Waste not, want not

Like many of you, I really dislike wasting things. For example, I'll say that the majority of the time, I'm pretty successful in the kitchen, so when I bomb the occasional dinner, I think I'm more upset about wasting good ingredients than the fact that my family didn't really enjoy it. So I really strive to use what I have in my home to make it into something useful, beautiful, delicious and/or practical. Whether it's "recycling" last night's crockpot brisket into tonight's chili or using up every scrap of fabric until it's just too tiny to do anything with, it's part of my biology to make things last as long as possible.

I picked up this book on a whim at the library, as it caught my eye on the "New and Interesting" shelf.

We don't eat out much, but I've been intrigued about how this author decided to not eat out for two years while living in New York (Hello, amazing restaurant/deli/pizza parlor/bagel shop capitol of the world!) and discover the ease and satisfaction of cooking for herself. I'm about 1/3 of the way through it, and already I'm fantasizing about being labeled a "frugalista," defined as "a person who lives a frugal lifestyle but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying secondhand, growing own produce, etc." Here's even a blog dedicated to it. Now, the book author talks about this concept in the middle of the chapter about freeganism, aka dumpster diving (which I don't plan on doing anytime soon), but the idea of the frugalista and making someone else's trash into my treasure goes right along with my waste-free, pro-recycle philosophy.

So, what do you like to recycle? For me, it's fabric. I pay good money for good fabric, and I don't have the budget or the storage space to have a whole bunch. OK, mostly it's the budget thing, as I can ALWAYS find room for more fabric. :-) Anyway, I can't bring myself to waste one bit of it without recycling it into as many projects as I can get out of it.

Here's a stack n' whack quilt I made a couple of years ago, which resulted in quite a stack of little leftover pieces.

What to do? I like to make anything from mini paper-pieced quilt blocks and table runners like this one, to hand-pieced hexagons and scrappy flowers. And when they're even too small for those, I stitch up the scraps to make pretty note cards. I made dozens of these in packets of 3 for stocking stuffers this past Christmas. And it was a gift to me as well, because it used up a bunch my scraps in a cute and useful way!

During my mom's annual quilt retreat, she collects buckets and bins full of teeny, otherwise unusable scraps, "snippets" and shreds of fabric and sends them to a crafter in Arizona where she uses them to stuff pillows for needy children.

Think the selvages are no good? I'm saving mine up...maybe for something like this:

source

Or, how AMAZING would this be???

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How do you like to stretch your fabric stash as far as it will go? If fabric isn't your thing, what's your favorite thing to recycle, or better yet, UPcycle? I'd love to know!

It's About Time

Did you ever think about all the time you either save or waste in a day? And if you're saving it ... where, exactly, do you store it? That's the basic plot-launcher of Michale Ende's novel Momo, wherein the Men in Grey, cloaking themselves as representatives of the Timesavings Bank will happily store up that extra time you've been saving, for future use. Except that of course they're actually just stealing it for their own nefarious purposes. Enter Momo! A little girl of uncertain origin, who has this remarkable ability to just ... listen ...

It's been years since I read this book, but I love it. I love the premise ... I mean, really, saving time? What a ridiculous idea! This book was an awesome reminder that time is meant to be used - to the fullest! It was an eye-opener to the fact that despite modern "time-saving" methods and devices, we don't really have the power to actually save time - we only have the power to choose how we will spend it.

And I do believe I'll be spending some time soon reading this book again.

Teaching an old baby new tricks

When my first child was born, I wanted to teach him sign language as an infant, and it went pretty well considering that I ended up being less consistent with it as I should have been. Now with my second baby just turning 18 months old, I've been even less consistent with her and I wondered if it was too late to start. On the way out of the library the other day, I just happened to see this book on the "new and interesting" display shelf.

This is a good one for older babies and toddlers because there are more commands and emotions that they can relate to. And, as they're beginning to form actual words and short sentences, this helps them understand their meaning and can express themselves with a little less frustration. When teaching an infant sign language, there isn't a whole lot beyond "milk", "more", and "sleep". This book is divided into three sections: Mealtime, Playtime, and Bedtime.



So far so good. Little Miss Polka-dot is catching on quickly, and Mr. Jellybean is even getting in on it, even at the ripe old age of 4.



Have you taught sign language to little ones? I'd love to hear your tips.







P.S. Speaking of communicating with little ones, if you or someone you know has a BRAND new baby, I would highly recommend checking out Dunstan Baby Language. Most libraries should have the DVD. I was skeptical at first when I had newborns, but it's amazingly accurate!

A Good Book for Movie Classics

Okay, just real quick, since I have to go watch Pushing Daisies with my husband in a minute (we've been catching up on television series that we've missed out on because we haven't had our TV hooked up, well, ever - hooray for Netflix!), I wanted to tell you about this book you should totally check out if you want to introduce your kids to classic films:

The Best Old Movies for Families, by Ty Burr

It's got some great suggestions, and it's fun to read! Go check it out, and then go watch some movies!

a beautiful family culture

The title of this post is Stephen Covey's answer when asked what is "effectiveness" of a family? He outlines methods of creating a beautiful family culture in this book:

I, like many of you I'm sure, have read his original book, and this is a follow-up using the same principle habits but focused on family relationships. I recommend reading the first one...well, first. The habits are pretty much the same in both, and it's interesting to see how habits like "Be Proactive", "Think Win-Win", and "Synergize" can take on drastically different levels of significance whether you're thinking of yourself individually or of your family dynamic.

This is a good read, no matter where you are in your family - parent, spouse, sibling, aunt/uncle, grandparent. I hope you'll give it a try, if you haven't already, and let me know how it has helped you better empathize, share, affirm, pray and sacrifice in your family.

Someday My Garden Will Be Featured in Books Like These

As I worked in my garden today, and reflected on the ratio of dirt and weeds to actual plants there, I started dreaming again of the garden I always envision. I think of these days as practice, and hope that someday I'll be the sort of gardener who is blessed to make real and take care of the garden in my head. In the meantime, I love to get inspiration from others to add to my someday garden. And here are a few of my favorite places to get that inspiration!


You Grow Girl is the first gardening book by garden blogger Gayla Trail, and I LOVE it. Her ideas work in urban as well as backyard gardens, it's easy to understand and fun to flip through. Whenever I'm feeling like the laziest gardener ever, this book kicks me right back into gear with simple and do-able ideas.

Front Yard Gardens by Liz Primeau is the garden book that when I picked it up I said "YES, this is exactly what I want!" I will confess right now that I'm not a fan of big lawns. On a ball field, yes. In my garden, no. They're high maintenance and I don't love the way they look. I've heard the argument that it's somewhere for the kids to play, and then I've watched my own kids run around the periphery of our backyard where they can climb trees and hide behind bushes and find shady cozy spots to read. That's what I want all over my yard - garden everywhere!


Any book on companion planting is cool with me, this is just the one I happen to own. As someone who believes wholeheartedly in working with nature rather than fighting against it, I love the idea that certain plants when grown together will help each other out; fighting each others battles against pests and diseases.


It is a dream of mine to have our backyard certified as wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation. Did you know you could do that? It's so cool. I love seeing birds in our trees and butterflies and hummingbirds flitting about and the hum of bees in the vegetable garden. This is a great book on how to use your landscape and your plantings to attract these helpful critters to your garden, thus making it even more beautiful.

And this, my friends, is the vegetable gardener's bible if you live in the Maritime Northwest. It pretty much tells you what you should be doing in your garden from month-to-month, including how to amend your soil and use compost, what sorts of seeds to plant and when (and which to start indoors and which to sow outdoors).

What inspires you when you're planning the garden of your dreams?
What are your favorite garden books?

Three For Feburary Reading

So it's the middle of February. It seems like I so often forget what month it is until I'm in the middle of it. Not that I forgot that it was February; but I did forget that it's Black History Month. And while my ancestry is Euro-American through and through, I have this thing about other peoples' cultures - that is, I love them. I love trying to see the world through someone else's eyes, and I've found the most fun way to do that is to celebrate with them. From the Lunar New Year to Los Dias de los Muertos to Rosh Hashanah, I love love LOVE the reasons that people celebrate.

So. Black History Month. Is February. And so, in celebration, I offer recommendation of these three books I have read and loved.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I know, everyone's probably read this one. But it was probably required reading for some high school or college class, and has probably been long forgotten. Read it again! This time just because you want to. There is so much experience in this book that is so different from mine, I find something new to learn every time I read it.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller. A memoir of the author's childhood in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). While I drank up every page of this book, I have to say right out, I hesitate to recommend it to people in general. It's unsentimental and unapologetic, often even raw, and there is most certainly some, um ... "colorful" language. If you are a reader who gets distracted by such details, this is probably not the book for you. I loved the honest, often funny, sometimes poignant remembrance of a time and a place that is forever lost to me, but never ever to the people who lived in it.

Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton. This one's about South Africa, a place I feel like I have had a little piece of in my heart ever since my brother served as a missionary there in the mid-1980's. And it's about apartheid. And it's about a man and his son. And it's about hope. And courage. And love. Just thinking about this book makes me want to pick it up and read it again and again.

My brother said of his two years in South Africa, that Africa is a place that never leaves you, it gets under your skin and just stays there, and there is always an itch to go back. These books, in their way, are a little like that.

Shannon Hale

I just read the most wonderful book. It was wholesome, fun, thought provoking, and not what you think of when you hear princess. It was "The Princess Academy" by Shannon Hale.

She is my new favorite author. I am currently reading another of her books "The Goose Girl" it is one of four in the Books of Bayern series. I am hooked. She is clean, modest, wholesome, everything I would want my daughter to be reading if she were older and could read.

"The Princess Academy" is about a low class town Mt. Eskel. the people are told the prince will find his wife there. They have to hold a princess academy for the girls to learn how to read, write, be poised, dance, etc. It is about a girls journey to find herself. As well as the background story of quarry speech. It is a mining town where they mine rock and Miri, the main character is forbidden to work in the mine. All the other girls work there so she really wants to. In the mine the have a quarry speech that is used. It is fascinating. The book has also received a Newbery Honor.

I highly recommend her books. I have only read the one, by the end of the day it will be two and I have 3 more I just checked out from the library. One is an Adult novel called "Austenland," one is a Graphic Novel called "Rapunzel's Revenge, written with her husband, and the last one is "Book of a Thousand Days." I also have the sequel to "The Goose Girl," "Enna Burning" on hold since they were all checked out. Yeah, I am obsessed.

Here is her official website. http://www.squeetus.com/stage/main.html

Here is the first chapter of "The Princess Academy." http://www.squeetus.com/stage/princess_chapter.html

And here is a link to her blog about when she received the Newbery Honor. It is pretty funny. http://www.squeetus.com/stage/princess_phonecall.html

Oh, by the way, my husband is a fan too.