sewing at church and this week’s to do list

Hello everyone 

We’re attending a new to us church.  Their new pastor is someone we’ve known for more than 20 years.  

We’ve jumped into several  activities and are really glad to be doing so.  

My favorite is the sewing group.  

Look at this wonderful sewing space full of supplies and workers.  

The main sewing project is tote bags.  they have one pocket inside and one pocket outside.  The handles are webbing.  

Missionaries take this bags to other countries and gift them to people in very poor areas. I’ve been told that a missionary team will take a suitcase full of these bags with them. And that’s a lot of bags!

The sewing space is so nice! It has cutting tables where some women cut out the body of the bag and the pieces for the pockets.

The sewing machines are in the center of the room and electric cords come down from the ceiling so we aren’t tripping over sewing machines plugged into the wall.

There are ironing stations and several sergers for the people who finish the inside seams.  

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The map on the wall has pins marking all the places these bags have been sent.

That’s a cart full of bags with the pockets matched up to them.

I usually sew on pockets on the inside and out

some people cut out, some people iron,  some pin on the pockets and some sew on the pockets and some people sew on the handles and some serge around the edges

Some of the women also sew simple little girl dresses and little boy shorts for missionaries to gift to people.  

Here’s my To Do list for this week 

I checked off most of the tasks on last weeks list and feel like I’m getting back to my productive self but a few jobs moved to this week.  

Hope you all have a good new week 

❤️ Rhonda 

A thrift tip and checking things off my list

hello everyone,

Thank you all so much for the big welcome back

First I have a thrift tip 

   

I prefer to use our dishwasher over handwashing and I used to use pods, but can you believe the price of those things now?

I switched  exclusively to this powder detergent from Walmart and it works great in our dishwasher.  

I don’t like pouring straight from the box because it comes out too fast so I switched to using an empty drink mix container that also had a scoop

I marked the scoop with a permanent marker at about 1 tablespoon. This much detergent gets our dishes as clean as any expensive pod I’ve ever used.

The canister with the dishwasher soap in it is under our kitchen sink with the label, so if anyone else is doing the dishes, they should be able to figure it out.

I think I read on someone else’s blog that they only use a quarter teaspoon of dishwasher powder per load.  That seems like a very small amount, but maybe that would work.

For now, I’m going to stick with about a tablespoon

This runs around four dollars at my local Walmart and a box last me about three months

We run the dishwasher daily, sometimes twice a day if I am cooking a lot or we have extra people in the house

I’ve been working on that to do list. I started on Monday.

Today I worked on a few kitchen drawers. Why do those drawers get so many crumbs in them?

I saw a whole maker on YouTube using a little handheld vacuum to clean the crumbs out of her kitchen drawers, and I thought that would be a handy appliance

But I am trying to get things out of my house, not more appliances.

When I was vacuuming, the floors I thought about my hose attachment and that’s what I used today. It was a little cumbersome than a little handheld vacuum, but I already own this vacuum and I already know how to use it so that’s a win-win.

I did remember to take some before and after photos

  

  

  

The first photo is the before, and the second photos are the after

See all those cribs in the potholder drawer 😱

and besides just cleaning out the crumbs, I changed out the potholders.

I found these new ones in my sewing room and thought I should be using them instead of the old, stained ones

Gardening tasks are pretty small right now

when I watered this morning, I found three tiny green bean plants have started coming up in the green bean bed

two grandsons are here today and I believe this will be the last of the tomatoes of this season

And I’m thankful the boys like picking them

supper tonight was just myself and the two boys

So I planned pizza for supper. I made up a batch of dough and realized it was more than we would need so I used part of it to make 1 pizza for 3 of us. 

And then the other two parts were  partially baked for future pizza.

I used 2 Pie plates to bake them, I also brushed them with a little bit of olive oil and a little bit of seasoning

  

I’ve never done this before, so we’ll see how the parbaked  pizza crusts turn out later.  

They are in the freezer, waiting for a future meal. 

I’ve got more to tell you, but this is long enough

So hopefully, I will add more to another post tomorrow

Hope you all have a very nice weekend

❤️ Rhonda 

it’s been a while…….

Hello Everyone

We had a very quiet summer while my husband was recuperating from a shoulder injury and  surgery that was much harder than either one of us expected it to be

he is doing much better now.

So things are starting to get back to normal here, and I am getting back to more homemaking instead of just the bare necessities. 

you may remember, I planted a spring garden. I harvested lots of bush green beans. I have since cleaned out that bed and planted another crop for fall

We also planted a few assorted peppers and several small tomato variety plants

The tomatoes have done amazingly well with very little care

One day we picked 20 pounds

And this morning I picked about 3 1/2 pounds

I have made spaghetti sauce for the freezer with some of them, have made fresh salsa many times

And have shared lots of them. My daughter works in a big office building that has a sharing table and she says our tomatoes are very popular there.

Our other summer entertainment has been birds

Robins like to build a nest on our pergola. I think this is the third year they have done so

This year, we have had five nests with baby Robins. 

Robins  grow up very fast And both parents provide equal care for the babies

My photos are not very good because I have to take them from a distance and the pergola is up kind of high.

My granddaughter has suggested we put a trail camera up there and we just may do that next year 

We have also enjoyed hummingbirds

We just had two feeders, but we may expand on that next summer.

This morning, I made my first pretty to do list in several months

I discovered my big black ink pad for the rubberstamps was not very fresh. But I have a smaller one and it worked good

Last week, I made this sort of master meal list for the month.

These are dishes that we have ingredients for and I’ve already made several of them even though there’s no check beside any of them

Sometimes it helps when I’m not feeling very inspired to look at a list. 

During the summer, we did enjoy takeout and restaurant meals several times.

But we live in a college town and the college kids are back, which means there’s lots of traffic and it’s not much fun to go out at busy times

So I intend to cook  At home whenever possible

Thank you all for the kind comments During my blog absence

I’m hoping to be back blogging and back to getting things done

❤️ Rhonda