These four sundae glasses we’re $1 each. Aren’t they great? My family loves them!

This Rubbermaid chip and dip tray and cover was only two bucks and is in excellent condition. We use containers like this all the time and when we can’t used it for food anymore, we’ll find another use for it, probably for storing craft supplies.

These banana split dishes were a $1 each and at first I only bought three because I didn’t see the other one. When I went back another day to donate some items, I spotted it. Needless to say, between the sundae glasses and these, we’ve been having a lot of ice cream lately. lol

This post is part of Frugal Friday and Second Time Around.

This post is part of Thrifty Thursday and Tablescape Thursday.

Window Formula
1/2 cup ammonia
1/2 cup vinegar
1 Tbls. cornstarch
1 gal. water
*used balled newspaper

Wall Formula
1/2 cup ammonia
1/2 cup vinegar
1/4 cup washing soda
1 gal. water

Hardwood Floor Formula
1 cup Ivory Flakes
1/2 cup bleach
1 gal. warm water

Upholstery Stains (old stains)
1/2 cup powdered laundry detergent
1/4 cup vinegar
warm water

Whiten Whites / Brighten Polyesters
2 cups electric dishwashing detergent
cold water
Soak overnight; was as usual

Commercial Spot Remover
2 parts water
1 part rubbing alcohol
Put into mist spray bottle; use for clothing

Frost Prevention
Rub inside window with rubbing alcohol; wipe with newspaper.

Fabric Softener
1 cup ammonia to washing cycle along with detergent.

Clogged Drains
1 cup salt
1 cup baking soda
1 cup boiling water
*Do not use with garbage disposal

Or try

3 cups boiled vinegar into drain.
Flush with water.
OK to use with garbage disposals.

Homemade Pre-Wash
1/3 cup water
1/3 cup liquid detergent
1/3 cup ammonia
Mix well and put in empty spray bottle.

Carpet Stain Formula
1/2 cup powdered laundry detergent
1/2 cup vinegar

Urine Spot Remover for Carpets
1. Blot up urine with paper towel.
2. Apply carpet stain formula (above); blot.
3. Pour on club soda; blot.
4. Mist/spray with vinegar.
5. Layer paper towels; place a heavy object on top to pull out moisture.

Mildew Prevention
1/2 cup salt into wash cycle to cut down possible mildew.

Baby Formula Remover
1/4 cup bleach
1 cup dishwashing detergent
1 gal. water
Soak overnight; wash as usual.

Spot Remover
1. Flush with club soda
2. Mix together 2 parts water and 1 part rubbing alcohol
3. Mist/spray spot with above and wipe off.

Clothing

* Buy only because you need clothing and buy only those items that will fit into your present wardrobe. If you are choosing between two outfits, buy the one that goes best with what you already have.

* Buy good, usable clothing from thrift shops, garage sales, warehouse outlets, discount centers, and yard sales. Check any purchases first for stains or worn spots.

* Make purchases during sales time: clearance, end-of-month, or end-of-season.

* Buy versatile clothes that will expand your wardrobe, i.e., a sweater you can wear with two pairs of slacks you already have.

* Instead of buying new clothes, buy accessories that give a new look to the clothes already in your closet.

* Buy multi-season clothes such as an all-weather coat with a zip-in lining.

* Remodel or recycle an outfit you already own.

* Use cloth diapers and launder them yourself.

* If you know how to sew, consider saving by sewing your own clothes, but estimate costs carefully. You may be able to buy certain items on sale for less than you would spend on fabric and supplies.

* Share or trade sewing skills with family members or others in your community.

* Swap outgrown children’s and/or maternity clothes with neighbors or friends. Consider doing the same with shoes, ice skates, sports equipment, baby accessories, activity or school uniforms, etc.

Clothing Care

* Always consider care costs before purchase by checking the care label. Washing by machine costs less than dry cleaning.

* Keep clothes clean and in good repair. Remove stains promptly.

* Store clothes properly to protect from sun, moths, mildew, stretching, etc.

* Protect shoes and other leather items from water and salt stains.

* Buy minimum-care clothing: washable, dark colors. Dark clothes usually show wear less than light colors — especially coats, slacks, etc.

* Use self-dry-cleaning services and dry-clean your own clothes. Make sure all stains are removed before dry-cleaning. Self-dry-cleaning kits don’t usually work well on oil-based stains such as lipstick, grease, butter, etc.

* Share a dry-cleaning load with a friend if you don’t have enough for a full load.

Personal Care

* Use a mixture of baking soda and salt for brushing teeth.

* Buy personal care items from discount stores or wherever you find a personal care product on sale.

* Buy necessary items such as shampoo and toothpaste at reduced prices when stores offer “specials.” Stock up on specials but no more than you can reasonably use within the life of the product.

* Compare generic, store, and national prices — you may be paying for advertising.

* Give haircuts and permanents at home. Adopt a hair style you can manage yourself and which doesn’t need expensive care products and/or upkeep.

* Try inexpensive cosmetics. Similar ingredients are used in like cosmetic products. The difference in price is often due to promotion and advertising costs.

* Watch for coupons and rebates for personal care products.

Gift wrapping:
Trying to avoid the “gift wrap trap?” Here are some great ideas for gift wrapping alternatives.

• Scarves, handkerchiefs or bandannas.
• Old posters and maps.
• Pages from a child’s coloring book taped together (especially nice for relatives who would enjoy the artwork).
• Old sheet music.
• Newspapers (foreign newspapers are great).
• Last year’s holiday paper (press with warm iron if wrinkled).
• Wallpaper scraps.
• Home-sewn cloth bags.
• Fabric scraps.
• Pictures or advertisements from magazines and catalogs.
• Sunday comic pages.
• A present in a present (for example, a hat in a matching scarf, jewelry in a wooden box, cookies in a reusable tin or cookie jar, barbecue grill utensils or picnic supplies in a tablecloth, kitchen gifts in towels or all-purpose cloths).
• A plain box decorated with leftover glitter, paint, markers, etc.
• A cake pan, basket or a wooden box.
• Reusable decorative bags.
• A “Hollywood box:” individually wrap or decorate the top and bottom of a box with a separate lid. Encourage the recipient to reuse the box.
• Purchase wrapping paper made from recycled paper.

Tree ornaments/decorating:
Here are a few ideas for adding a special touch to holiday decorations.

* Baby’s shoe Memorabilia, such as a child’s first shoe or grandma’s hankie scented with perfume.
* An old full skirt as a tree skirt.
* Old jewelry (restring old necklaces, hang earrings or bracelets).
* Items collected on vacation.
* Small stuffed animals and toys.
* Cookie cutters.
* Miniature toy cars.
* Dressed-up doll as a tree-topper.
* Holiday card ornaments: cut up; glue felt fabric scraps on back; tie with yarn scraps.
* Edible cookie ornaments: use gingerbread or sugar cookie dough; poke a hole at the tip using a drinking straw; decorate and bake; thread a ribbon through hole; tie ribbon in a large loop and hang on bough of tree.
* Small pictures from old magazines or holiday cards: cut out; glue onto old plastic lid; decorate with beads, buttons or jewelry; punch a hole and hang with string or yarn.
* Popcorn and cranberry strings (can be eaten by animals after the holidays). Buttons
* Reusable glass icicles instead of disposable tinsel (keeps tree clean for mulching).
* Buttons knotted on a sturdy length of string.
* Spices from the kitchen instead of commercially prepared and packaged products or aerosols (for example, create pomander balls by placing whole cloves in oranges or lemons to create decorations that look and smell great).
* Gingerbread people and reindeer from leftover brown paper grocery bags (place on windows and walls for decoration.)
* Tin can luminary (punch holes into empty metal can; place candle inside.)

*** Look for more ideas in a later post ***

Cut Your Grocery Budget

Sometimes you want to give someone a small gift to express your appreciation or you simply don’t have extra money to buy an expensive gift but you want to give something. Here’s a few ideas for gifts that don’t cost a lot but will be appreciated by whoever the recipient is.

1. Make muffins. Line a tin (that you picked up in a yard sale, of course) with colorful tissue paper and fill it with yummy muffins.

2. Make a personalized homemade gift basket. Pick up baskets at yard sales and flea markets. Line them with pretty cloth napkins.

3. Offer a service. Print out a coupon for three car washes, a months worth of babysitting, landscaping or a foot massage.

4. Pack a picnic. Buy a red checkered table cloth (or any color) at a flea market, or use your own. Pack a large covered basket, or cooler with pasta salads, fruit, cheese, bread and crackers, leftovers and drinks.

5. Defrost one of your Once A Month Cooking Meals. Add two colorful cloth napkins and a loaf of bread.

6. If you bake, create your own cookie of the month. Print out a list in advance and make a half dozen cookies each month.

7. Frame a paint by number that you or your child created.

Also, be sure to check out these posts:
Free Printable Coupons
Free Money Saving Tips
Coupons & Freebies

It began as a simple, or simply terrifying, pledge taken by a small group of friends feeling overwhelmed by all the things in their lives. Over a potluck dinner two years ago, they made a pact: Buy nothing new except food, medicine and toiletries for six months.

The effort lasted a year before falling victim to the demands of modern life. But the commercial craziness of the Christmas season brought the group back together a few months ago.

Only now they’re not toiling in relative anonymity. A whiff of media interest over the past month has turned their tool-sharing, library-going, thrift-store-shopping band into a full-fledged cultural phenomenon with more than 700 members joining through their Yahoo website. Groups are meeting in Maine, Alabama, Texas, Oregon and Wisconsin, and satiated consumers in Japan and Brazil are making inquiries.

The original group named itself the Compact after the Mayflower Compact, a civil agreement that bound the Pilgrims to a life of higher purpose when they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620.

The goal of the members wasn’t so much to save money, or even the environment, as much as it was to simplify their lives, says Rob Picciotto, a high school French teacher who attended that first potluck. “It saved us time because there was less time spent shopping. We still buy groceries and go to the drugstore, but we don’t go to Target on a Saturday, which was a ritual before just to see what the sales were,” he says.

It was Picciotto’s partner, John Perry, employed in high-tech marketing, who initiated the reincarnation of the Compact, an effort that drew the attention of the San Francisco Chronicle. When an article hit the paper’s website on Feb. 13, it became apparent that the Compact had tapped into a very deep stream of consumer discontent.

Today the Compact exists as several local potluck groups who meet to celebrate their successes (a free sewing machine from online Craig’s List) and dilemmas (Do new keys count? What about makeup?). A national and several state-based Web discussion groups serve the same purpose electronically.

Joining is simple, says Julie Fitzpatrick, a third-grade teacher from Madison, Wis., who signed up on the Internet site the day she heard about it on the news. There’s no ceremony involved. “You just say ‘I’m going to do it,’ ” she says.

She has found being in the Compact helpful when she is invited to direct-sale events such as candle or Tupperware parties. “I can say, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve taken a pledge.’ So now I’m out of that circle.”

Still, it’s not easy to refrain from the great American pastime. The desire for new sunglasses was the downfall of Sarah Pelmas, a high school English teacher, when she joined the group two years ago. “It was killing me,” she says. Finally she broke down and bought a pair, stepping onto the “slippery slope” that brought her back into mainstream consumerism. “It was like vegetarians and bacon,” she says: You can’t just stop at a taste. But she re-enlisted in December.

Not that the idea is embraced by everyone. In Chilliwack, British Columbia, Tira Brandon-Evans says that when she and her husband told friends they weren’t going to exchange Christmas and birthday presents, they acted as if she’d suddenly developed a mental illness.

She jokes that from her friends’ reactions, you would have thought she had announced plans to have a sex change or join a satanic cult.

The biggest challenge for San Franciscan Rachel Kesel was a camping trip, which “takes a lot of gear.” But for a fall outing, the 25-year-old student called friends to borrow what she needed. It worked out great, “because it’s so rare that you’re using camping gear at the same time as everybody else.”

Dorice Baty of Monett, Mo., says her family was forced into “involuntary simplicity” when her husband lost his job two years ago. The couple now get by on her salary as a substitute teacher. She likes sharing ideas on how to get by without buying with people in the Compact, whether rich or poor.

“If someone is wealthy and they’re doing this, God bless them,” she says. “If they’ve taken on the challenge, then I admire them as much as the people like me who are struggling.”

But to many, the entire notion seems strange, even downright un-American. Compacters interviewed on the radio have been accused of wanting to destroy the country. Bloggers have attacked the idea as “conspicuous anti-consumerism” and “pretentious.”

Compacter James Glines of Copperas Cove, Texas, says relatives have asked him, “How can you do that? Are you going to steal?”

But there’s a strong history of frugality in the USA, says David Shi, president of Furman University in Greenville, S.C., and author of The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture. Religious groups such as the Shakers, the Mennonites, the Amish and some Quakers have long embraced the notion of living a simpler life. Writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau idealized it.
Shi says that for the past decade, Americans have been turning toward “therapeutic simplicity.”

“It’s a function of individuals beginning to feel a sense of crisis in their lives,” Shi says. “The frenetic pace of our high-tech society, coupled with the barrage of seductive messages coming from our consumer culture, have reached a point that many people simply feel like they’re about to self-destruct.”
For Pelmas, it’s about “avoiding the hysteria that seems to govern a lot of our consciousness right now around consumerism. It’s the kind of craze where fathers are beating each other up to get the latest Nintendo for their kids. It strikes me as some strange kind of 21st-century spiritual lack.”

It’s not just her. Surveys done by Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College who studies consumer society, have found that 81% of Americans say the country is too focused on shopping and spending, and 88% think it is too materialistic.

The Compacters are simply the most recent manifestation of a kind of underground mass movement, Schor says. She studies the “downshifter movement” that began in the 1980s with people making choices about earning and spending less money so they could focus on the quality of their lives and their families, typically by working fewer hours or changing jobs.

In 2003, USA TODAY columnist Craig Wilson vowed to buy nothing but food, toiletries and gifts for a year. The column “had one of the largest reader responses ever. Thousands and thousands of readers e-mailed me,” Wilson says.

Just this month saw publication of a whole book about a year without buying. Judith Levine had her own “no more” moment in 2004 and went on to write Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. There’s even a glossy magazine called Real Simple that taps into the trend, although its focus is more on buying things to make life simpler rather than not buying things.

They’re all onto something, says James Roberts, a professor of marketing at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “The research is overwhelmingly clear,” he says. “The more materialistic you are, the less happy you are. We get happiness through love of others and sense of community. But we’ve been told by Madison Avenue that happiness can come through the mall.”

For Glines, joining the Compact was about taming the need for the new. “I wanted ways to be frugal without cutting into my kids’ happiness,” he says.
But it’s harder in central Texas than San Francisco, where thrift stores are hip, and people put on things like the “Really Really Free Market” at a park once a month. At that urban potluck picnic, people bring what they don’t need and take what they do.

It’s hard but not impossible, Glines found. Putting in a raised vegetable garden, he was stymied by a lack of nails. But new houses are going up all over the place in Copperas Cove. “I talked to some of the builders, and they had half clips of nails from nail guns they were just throwing away, and they said I could have them. “I just popped them off, and there were my nails,” he says.

For Pelmas, the Compact kept a lot of things out of her life but did bring in something very important — a husband. She had met Matt Eddy, a high school science teacher, through friends several years before, but when she asked him out, he said no. “Then a year later, he was having dinner with some friends, and they said, ‘Oh, Sarah’s part of this Compact where she doesn’t buy anything new.’ Eddy, with his great love of environmental science, instantly rethought his rejection. He called Pelmas, and as she puts it, “the rest was history.” They were married 18 months later. The couple just bought a 1920s house that they plan to bring up to snuff using only recycled materials.
After all, she says, “it’s a used home.”