Four Dollar Pillows

I love pillows! It's one of the quickest and cheapest ways to accessorize any room when you want to make a change, or add a pop of color. Anywho, recently I walked into my reading room and decided that my boring pillows needed to be dressed up a little bit. I decided to take a trip to one of my favorite stores, the goodwill. This was one of my good find days. I found the most beautiful quilted silver material that was originally a curtain panel. I could only find one, but was happy to have it. I was able to make three large and one small pillow with this material. Two of the large pillows grace my sofa and you see the other two on the chaise in the picture. This long curtain panel cost me $4. I was excited! I could envision the pillows on the sofa and chaise dressed in this material when I was in the store. I love the silky feel and the raised diamonds on the material. I decided to keep searching for more bargains and to my luck I found the red and white material that is in the posted picture. This material was valance panels. I found four pieces and made four pillows. Wow! It cost me under $25 to make eight pillows! Now that's what I call a great deal! If you can sew a straight line, you can do a project like this. I simply sewed three sides of the fabric, put the pillow in and hand sewed the fourth side shut with a needle and thread. This project took me about an hour to do four pillows, then the next day I did four more. Learn to look at material in a different way. Any material that you really like is game for making into a pillow for your sofa, chaise, chair or bed. Take a chance and mix and match colors, designs, and textures. Until next time, "be frugal and live like a queen"!

Summer's Bounty (REVISED)

Summer's Bounty is what I live for. I love getting out in the garden, working hard in the sun, sweating and then for all the hard work, I reap the rewards. Great exercise too! I found that it is so much cheaper to grow my own vegetables. There is something about becoming one with the earth. It's so therapeutic. You take a seed and put it in the ground and these beautiful edible creatures come up, that's when you smile and think, "I did this, I actually grew my own veggies", and then you taste it. That's when you know that you have had a piece of heaven! I was so excited the first time that we got tomatoes to grow, I literally did the happy dance. That's when we decided to try a few more things. Before I knew it we had cucumbers, basil, sage, rosemary, spearmint, egg plants, sweet green peppers,string beans, cabbage, broccoli, and collards. Wow! This was so delicious! It gets addicting. You start thinking,"what else can I grow". If you don't have a yard, try growing something in a pot. The great thing about growing you own veggies, you know where they come from. Nothing gets more frugal than growing your own and you eat like a queen.
I have also tried composting. Its a great way to nourish your garden with it's own scrap and guess what, we actually had three additional tomatoe plants that came up on their own from scraps we buried the previous year. Those tomatoes tasted even better and looked redder than the ones that we had planted. I took a tin trash can, put tiny holes in it all the way around so that oxygen can allow the compost to decompose. This project was so easy. If I can do this anybody can. This is a fun and easy way to go green. Try getting the family in on it and just think of all the money that you save at the grocery store.