I wanted to share a recent discovery. For 2012 we’re trying to “green” our household cleaners, and one of my biggest concerns was eliminating liquid soaps. They’re expensive, and overused. I also don’t like regular soaps, as they can hang on to germs between uses, especially that bathroom counter-top bar that gets frequent use. It gets soggy and unappealing, gets stuck in rings, and begins slipping around.

You may remember those old “soap shavings” dispensers, which dispense a powdered detergent for hand-washing. Fairly sanitary and tidy, but I’m not interested in using detergents on skin.

My solution is shavings of castile soap, a vegetable-based, all natural soap.

While watching television a few nights ago, I took a potato peeler to a bar of soap (like any other crazy frugalista does on a Monday night), and made these beautiful soap curls! One bar of soap will fill this jar about six times. To wash hands or face, simply pick up a single curl, and scrub up! No sticky sloppy bar, no transfer of “used soap” germs, and not an egregious use of time. (A fine task for television watching).

Also, the soap curls smell delightful! With all the surface areas of the soap curls, it smells fantastic.

You can also buy gift cards for Big Fish. My oldest daughter has received these for birthdays a few times, and really loves them.

I didn’t have a photo that I was ready send off from my family, but husband’s sister got married recently, and I thought a canvas transfer of one of their wedding photos would be a fun gift.

I uploaded the photo, selected the size, wrap, shape and coloring of the, and it was all done within a few minutes. If your photo isn’t perfect, the company will change the coloring for you, or add effects like sepia or even touch up problems (additional fees apply).

Within a few minutes of submitting my order, I got an email from the company, informing me that the photo I submitted was low-resolution, and to confirm if I wanted to substitute another photograph or proceed anyway. This was all handled personally by an employee–not a random database-generated message into the ether.  I submitted a higher-resoution photograph and got confirmation just a few minutes later that it would work perfectly, which is great because I’m no photo pro.

The final print arrived a week later, and is really, really stunning. I can’t wait to give it to my sister-in-law and my new brother-in-law.

Frugal, really?

Yes, these are pretty expensive, but not outrageous (at least in my opinion) for what they are worth. The canvas will be treasured by its owners. Also, there’s a 50% off coupon right now on Facebook if you like their page “Easy Canvas Prints.”

But would I order again?

Absolutely! We’ve got to get some new family photos done soon. After those are done, I think we will have them turned into a canvas for our house, and maybe even as a gift for my parents and my husband’s parents.

For a glimpse of the canvas that is on its way to the happy couple, see below.

*Disclosure: I was given a canvas in exchange for review and blog advertising, though this opinion is entirely my own and is not under the direction of the company in any way.

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One of our readers (Thanks Judy) recently introduced me to “Boondocking.”

Boondocking is camping rough. Really rough. It’s also free. Boondocking refers to camping for free, weather it is at a Casino’s RV site or a wilderness area in a public park.

I’ve found several websites that index and rate “boondocking” sites:

• Freecampsites.net
• Boondocking.org
• Freecampgrounds.com (specifically tailored to RV camping)

True, some “perks” of maintained campgrounds aren’t always available — flush toilets and latrines, electricity hookups, noisy campsite neighbors.

There are a number of easy workarounds for the lack of plumbing (I’l let you Google “boondocking tips” for that info though).

Aside from roughing it, how else can you save money on your family camping trips?

1. Get your gear used. Tons of people take up camping every year, but tons of people give it up too. Freecycle lists, CraigsList and the classified ads are great ways to get the big stuff like camp stoves and tents. Smaller items like silverware, cooking pans and knives are easily (and cheaply) found at yard sales and thrift stores.  Housewares are easiest to find in July right after “wedding season” and hardest to find in August and September when everyone is hunting up that stuff for dormitories. Conversely, if you’re not opposed to dumpster diving, check out your local college campus dorm dumpster areas as soon as the school year ends for a serious stash of housewears being ditched by departing grads.

2. Save on space and ice by preparing and freezing meals ahead.  We make rice pudding, and freeze it in gallon sized ziploc bags.  It stays frozen a long time, and makes great breakfasts over the campfire. Besides, it doesn’t leave puddles in the bottom of the cooler.

3. Try solar lights. You can find solar garden lights just about anywhere now, and they are great for marking out obstacles on the campsite, or having in the tent for little ones who are afraid of the dark.

Image Credit: foto76 Freedigitalphotos.net

4. Day camp.  This never occurred to me until I saw a family doing this at a local lakefront park. They pitched a tent on the lawn, pulled out their cooler and sent the kids to play.  Mom and dad held down “home base” at the tent and kept an eye on the kids. Little ones returned to the tent for naps or to change from swimsuits to playground clothes. It didn’t cost the family anything except the cooler full of water bottles and peanut butter sandwiches and the kids got to play all day. (Oh, and did I mention, mom didn’t have to check the shower for spiders, wash dishes in the dark, hassle with the propane stove, or worry about bears). When the sun went down or the kids got tired of playing, the family just folded up their tent and lawn chairs, and went home.

5. Camp off-season.  My husband hates spiders, and as a result, will only camp in the winter. Like serious, dead-of-winter, snow-on-the-ground craziness. But let me tell you this, it’s cheap!

6. Camp during the week. If you’ve got the vacation time, a Monday-Thursday camping trip can sometimes cost 1/2 the weekend rates.

7. Share! Every summer we try to attend a four-day camping trip with some friends. Between us, we have five “parental teams” and around twenty children, or about eight tents and an RV.  We rent three adjoining campsites and let the kids run loose between the three. That keeps our site rental fees very low, as we just split it based on the number of people in our group and the number of days we stay. We also share a couple of cook-stoves, and one fire pit, reducing our firewood expense greatly by sharing. (You can cook 35 marshmallows over one fire just as well as you can cook 4).

Yes, I’m a canner. A pretty hardcore canner. In June, we make jam, in July it’s beets and pickled cucumbers and dill beans, and come August, it’s peaches, spaghetti sauce and stewed tomatoes.  Is it frugal?  Honestly, I don’t think it is.  Between the costs of the fruit to can, the jars (reusable, but still expensive) the sugar, pectin, vinegar, or other ingredients, and the processing time, I’m fairly certian that it is not less expensive than buying a similar item at the supermarket.

But there’s still a host of good reasons to home-can.

I know EXACTLY where the food came from. I buy organic when I can, when I can’t, I wash fruit very, very carefully. Organic strawberry farms are expensive and hard to find around here, but we buy our strawberries from Duris Farms in Kent and Puyallup, WA. Duris has a committment not to use any chemicals on their berry plants from the time they bloom, so we can be fairly certain our fruit will have very low pesticide levels.

We use BPA-free jars and lids.  Glass jars are naturally BPA free, but most commercially available jars have lids which contain dangerous BPA chemicals. We buy special BPA free lids from Azure Standard by mail order.

We don’t need extra preservatives or colorants.  Our oldest daughter takes ADHD medications and artificial food dyes seem to interact with her medication. We don’t have to add any artificial colorants to our home-preserved foods. Our strawberries were fully ripe, and the jelly gets a deep dark burgundy color all by itself.

This is a case of paying for peace of mind.  Yes, I’m willing to take the extra time and energy to be 100% sure of the origins of my preserved food. We spend our money in our local community, with local farmers. We avoid chemicals and we really, really love jam.

For canning newbies

For those looking for canning instructions, there are a few good places to find them. I really like the Ball Book of Canning which is available at most hardware stores. I’ve also had great luck finding my canning equipment at estate sales and Freecyle e-mail lists. My friends know that I can, so they collect canning jars and glass spaghetti jars for me throughout the year, and because the jars are re-usable over and over, it’s a worthwhile investment. You’ll only have to replace jars lost due to breakage or gifting. For beginning canners, the water-bath method requires the least extra equipment and is lowest risk food-safety-wise. You don’t necessarily need a special canner, if you have a really, really big stockpot, that will suffice. Classes are often offered by food co-ops, cooperative extensions and private companies like Seattle Can Can.

We buy almost all of the kids clothes second hand, but still, they typically grow out of their clothes before they are worn out.  We’re now seeing that our youngest is likely to have a very different body type than our oldest. So most of those boxes of tween clothes are slim and tall sizes that may not fit little sister who’s more average-sized.

I was thrilled to learn about a company called ThredUp from a friend of a friend at a Barbeque recently. As soon as her baby grows, she boxes up baby’s too-small sizes and swaps them for a larger size. It’s all done by mail and Web which makes it even better. (Thrift stores with the tykes in tow is just no fun!)

The premise behind ThredUp is this — Each box costs $15. You can buy boxes, or you can trade boxes (if your box is well-rated, your account will be credited). You search by the season you want, the size and gender. You can even trade books, toys, or mom-wear this way (for my friends on the hunt for maternity wear–this is a shoutout for you! There’s gobs of materinity clothes on ThredUP, and it’s always $15 for a full flat-rate box.

I’ll be experimenting a bit with this over the summer and will post my results.  Right now I’m not needing anything, but usually by mid-July the kids have gotten up and said “Mom, I can’t button my pants.” (Growth is a sudden experience around here).

The other thing I have done with great success is ordering “lots” from Ebay. I just search the size and gender and include the word “lot.”  I’ve ordered many, many of our youngest daughter’s clothes this way, and I’ve been very happy with the results, but I love that with ThredUp I can keep my costs lower by trading in what the kids have just grown out of.

Have you tried a formal clothes-swap like this? If so, what did you think? I’d love to get your feedback.

Jessica

My youngest in preparation for a Bollywood dance recital at the YMCA

My day began like this.  Make breakfast.  Clean up additional items pulled out of refrigerator by “helper.”  Burn breakfast while returning salad dressing, soy sauce, barbeque sauce and pickle relish to the refrigerator.

Give up on breakfast. Dump the hot, scorched pan in the sink, and leave for the garden center–picking up breakfast sandwiches on the way. (I know, not frugal or gluten-free, so regretted on all fronts).

M, my youngest, age 5 "helping" with plants.

Today was the 27th sunny day of the year so far in Seattle. Please note the date. May 12. Yes, it was only our 27th day of sunshine for the entire year. The garden should have been in months ago.

Actually, I’ve planted my garden twice. Once it flooded out, once it was eaten to the ground by maniacal bunnies, (apparently ravaged by vitamin D deficiency). I’ve lost my chance to start any more plants from seed, so I had to break down and buy plants from seed.  I had to do it before the garden center stopped carrying seedlings, babysitter or no babysitter.

At 8:50, we had been in the car outside the garden center for  ten minutes, and my youngest daughter had already asked me fourty-two times what we were waiting in the car for. “Why aren’t we going in yet?”  Me (through snarled lips) “For the fourty-second time–you have not finished eating your sandwich yet! We are waiting on YOU!” (Truthfully, the garden center didn’t open until 9, but I didn’t want her food congealing and stinking up my car while we were in there either).

Sandwich eaten (or sufficiently picked at) our youngest decided that we could go buy the plants now. I pulled out an unwieldy cart, and lurched and turned it around to head into the store. I was promptly hit in the back of the ankles by another cart.

How in the hell does this happen? What’s the big freakin’ hurry? The place just opened and it’s empty!

I turned around to acknowledge my assailant (deciding if I should take the “please pardon me” or the “where’s the fire” approach), and found my five year old daughter pushing the offending cart. She couldn’t even see through the back of the cart, and held her little hands at pig-tail level to push the thing.

“Melat! What is our rule here?”

“No touching anything?” She responds quietly from behind the cart.

“Yes. Why do you have a cart?”

“For the stuff that I buy.”

“Did you bring your allowance?”

“No.”

“Do you need to plant green bean plants?”

“No.”

“Why do you have a cart?”

“Ummmm….” she says as she begins backing away from me with the cart.

I sigh, dislodged my cart from whatever it was stuck on, and heave it into the garden center. Tomatoes, bean starts, pumpkins, and a few annual herbs destined for our patio herb garden went into the cart.

Chili peppers, flowers, and little pink garden gloves came out of the cart and went back on their proper shelves.

I then pushed the cart with my “helper” awkwardly. She walked in front of me–between me and the cart handle “helping” me to push the cart–her little hands under mine (firmly) on the cart rail so she will stop “helping” with items I cannot see.

I saw a garden center employee behind me pulling aside several tomato plants that appear to have had their tops lopped off about halfway up the height of the plant, and hoped that had nothing to do with our arrival on the scene.

I finished the shopping trip by nodding my head in the rough direction of plants and dictating to my twelve-year-old (reading, instruction-following) daughter. “There, Pink Lady tomatoes–two of them, top shelf. Bottom shelf, one pumpkin, your choice of variety.”  ”On the herb shelf–dill. It will smell like the tartar sauce I make.”

By the time we arrived at the checkstand, I was exhausted.

Miraculously, everything in the cart was mostly undamaged, and only items I actually planned to buy. I was proud of myself for paying with exact change, cash and totally within budget. “Yes!” I murmered to myself and pushed the cart to the car…wondering if I was actually on budget, since it was the third time I’ve had to plant the garden this season. At what point should a gardener throw in the towel and determine that it is more frugal to buy the produce at the supermarket?

I breathed a sigh of relief that we had gotten to the car without incident. I told my youngest to “assume the position” (like in the television show COPS my rule is “put a hand on the car” in the parking lot). She put one hand on the car, and one on where her hip is gonna be one day, and I started loading plants carefully into the trunk of my station wagon.

And then it happened. Dirt hit me. It splattered me, everywhere. I froze, startled. I hear my oldest say “whoa” behind me under her breath.

This could only mean one thing.

More “helping.” I turned around just in time to catch my youngest–one hand on the car, one hand into the basket of the cart–getting ready to chuck the second six-pack of Blue Lake bean starts over the back seat of the car so they can “ride up front with us mom. I’m just helping.”

Deep breaths.

I turned to my oldest, asked her to load the car, and I picked of my youngest at the waist, set her into the carseat and told her “Don’t touch anything!”

We got in the car to go home and my oldest daughter says “Wow, good job mom–we only spent 14 minutes in that store.”

::whimper::

Arriving home, I sent my little helper in the front door first. “Run inside and make your bed before lunch,” I said, and she eagerly complied.  Before lunch? I thought.  I’ve got three more hours!

I grabbed the herb starts from the back of the car, the trowel from the garage and headed out to the back deck to divide and plant them in my containers. A quick transplant of dill and cilantro, not a complicated task. I headed to the deck thinking that this was just what I needed after our harrowing fourteen-minute trip to the garden center.

I patted out the dill and began dividing the clumps, and set the little plastic bucket aside.

I hear “I got it for ya momma” from my youngest. That was some quick bed-making I think, but she’s happy and busy, so whatever. As I stood up to start on the cilantro, I  saw it. Through the patio window, into my beautiful cream-on-cream colored house–light furniture, light floors, everything had been clean simultaneously for the first time in weeks.

What she “got,” was not the bed making, it was the little plastic container from the plant. She went to “help” me by tossing it in the trash. In the kitchen.

To accomplish this task, she traversed through the dining room, foyer, living room (to pet the cat on the sofa from the looks of it) and to the trash in the kitchen.

There was a distinct trail of little globules of damp potting soil through the whole house. The whole freaking house. It was about four-feet wide, and using my highly-trained mommy-forensic skills, I take this to mean that the trail was formed by skipping rather than walking through the house.

She is a cheery helper.

I went to the bathroom, filled a bucket with water, and found an old scrub-brush. I needed help with a very important task.

My happy little helper spent the rest of the afternoon happily enjoying the warm sunshine and scrubbing away at our outdoor patio, while inside, I scrubbed away at the rugs, counting my blessings.

Dear Jesus,

Help me to serve you always with the same joy of service that my children serve me with.

Help me to count their service always as a blessing.

Help me to remember, that when they serve me, they are practicing to serve You.

Help me to be a kind and patient teacher as they blossom into the people they are to become.

Amen

"Helping" me by incubating the seeds I planted.

I thought I’d spend a minute passing on my tricks for ridding the house of the little beasties.

Take a narrow-top bottle like a vinegar or oil bottle or a wine bottle. Pour a little fruit juice or red wine (2 TBS) and banana bits (2TBS) in the bottom, seal off most of the top with tape, or use a funnel (paper, coffee filter, or plastic) to further reduce the size of the opening.

Leave in affected area for 1-2 days.

The fruit fly problem should be substantially resolved after one night of having the trap available.

I always put red wine in my traps–it seems more humane this way. At least they’ll die happy.

In the morning, I cap the bottle and dispose of it (trust me, they’ll multiply in there, you don’t want to cap it and try washing it in a few days. If you must… see below for instructions, though it’s quite an effort).

To “recycle” your trap glass or plastic bottle, place the bottle in a slightly larger container, like a deep pot (asparagus pot or mug if you’re using a narrow bottle) Cap the bottle.

Invert a canister of “canned air” from a computer supply store  and point the plastic tube into the space between the larger and smaller bottle. Spray the canned air for 3-5 seconds. The flies will drop like… well… flies.   This will freeze the smaller container with your flies in it and allow you to rinse the bottle and recycle it.   Note: DO NOT put the caned air opening directly into your fly canister.. that will result in a facial spray of wine and dead flies…

Here’s wishing you a fly-free kitchen this spring and summer!

Jessica, the Penny-Wise Mom