What does fast and easy mean?

Fast Felt Booties

Hello Ladies, Thank-you for your comments of encourage-ment

I do so enjoy passing along these fun ideas. Please offer your own thoughts as you feel the desire. As I was making my favorite oatmeal muffin recipe today I was thinking "now what does make an easy recipe, an easy project?" It seems to some of us something challenging is not hard but an enjoyable work. For others it is horrible and avoided. Same goes for recipes, and sewing and scrap books. It is all in our mind, the choice of comfort in what is easy and what is hard. Experience makes many things easier so DON'T shy away from things that are harder. If you want to learn to do something do it while it's hard and it will become easy! And the next hard thing you do is even easier. So now for my thoughts on what makes something easy.

When I cook if there are only three steps. Collect, mix, bake, then I think it is easy.

in the muffins from yesterdays easy recipes, if I take out two bowls one for dry ingredients and one for wet, I can quickly put ingredients in each bowl, combine and bake. That makes it fast, even if it takes 20 minutes to cook I have done the work part without stress and can get back to the school work, the babies or the cleaning. However cheesy potatoes has so many steps, clean the potatoes, pre-bake, cool, scoop out the middle carefully, mix middle with cheese etc and put back in shells and cook again. Now that is a lot of steps! I might save this for a special, carefree occasion but not for every day fast meals. However, again, if I make a large batch and freeze some before the 2nd baking I will have days and days worth of easy meals to look forward to. It's all in what you are able or willing to fit into your day.

for projects. May I encourage you to consider projects in your life. I found most of homemaking shows little process towards see able goals. It's so much day to day, repeating chores and training of the young that goes on in your life. Over and over. Important but not daily fulfilling. But a project no matter how easy or hard has a beginning plan, a time of creating and a finish that can be looked at and acknowledged as something you accomplished. You will in certain points of being a mother, a student, a teacher see times when you know all your past work has a good result! It just doesn't come often.

very proud of my youngest who decided to make a baby sling, she planned her project, she made it and I was happy to see it all finished on the web cam the other night. Was it easy, she will have to say. Did it make her feel happy to have something she could finish? I do hope so!

e of us like to sew, some to paint, some to garden, to write, to bake. All kinds of things we can do that we enjoy the beginning planning, the middle and the end. Think of what that is for you. Find a little something to make. I have my grandma Gardner to thank for this lesson in my life. She had a lot of grandchildren! I came in the middle of the group, yet the wonderful little gifts I would get from her hands! Little dolls, simple and so sweet. I adore them still today. And each night I go to sleep under an Afghan she made me as a little girl. I know she made one for all the grand kids at the time. She lived a hard life, through the depression and with a large family, my grandfather wasn't a kind man, no income, so very poor. My uncle sold candied popcorn, she'd make, on the street corners. Yet I remember her as a happy lady, kind and sweet. She had a beautiful garden in pots all around her home, and she always had a project going. Do you think that focus on small things, she really could do and have an effect on, helped her? I do. I think it helps keep us together. Something we can finish, so nice.

what's an easy project? First it can't take up too much space. You have to keep it from little hands, or be able to move it to a safe place between working on it. low Costco boxes are great to move a project around in.

t it has to have materials you can afford or get from others, or be made from what you have on hand. You will regret a project that hurts the budget. I've found lots of materials at 2nd hand stores. Check it out. The other thing that helps make a project easy is if it has steps that can be broken into short working periods. Most sewing can easily be broken up, I never feel that way about scrap booking, it's all or nothing for me. If you can plan little steps that fit a time frame you can live with then you will finish the project.

l enough said about that. If you go to a 2nd hand store and see a wool sweater buy it, do a gentle shrinking (I can provide instructions) and cut up and sew the cutest baby shoes you have ever seen. Nearly Free! the patten is above but you will need to ask me to e-mail you a PDF so you can print and cut out the little shoes. I have two styles, and ones a Mary Jane!

>Enjoy your week-end