This post contains affiliate links, marked by *
Holiday mode! Honestly, it’s not easy to whip yourself back into a writing routine when you’ve been coasting for a few days. With everyone off work and school, the only thing you want to do is chill. I’ve definitely enjoyed my first week off, and I’ve been busy learning a few new frugal skills:
Learning coptic stitch bookbinding
I’ve messed around with bookbinding before, but never tried anything as complicated as coptic stitch binding. I’m totally hooked though, and I can see myself making quite a few more books in the next few weeks.
Maybe I’ll make some for my spending diaries?
Carpool cinema
We went to watch the latest Star Wars movie with some friends and shared their car for the ride. Afterwards we went back to theirs for pizza, wine and a catch up – and our friends actually suggested this as one of our frugal things, so in it goes!
Pinching my friends’ slow cooker
Well this is a cheeky one I suppose – just before leaving our friends’ house that night, I asked whether they wanted to sell me their old slow cooker for a fiver. I did already ask if they were using it!
Why a fiver? I only wanted an older one that I could use for melting down wax-based clay for sculpting, and if it was a bit older and not really used I could do it guilt-free, as it wouldn’t feel like a waste and I couldn’t justify spending much more on something that wasn’t going to be used for food.
Well, they ended up letting me have it as they hadn’t used it for years… I definitely owe them now!
Making yoghurt in the slow cooker
A while back I mentioned that I wanted to expand on my slow cooker repertoire, but I meant food, not clay.
This week I finally got around to it by making a batch of yoghurt in the slow cooker. It took a while get going as I had to wait for a cheap & cheerful instant-read thermometer I bought on Amazon* to arrive after a few weeks of dithering and looking at expensive ones in the shops. Honestly, it’s not too “instant”, but it does the job.
I followed the instructions here and ended up with more yoghurt than I knew what to do with. Honestly, I was panicking a little thinking about how I was going to strain it all and then where to store it!
Making yoghurt seems like a bit of a fiddly thing but it was actually very straightforward and as a plus, Ste can use the whey that I strained off as a natural supplement.
Studio clearup
My art studio descends into chaos a lot more quickly than I’d like to admit, and I eventually have to spend a few days tidying up. I had a clearout not long ago, but this time I went all in on the clearup and actually created a lot more space just by grouping lots of things together properly.
Instead of buying more shelving, I used some flat-packed cardboard takeout containers* that I had rescued from a recycling bin at work, and after gathering together all of the like items that had found their way to the farthest reaches of the room, it turned out that I actually had lots of unused space.
Over to you…
I know that for most people, this is the toughest time of the year when it comes to saving money – I hope you’ve found a way to keep riding the frugal wave!
