Birthday fun and easy meals

Hello everyone 🌞

With my craft room in order, it was easy and fun to make this birthday card.  I used a circle paper punch, embroidery floss, scrap paper, a glue stick and a rubber stamp. 

Our oldest granddaughter, Elizabeth, turned 8 ❤️

Her momma (my daughter, Nina) made her a very fun surprise center cake. 

When cut, candy and sprinkles pour out.  It was a very special cake and it tasted delicious too. 

Nina also fancied up my husband’s insulated iced tea cup.  She uses some kind of inks, epoxies and a turning contraption.  They turn out beautiful and she has a busy little side business starting with them.  



I haven’t made a pretty to do list lately but I made one yesterday.  


My husband has a little garden in our backyard.  Yesterday he picked onions, a few peppers, basil and lettuce.  


Supper last night was easy

Hash brown potatoes

Spinach from the garden with onions and a little bacon

Chopped veggies with cottage cheese- I like balsamic vinegar on mine ❤️


Another easy meal was fajita bowls. I cooked 2 diced chicken breasts in one pan, 2 onions and 2 bell peppers in another,  when done I mixed them together and seasoned with garlic salt, pepper and lime juice.  

Serve on top of rice and add salsa, sour cream and cheese as desired.  

This is so good and is good leftover too.  

Yard sale selling and buying

Hello everyone 

We were up and out in our garage and driveway early this morning.  I did some of the work but my husband and son did the majority of it.  

We pretty much just had a assortment of odds and ends to sell.  

When we were too hot and tired,  we moved the leftovers to the end of our driveway and marked it free.  Most all was picked up fairly fast.  

There was so little left that it was easy to deal with.  



I walked to few of the neighbors who were also having sales.

Everything in this photo was $5.75

Not shown are a bunch of clay pots $1 each

8 basketballs and soccerballs .50 each

A skateboard for .50 

And an air tank for $10, my husband picked it out

Any of you yardsale today? I like hearing about treasures and bargains.  

Crafting and sewing things organization and room switcheroo

Hello - I did a rather poor job as a Blogger in May but I have hopes to do much better in June. 

May was just a hectic month in our home.  

I did spend a good bit of time redoing my crafting and sewing things, which led to some other moving around too but it’s all done and I’m so happy with it.  

If you look a few posts back, you can see the messy before state of this room.  

Now, this is my sewing desk.  It didn’t change much except the drawers are cleaned out. 

The sack is where I put trash and threads, etc when I’m sewing.  

I downsized my rubber stamps but I kept plenty.  Besides the ones on the wall rack, my everyday stamps are in one drawer and Christmas ones in another.  

The drawers also hold craft paper, scissors, stamp pads, card supplies and Cricut accessories.  

The big basket in the middle right of the photo holds jewelry making beads and accessories.  

To the right of this table is our desktop computer.  

The closet got a lot of work.  I’m glad it holds so much, because I have a lot of stuff.  I did buy a small portion of these supplies but I got so much stuff from my parents when they moved to a retirement home, my daughter has given me lots of stuff, as well as a few friends and one stranger have given me supplies.  



I spent money for this re-do on these small shoe box size storage boxes and some big storage tubs. All  are clear, so I can easily see what is inside, and all were purchased at Walmart. 

I labeled them all with their contents written on cards that are inside each box.  

The cards don’t get lost or fall off, and I won’t ever have to peel them off like I might if I’d used sticker labels.  



We also moved the treadmill and rowing machine into this craft room/office.  

It’s not a spacious room, but everything fits with just aenough space to be functional.  




Fabric I don’t plan on using right away and other sewing things are now stored in clear tubs in the guest room closet. 



I have several clothing patterns that were printed online.  I previously had them hanging from a bulletin board and they looked messy.  

So I rigged some binder clips with small zip ties so I could hang the patterns from a hook inside one of the closet doors.  

It works fine, keeps the patterns handy and flat but behind closed doors.  

The messy before sewing room had 3 sets of these white shelves.  We moved 2 of them into the children’s room and they now hold almost all of the toys.    Before, the games and puzzles were on closet shelves.  The grands like these shelves as they can see exactly what all is here.  The big grands all understand that they can play with anything but they have to put it all away before they get out a second game, puzzle, building set etc.  

And yes, Grandpa secured all these units to the wall so we shouldn’t have any topple over.  




The bunk bed unit isn’t new this spring,  I don’t remember exactly when we bought it but it is recent and the grands all like it too.  

I sewed up fitted covers, made like fitted sheets, from some plush blankets we bought at Aldi.  

They are easy to launder and very soft to lay on, whether the grands are sleeping, reading or using an electronic device.  



All the grands like to play “cook” 

This polka dot basket holds the wooden play food and dishes.  This old wood and metal desk work as a play kitchen for them.  

That’s Ducky- we’ve had him 5 months and he’s a lot bigger than he was when he got him.  He is a very sweet puppy.  

He likes to hang out in this toy room even when the grands aren’t around.  

I still need to do some paint touch ups on the walls in those 2 rooms and add some framed things to the wall.  

While I didn’t downsize my supplies much, I did reduce the number the furniture pieces.  

And with the Kitchen reorganization,  I ended up with a good size “pile” 

So,  we will be participating in our neighborhood yard sale as sellers this weekend.  I prefer to be a buyer,  but I don’t need anything except to get rid of that pile of discards in our garage.  So selling is what I’ll do.  I plan on pricing things to sell, none of it will be coming back into this house afterward.  

So that’s what’s going on here.  

I plan to do lots of crafting and sewing in my new space this summer.  

You all have any garage sale hosting tips for me?  My husband has already rounded up tables and set me up with change and small bills.  

Two frugal things- $1 carpet cleaner and 1/2 price dishwasher tabs

I tried 2 new to me ways to clean, and spend less this week.  

I used this LA Totally Awesome cleaner, bought at the Dollar Tree for $1 in our carpet cleaning machine

and I tried cutting dishwasher tabs in half.  

Both gave great results.  

On the back of the bottle, it lists many things this cleaner is good for.  I’ve only used in the carpet cleaning machine and am very happy with how it removed pet stains on our 18 year old white carpet and on 2 rugs.  It doesn’t have much of a scent.  And it’s so much cheaper than those name brand jugs of carpet cleaner.  I’ve use commercial cleaners and I’ve mixed up homemade versions.  This Awesome is best of all them in my opinion.  

I had a small stockpile of these fancy dishwasher tabs.  (  Did you know that the high value dishwasher tabs coupons only come out in January? The ones that are $2- $2.50?  I read that somewhere and so far it seems to be true. )

Anyway,  I tried cutting 2 of the dry type ones in half and using just 1/2 a tab per dishwasher load.  

I’ve ran 3 loads and the results have been good too.  

The tabs are fairly easy to cut with a knife but do be careful as it takes a bit of pressure.  

It also makes some crumbs so I am only cutting 2 at a time and keeping them in small container.  

The 3rd tab in the photo seems to be all liquid and gel so I won’t be cutting that kind in half.  

I’m not loyal to any particular brand of dishwasher soap but I do want a kind with bleach as the bleach-less types don’t seem to remove coffee and tea stains in our hard Oklahoma water.  I know lots of people have good results with homemade cleaners but they haven’t worked for me.  

And I have to say that neither of these are my original ideas.  I saw a YouTuber talk about the Awesome cleaner for carpets and the dishwasher cutting tabs on a blog, I think it was 

sunny simple life

Tuesday's shopping for the week

Hello again.  I have done almost no couponing or bargain shopping during April but I'm getting back to it.  I have a new financial goal and careful grocery shopping is one way we will reach it.
Above and below is what I bought at Walmart.
The string cheese are my husbands favorite snack.
Most of the other things are things we use and I stocked up on because of Ibotta deals
Ibotta is an app that refunds your money for buying specific things.

I always check the Walmart day old bread-


Below is my Walmart receipt.
The cheese was a great deal.  Each bag had a $1 coupon attached so that made their purchase price just $1.38 - and youll see below that Ibotta gave me back $1 for each bag so the final cost as .38 for 1/2 pound of cheese



At Aldi,  I bought produce and a few ingredients we need.
The mini doughnuts and strawberries were a snack to take to my parents when my brother and3 grands were there.
The 1 pound boxes of Spring Mix are my favorite salad base.  1 pound is a lot of salad too!


Aldi receipt



I shopped at Dollar General and used 3 digital coupons from their app.
The bleach is from their dollar aisle and is a great price for bleach.  I am not brand loyal on bleach and I do use it on all white loads to sanitize kitchen towels, cloth napkins, washcloths,
also undies and handkerchiefs and cleaning rags.

I think $6.65 was a very low out of pocket purchase, especially for things we use often.  

these are the digital coupons I used there.
They change often so if you shop there,  always check the app the day you shop.

 


When I got home,  I entered my receipts on to a few apps that give cash back or you can earn gift cards.  This part goes very fast,.

The Walmart receipt goes on SavingsCatcher  

My big earner  was Ibotta.   Before I shopped, it did take a while to plan my shopping around their deals.  They have hundreds of deals but I only picked these as they at things we use and need.


The McCormick refund included the 3 Frenchs mustards.




I also entered my receipts onto Receipt Hog and Receipt Pal.
They don't have referral credit but if you search in your app store,  you will find them.
You won't earn fast but they truly take just seconds to enter your receipts.   I say when things take so little effort to save a few dollars,  do them.

I also used Fetch which I've posted about earlier.


I looked on Savings Start and Checkout 51 but didn't have any new offers to get credit for today.
I did see on Checkout 51 that I had previously earned enough to cash out so I requested a check be mailed to me.




I get it that some people don't want to do all these apps but I think most of readers are always trying to stretch their dollars and all these apps and careful shopping at multiple stores can be ways to do that.

I apologize to readers in other countries as I think these apps are all USA only.


I do have an Ibotta referral code,  I think if you use my code and are a first time ibotta use,  you will get $10 for signing up and doing your first purchase.

If you got this far,  thanks for reading and I hope my tips help you if you want to do some super penny pinching.