The Family Together

Jul. 30, 2009 - Free Baby Dress Crochet Pattern

THIS pattern is for a cute little dress that is quick to complete and would make a nice gift for someone expecting a little girl.

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Jul. 18, 2009 - Organized Christmas - Gifts in a Jar

As I mentioned below, I start my Christmas planning in the summertime. Nothing overwhelming; it's not like I'm already dragging out the decorations or anything! :) I simply like to have a plan going, and know what items I'm going to need.

ORGANIZED CHRISTMAS is a website for people who *really* like to be prepared. There are planning sheets, ideas for gifts, and a section on "simplifying" your holidays.

Their GIFTS IN A JAR section has some recipes that would work year-round, and, as a bonus, there are printable gift tags to go along with them.

THIS WEBSITE has dozens of gifts-in-a-jar recipes to choose from, along with user ratings.

I've found boxes of canning jars at garage sales and in thrift stores for a fraction of the cost of buying them new. If you crochet, YOU CAN MAKE JAR COVERS. I like to only make lid covers, and let the ingredients "sell" themselves in the jars.

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Jul. 3, 2009 - Soap Making & Gift Giving

My 12yo daughter has been making soap and shampoo bars for the past week. She had asked us to take her to Basin (a bath & body shop) to spend her birthday money from her great-grandmother about a week after her b-day in June. One jar of scented sugar scrub was $25! The soaps ranged $5 - $6 a bar. I told her she could buy some soap if she really wanted, but convinced her to not spend her entire check on the sugar scrub. I voiced the opinion that we could probably make something similar for a lot less, and in the end, she only bought one thing - a shampoo bar for our dogs; she was willing to give the homemade versions a try.

A trip to the library, and some internet research behind us, we were ready to go for it. Not only did we want to make our own sugar scrub, we decided to give soap-making a try as well.

After some consideration, we decided not to make soap entirely from scratch - yet. We are planning to attempt it in the fall, but we need to find a digital kitchen scale first. I don't know how long that will take. When we wanted a "new" crockpot, we found one at a garage sale within a week ($2). It only took two weeks to get a color printer - for $5, from a Craig's List ad. I'm afraid a digital scale will be much harder to come by and I'm not thrilled with the buy-it-new option, as the least expensive I've found so far is about $20. It also involves using lye, which we'll need to order online. Most places listed on the web that would sell it locally, I found no longer do when I actually called them. (Apparently lye has something to so with meth labs! Understandably, many stores don't want to carry it.)

In any case, we chose "hand-milling" for our soap making - where you take plain, unscented soap and grate it. You add distilled water, some kind of oil (we choose coconut; it was the cheapest oil of the kinds listed as "acceptable" that was still organic), and scent and optional color. Oddly enough, it was the plain soap that turned out to be the hardest-to-find ingredient. Everything else we needed, we found at a craft store and we were even able to use a 15% off coupon, or simply bought at the grocery store. We finally tracked down the soap at a pharmacy.

So far my daughter has made Lavendar-Chamomile shampoo bars, Woodland Pine & Sage soap, and Cucumber-Green Tea soap. She's also made a lavender sugar scrub, and cucumber-green tea bath salts. She has more than spent her birthday money from great-grandma, so she had to dip into savings as well to cover all her supplies. I've been extremely impressed with her dedication to it so far. She has asked about the possibility of making and selling soaps and bath products through my store at Etsy. I'm not really sure how to connect bath products to crocheted baby items, but I'm willing to consider it if she's genuinely serious. She certainly seems to enjoy it so far. (Though she's not happy with the fact that her cucumber-green tea soaps came out looking like mint-chocolate chip ice cream! I think she'll need to use more colorant next time.)

All her experiments have enabled me to formulate my Christmas plans for the year. Every year I make themed gift baskets for all the adults on our list and it usually costs me about $80 total - working out to about $6 a person. I always try to start my baskets in the summer, to give myself plenty of time, and this year I hadn't yet come up with any ideas. (Last year's Italian Dinner baskets went over very well.)

As usual, I will buy the containers at the dollar store. Since I've given out plenty of baskets over the years, and everyone seemed to like the colanders last year, I'm thinking I might get plastic carry-all type containers to assemble everything in.

For the women on our list, I will be making crocheted spa wash clothes from free patterns at Lion Brand Yarn. I will add to that bath salts, a homemade bar of soap, and a scented candle (these are also easy to make), plus some herbal tea and a dollar store mug.

For the men, I will be making men's "beauty care" items (Can I call them that?) - like aftershave and a masculine scented soap. I will add a jar of sugared almonds or pecans, some coffee and a mug.

So this year's official theme is now "Pamper Yourself." I'll let my son design the cards again. Who knows what he'll come up with this time. Santa in a bath tub?

For the "small gifts" - for co-op teachers and the like - I will make small jars of the sugar scrub.

Some of these items will need to wait until much closer to Christmas to make, to remain fresh, but I can start collecting the containers and searching for yarns for the wash clothes, plus keep an eye out for canning jars at garage sales, to make the candles with.

Here's a website with over 800 free recipes for all sorts of bath products: BATH AND BODY RECIPES. Even if you aren't remotely interested in something as time-consuming as making soap, you can find a lot of quick, inexpensive ideas here for gift-giving, or simply to make for yourself.

And here's some info on candle making: CANDLES IN JARS and MAKING SOY CANDLES.

My daughter has already said she wants to make peppermint soap for her friends, and we can make some sort of silly, colorful soaps for the youngest children on our lists. My son is sticking with baked goods for his friends.

I believe our gift-giving this year (outside of the immediate family) will cost us about $100 again. Breaking that down over the next 5 months, it's just $20 a month.

Oh, and I should also mention the $15ish dollars we spend each year in baking supplies and plastic bags and ribbon, for all the cookies and candies we also give out, and the $10 we spend on Operation Christmas Child.

Still, all in all, the roughly $125 we spend on gift-giving, coupled with the $100 per child spending limit* means that Christmas is not a bank-breaker for us and we do not then have enormous credit card bills to pay off afterward. Also, getting started with things in July means that by the time December rolls around, our Christmases are relatively quiet and stress-free.

*In our house, each child receives three Christmas gifts (to represent the 3 gifts given to Jesus), plus a few surprise trinkets in their stockings. They always choose their gifts - we never really did the Santa thing, but they know they cannot go over $100 total. Some parents probably think we are being too stingy, but we have always kept the focus on the idea that we are celebrating Jesus's birthday, not theirs. Our holidays are filled with games, crafts, baking, and movie nights (movies checked out from the library and watched while eating big bowls of stove-popped popcorn), and my children have never once whined or complained about any of it. They are also not stuck in the mind-set that everything must be new. They often pick out their own Christmas gifts at garage sales. For my daughter's b-day last month, one of her grandmothers sent her two baking cookbooks from a used bookstore and she loves them. She's already made triple-chocolate muffins and two kinds of bread. We call this kind of shopping "recycling" rather than "buying used" - after all, what's better for the environment anyway? Re-using items someone else might otherwise throw away, or always insisting on buying everything new? It works for us. :)

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