along the surface indefinitely, (70).

-In Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory, she mentions a Medieval scholar, named Ockham. He was imprisoned without his books for several years, and while there he wrote about the books he had studied. He had read them to memorize, as scholars did at that time, and “was able at will to draw extensive resources from his memorial library”. In expounding and commenting on these books in his memory, he filled 551 folio pages, all showing a deep knowledge of the things he had studied. In his writings he also apologizes for “skimming the surface,” and says if he had access to his books he would be able to write more, (Carruthers 158). These hundreds of pages of philosophical commentary written from memory, an incomplete work to him, is much more than is expected in a dissertation today.

The student that emerges from our current education system does not usually learn how to read and study deeply. Because of our love for technology and information, we tend to rush from topic to topic in school, taking in as much as we can as fast as we can, and we don’t spend enough time on texts that require more study and research. With each gain in technology, we lose something of wisdom and memory. But despite all this, we need to keep on top of technology to some degree in order to function in society. So what should we do? Perhaps the only thing we can do is to understand that with each new technological gain, we lose something that had until then been fundamentally important, just as scholars in the Middle Ages must have lost the ability to memorize after books became more plentiful. In all probability, times will continue to change and education will soon become drastically different as a result of our love for technology. But we should at least try to understand what that change will be, and decide whether we really want it.

p.s. if you use this without my permission, you are plagiarizing, which is against the law.