Friday Morning Yard Saleing

Katielyn and I have taken to going Yard Saleing every Friday morning trying to find treasures to add make our new house a home. Today didn't look promising with only one moving sale listed in the classifieds but we set out anyway as it was a nice morning for yard saleing and usually we find more sales on our way.

I was disappointed as we drove out to not find any more sale signs and the corner where we turn into the neighborhood with the one sale, usually is brimming with signs didn't even have one. I was hoping I could find the one sale as I hadn't bothered to write down the address. We drove through the neighborhood and still no more signs. I figured today would be a bust. Finally we arrived at the turn with the sign for the advertised sale and happily there were three signs there. Yeah!

The first sale we poked through the treasures and found, a couple of planter stands for outside (last week we went on a greenhouse tour and now we're determined to dress up the outside of our house!), an old paper holder for my office (needs some refinishing) and a tomato planter (of course I find this today as I just repotted my tomato plant yesterday). We bought these for the princely sum of $2.00.

On to the next sale. We didn't find much there mostly toys and clothes. Katielyn did find a feather boa to dress up a sign she bought a couple of weeks ago. This sale only cost us $0.10 cents.

Finally we arrived at the last sale which was a moving sale. They had lots of interesting stuff but not really what we needed. Katielyn found a folding chair she had to have, and I found a picnic basket that would be good for holding my office paperwork. I spotted a nice wooden cabinet with glass doors behind a pile of boxes and bags and asked if it was for sale and it was! We went inside to see the matching pieces and liked them so we dickered a bit and finally settled on $100 for the pair. Not exactly a steal, but I do like the pieces and can use them. The house was lovely decorated with Guatemalan artwork. I may yet get a nice woven rug bought...we'll see when I pick up the cabinets. I also found a blouse and a bird feeder with character (read needs work but looks nice and old). Total expenditure (not including the shelves which we'll pick up later) $5.25.

Here's our yard sale loot for the day:

Total purchase price $7.35 (missing the feather boa)

We've been doing the Friday morning yard saleing for a while now, here are a couple pics of finds from the past few weeks:

My $5.00 water trough, complete with spigot!

Antique trunk for KT's rooms that we plan to refinish $10.00 (we were offered $20.00 for it before we even left the sale!)

Cute bow holder made from a window frame $3.00

Highway Robbery

Yesterday morning I had to make my daughters PB&J with one regular slice of bread and a crust (gasp). We were out of her awful white bread. I wondered if I'd her complaints after school or worse yet find a sandwich with just one bite out of it when I emptied here lunch bag this morning. Neither happened -maybe hiding the crust side face down in her sandwich container worked? Don't doubt the devious mind of a Mom in the morning.

I didn't get out all day so when I picked her up from school I needed to get bread. There is a cute little restaurant/store right near here school so I stopped in to get bread. No bread. They don't sell it. They had canned drinks and snacks but didn't stock bread. So I had to take a slight detour to the local convenience/gas stop. You know the kind, shelves stocked with beer of every flavor, coolers full of pop, aisles of chips and snacks, and oh yes, one little shelf with bread on it.

Have you ever noticed that in this kind of store, most of the grocery items don't have prices on them? They're not fools. They know that once you mosey up to the cash register and they ring it up they've just about got you. How many of us have the balls to say the thoughts racing through our mind at that point, such things as "highway robbery", "scandalous" or "what a rip-off"? Not me. I dutifully shelled out my $2.79 for my loaf of white bread. You better believe my frugal mind was calculating how much fuel I had saved by not driving to Walmart (I figured it to be about $1.00) and that my time was worth ever so much, that it certainly justified not spending the additional 25 minutes it would have taken to drive there, park and get the bread.

Oh what a price we pay for convenience. I just can't believe how many people make these kind of stores a regular in their day - the place was packed. Can you imagine how much money these people waste each week? And then they complain about not being able to make ends meet?

You better believe I'm buying two loaves of bread when I do my groceries this week, I'm going to keep a spare loaf in the freezer!

And just for the record, here's what a $2.79 loaf of bread looks like!

Homemade Lotion Bars

I suppose I don't need to tell anyone Texas is dry, especially in a year of record breaking drought. And hot (another redundant statement I suppose). This combination wreaks havoc on skin. My arms are beginning to look like one of those road maps that has all the smallest roads. You know the kind, lots and lots of squiggly lines. Yup that's what my arms are beginning to look like. And I want to stop it now.

I've been applying commercial lotions but they always leave my skin feeling greasy and don't really seem to do much so I went searching for something that might help. Lotion bars came up in my search and they sounded like just the thing except"Whoa Nelly...they are expensive!" Pricesvary but they average about $10.00 for a 2oz bar. That doesn't fall into my definition of frugality. Hmmmph and I so wanted to try them. So I searched, and much to my frugal little self's happiness lotion bars can be made at home for far less than the cost to purchase them and even better all the ingredients are natural!

For my first try at making homemade lotion bars I found what sounds like a very simple recipe:

Simple Lotion Bars

1 part oil (sunflower, olive, almond etc)

1 part beeswax

1 part butter (cocoa, shea, mango etc)

fragrance oil or essential oil (about 10 drops per oz of oil)

optional: vitamin E oil capsule

Melt oil, beeswax and butter together and add scent if desired. You can always remelt it add more ingredients if it is too hard or too soft. To make it harder add more beeswax; to make it softer, add more oil.

So I set out to buy the ingredients. I found cocoa butter in 1oz tubes at Walgreens for $1.39 so I bought two of those. I had olive oil at home but opted to purchase some almond oil at Target ($6.99 for 80z)-it just sounds nicer than olive oil. Then I hit a roadblock I couldn't find beeswax anywhere, and had to order it online. I found some at Amazon for only $1.99 for 5oz but $4.49 shipping brought it to $6.48 total).

So now with ingredients in hand I set out to make the lotion bars.

First I melted the butters and oil together. For lack of a double boiler I just boiled water in a pot and used a glass measuring cup as the top pot. It sat nicely on top of the pot. I realized after I started that I should have melted the butters together, and then added the oil as the oil was over the heat much longer than necessary while I waited for the beeswax to melt.

This is the beeswax melting in my "double boiler"

Here you can see the beeswax is taking longest to melt

For scent I asked my daughter what she liked. She chose peppermint and lavender -I'm not so sure with the cocoa butter that those were the best choice but we opted for them. I think next time I'll use vanilla or cinnamon with the cocoa butter. You add the oils just before you pour the wax so that they don't get cooked off.

I let the concoction cool a little and then transferred it into the molds. I used a turkey baster to measure out the lotion but will not do that again. It's impossible to clean the wax out of the baster so it ended up being tossed in the garbage. My measuring cup that I used to melt the wax in has a pouring spout and with care that's good enough.

I don't have any fancy molds so I rummaged through my cupboard and found a muffin tin. I tried lining with cupcake papers and without. It's definitely easier to get the bars out the pan with the cupcake papers and it gives the bars pretty little edges to. I also used a teabag holder that I have that is heart shaped. It's cute but it wasn't so easy to get out of this mold and I damaged the edges a little getting them out. I also poured some of the lotion back into the stick containers the cocoa butter came in.

My various improvised "molds". The one with the little pieces in it is just leftover material I later put into a lip balm container and used up first.

Here is the finished product (you can see the damaged edges on the bars that I poured without papers liners.)

I store the finished bars in the freezer as there are no preservatives in them. I think these bars are the perfect texture. They are solid but melt easily when rubbed on the screen without being messy.

The final tally is 6oz of lotion bars for a grand total of $7.12 (I didn't factor in the essential oil cost as I already had that on hand, and used so little). These were very simple to make and I think a great success. I"m using the bars after every shower and on my feet before bed. I think I can the roadmap on my arms is fading and the sandpaper on my feet has disappeared!