Three Thrifty Things | December 2024 | A Thrifty Notion

Welcome to a Thrifty Notions, Three Thrifty Things, monthly inspiration for mindful makers. In every episode, we're sharing a trio of bite-sized ideas we're loving for the season from DIY projects to sustainable living tips. Are you ready to see what this month has to offer? Hi, I'm Liv. I would like to welcome you to our December 2024, Three Thrifty Things video. So these are our videos where we just share some tips and tricks and maybe some craft tutorials for ways that you can just live a little more frugally and self-sustainably and just kind of generally have a slower, better life. So we have a couple of tips for readers and a couple of tips for bakers. And then Kelly's gonna talk to us about some cool upcycled paper crafts for the holiday season. Maybe grab yourself a warm drink and settle in for some thrifty goodness. I don't know about you, but I am an avid reader. And for the most part, I read on my phone because my dedicated reading time is at night before I fall asleep, I read in bed. And I have a partner who is bothered if I have a light on to read a physical book. So I have apps on my phone where I can read books and adjust the screen brightness where I can still read, but it's not quite so bothersome for him when he's trying to sleep. So I used to do the subscription service available through Kindle, where you get like eight titles a month or whatever. And I was paying for that, or I would pay for individual books. But then I discovered the public library has so many offerings when it comes to options for free books. So I'm already paying taxes, which support my public library. Whether I take advantage of it or not, I'm paying for it. So you might as well take advantage of it. So the app that I use the most is called Libby, very similar to Kindle as far as how it works. You just use your library card to make an account on Libby, and then you have access to all kinds of books. If they're checked out, you just put a hold on it, just like you would for a physical book. And then you get to have them, usually you're able to check them out for two weeks. It kind of, I think it might depend on your library. I'm not entirely sure on that. For me, it's two weeks. And then there's no late fees because you don't have to actually return it. They forcibly return it. They just end your borrow and you need to recheck it out. But what's nice is it will just open back up to the page you were on. You don't have to remember where you were. So I love that. Another app is Canopy. And a lot of libraries offer this. This is for movies and documentaries. Basically, you could replace several paid apps by just using Canopy. Now you may not get the latest titles, but if you don't mind too much watching older stuff, there's always a back catalog of stuff that I wish I had time to watch. So my list is pretty long. I don't need to be watching the latest new releases. There are actually a couple of other ones that I've been doing research for this video I discovered. There's one called LinkedIn Learning. So rather than doing something like Skillshare or some of those other ones that you have to pay for, LinkedIn Learning has professional development courses available for free. And a lot of libraries subscribe to that service so you don't have to pay for it. There's also one called Mango Languages. Again, paid apps and subscriptions to websites and all these other things that you try to do to learn a language. It's at least worth a shot to take the free option from your public library. We have a whole bunch of other apps that your library might offer. So if you don't have a library card, you definitely need to go get one. You can check the notes below the video for a list of resources that might be available through your public library. So you can go ahead and search those up and see what you can find for free. One other thing, if you are a parent of littles, please make sure they see you reading real books. When you have your phone and you're reading a book on your phone, they can't tell the difference. It just looks like you're on a screen. So be sure that you are modeling reading to your kids because little people learn to want to read when they see big people reading. They wanna be like big people. They need to see you reading. All right, that's my mom slash former teacher bit of advice for you all. Okay, this thrifty tip is about seasonal cooking and seasonal ingredients. So one thing I really like to do is stock up during the holidays because things like pumpkin, baking cocoa, especially like right after the holiday, they'll try and clearance it all out. So you can pick up a whole bunch of them for pretty cheap. And I don't know about you, but so if you are fortunate enough to have an Aldi in your town, our Aldi only stocks baking cocoa during the holidays. It's considered a seasonal item at our store. And so the only time you can get it at Aldi prices is during the holidays. So I will buy a bunch, like enough to get me through the year if I can. We make a lot of brownies. So baking cocoa is kind of a big thing in our house. I also have an issue with corn. I can't eat the corn or corn products. And it is in everything. Things like hot cocoa, pre-made packets of hot cocoa. I can't have those. So I make my hot chocolate from scratch and use a lot of baking cocoa for that as well. So those kinds of things are really good to stock up on. And I just wanted to give you a little tip about cranberries. You can get these nice bags of fresh cranberries during the holidays, but usually you can't find them when it's not the holiday season. Just don't really sell them. So what I like to do is freeze them in mason jars. They stay, unless you have a bunch of freeze thaw happening in your freezer, they stay separate. They don't get all frozen together in a big clump. I have this really good cranberry oatmeal bread that I really love to make. And we use a lot of cranberries and it's just better. You can use dried cranberries, but it's just better with the fresh ones. So that's a fun little thing. I wanted to get those back in the freezer before they thawed and then did freeze together as one clump. When you're freezing things in mason jars, the big thing is if it's not a liquid, you don't really need to worry about it. You can just fill up the mason jar. Oh, it's gonna be close. Yep, one jar. So you can fill this all the way to the top because it's not gonna have a great big expansion. Like if you're freezing a liquid, you don't wanna fill it past this little shoulder on the jar because it needs room to expand. Ice expands as it freezes. So things like chicken broth, I will make a big batch of chicken broth and then just fill the jar up to the shoulder. And then it freezes just fine and you can keep it in your deep freezer or whatever. And then you're not storing in plastic or plastic bags or anything like that, which I'm trying to do is just like get away from the plastics. So for this, you can either use masking tape, just regular masking tape, or you can get these water-soluble labels. I buy these on Amazon, but you can find them. They're in a lot of food safety, like restaurant prep kind of websites. They're water-soluble, so they will just wash away when you run it through the dishwasher. I just like to put the date on here and what's in there. With the cranberries, it's pretty obvious what's in there, but pumpkin puree and chicken broth look surprisingly similar when frozen and it's hard to tell what's what. So you can just stick that on the lid or on the side of the jar and it'll work. They sometimes don't stick super well. You really have to push them down, but the main thing with these is if you have water on your counter or if your hands are wet, it will dissolve. So you have to make sure everything's nice and dry when you're using them. Then it's ready to go in the freezer. A lot of recipes, especially recipes with cranberries, also call for orange zest. And I sometimes don't have oranges when I wanna whip up one of these recipes. What I like to do is just if I have oranges around and I'm cutting them up or peeling them anyway, I'll just go ahead and use a microplane. You can also use just a potato peeler and just get that little bit of zest off the orange and then chop it up with a knife. But since I have a microplane, I'm just gonna use this. If you don't have one of these, these are pretty great also for shredding your own Parmesan. So we use ours a lot, but they're really good for zesting citrus. It is also really, really sharp, so you have to be careful. But you can just get that little bit of zest off of there. And then once you've zested your orange, you can zest more than one. You wanna try and keep it kind of fluffy in the bowl, but then you can put this in the freezer. And then when you have a recipe that calls for orange zest, you've got it ready to go in the freezer and you can just pull some out. I try to do separate containers. Like if I've got one that's a couple weeks old and then I wanted to zest another orange, I try to put it in a different container just so that I know which one's newer and which one's older to just use up that older one first. But here I will have the zest of one orange ready to go when I'm ready to make my favorite recipe, the cranberry oatmeal bread. That is like a household favorite. It is actually cranberry orange oatmeal bread. It's kind of healthy because it's got the oatmeal and the citrus and the berries. And then it's also just like super tasty. We like it for breakfast or snacks or, you know, just always, just always, it's just good all the time. So I will put that recipe, I'll make a little blog post with that recipe and link it in the video notes down below. All right, so this just goes right into, I keep mine in the door of my freezer. So basically I'm now ready to make my little recipe, but I'm kind of always ready to make my recipe because these are ingredients that aren't always available. So by stocking up during the holidays, I can just make sure that I will have these ingredients available year round when I wanna make this particular recipe. Hey everybody, today we're making origami stars. And I love these because you can make them out of repurposed paper, like this book I have that I love that I plan to replace, but is desperately falling apart. And just past its prime, so I've been repurposing pieces of it. And then I also went to the thrift store and picked up a book of sheet music because there are tons of these in the world, a lot of these like compilation ones, like this one's all love songs. And there's so many of them, there's no lacking if you decide to go and pick one of these up and repurpose it, no reason to be missing out. And they're just really pretty when folded up into different designs. To make your origami star, you're gonna need a square piece of paper. And if you're starting with origami paper, you don't need to do anything. But if you're starting with book pages, you can take the corner of a page and fold it to the opposite side. And if you wind up those straight edges really nicely, you wanna make sure that this corner is really crisp and that you're not causing one side to overlap over the other any. That's what's gonna get you a perfect square or as close to perfect as you can get. Sometimes the book pages are a little warped, but it'll get you pretty close. And even if you have some slight imperfections in your star at the end, they're really not gonna be noticeable. After you got that away, we have our square piece of paper. And you can see mine's folded a little bit all of a sudden, and that's because I just refreshed my memory and also was trying to figure out the most concise way to tell you these folds. It took me watching a few different tutorials to really get it straight. So I'm trying to make this as clear as possible. But you're gonna start by taking your square and folding it in half. And then you'll have a rectangle, and you'll fold that rectangle in half, ending up with a smaller square. I'd recommend creasing this fold we just made with your fingernail or the handle of your scissors, and that'll make it more crisp. After that, we're gonna open it back up. And these outside corners are gonna get folded into this middle line we just made. So we're gonna fold the first two in and then the next two. Since you've done that, we're gonna find the folded edge of the rectangle. See, these are the loose edges. Here's the folded edge. We're gonna take one of the corners and fold it to this middle point that was created by the folds we just did. After you do that, we're gonna fold it back over to itself. Take this shape. And then we're gonna take this edge and fold it in. And then folding it back. So it really satisfyingly creates this little stack of triangles. And we have this short edge on front. So that's why we folded it the way we did. So just to recap, we're folding this outside corner across, then that corner back to the edge we just created, this opposite folded edge in, and then we're folding it back. And that's so we can keep this edge visible because that's where we're gonna cut. If you do fold it wrong, you'll end up with a different shape, which I think I have some very blurry footage of. And that will mean that you can't make the star, but it's really easy to fix it. You just have to refold your paper in the correct orientation and then retrim it. Because if you get it wrong, you're probably gonna be trimming further back than where you need to be. And so you just refold it the correct way and you trim it away. Okay, now we have reference lines going to all of the points of our shape, as well as the middles of each side. And we're gonna use those to do our next fold. You're gonna take the straight edges and fold them up to the reference lines going to the corners on the sides. And it's really easy to get one lined up and then pull the other one and get one off, but make sure they're both lined up and you can even use that middle fold on your side to line up with the middle of this point as well. And I can help you get it straight. So you're gonna wanna do that on each side, working your way around and having all of these reference lines makes it a lot easier. Along the way, more and more fold lines are created. So it does take a little bit of attention to detail, but it's not really complicated once you get the hang of it. It's super easy and you can just kind of sit in front of the TV or sit and hang out with people and chat and fold these. And it's a really fun activity to do just while hanging out. After that, we start to fold those sides up into that smaller shape. We end up with these little corners sticking up. If you crease those, so we're really just creasing along lines we created, right? Crease all of these and keep it like this. Occasionally you'll get off on the wrong line, like a different reference line, but again, attention to detail. Gets easier the more you do it. Then you'll end up with this kind of like taco bowl situation. From here, pick a point. So I'm gonna pick this one. I'm gonna flip it over and I'm gonna fold the point of the star that's sticking up from that flat to the left. You can fold it either direction. And I did mine in both directions and I've used them all and it didn't affect anything. But you're just gonna work your way around the shape, folding all of these down. If you do that, keeping their original folds in place, being sure that nothing gets off where it's supposed to be, then eventually you're gonna end up with this situation where you have these new folds being created. We can just crease those down. We have somewhat of a star. If you take this and flip it over, take the outside of one of these points and fold it towards the middle. You'll see that there's a line in the middle of this as well that you line it up with. Then it lines up with the middle of the point. And again, we work our way around the shape doing that with each side. You wanna go in a circle, folding them down. Then when you get to the end, you're gonna lift up the first one you did just a smidge and tuck this last one towards the middle underneath it. And crease that last fold. Again, sometimes they're not quite perfect but you can usually finesse them a little bit. From there, you have an origami star. And I did refold that same star the opposite way because I realized I forgot that I wanted the trees to be on the outside because I think it's really cool to fold them with different details facing outward. And that's why I chose to repurpose a book that I had that was already falling apart but had interesting details like these illustrations. What I do from here is flip them over and add a dab of hot glue to the back. I'm gonna actually prep my string first. So I actually was sitting at my desk when I cut these and I cut all of mine to the length of my space bar. And it was actually the perfect length to slip over a beaded garland I have so that I can slip these on and have a star garland or slip them right back off of the garland without having to mess with the beads and then change out the style of the garland later which is really fun. So that's what I did. And then I have these bells that I added on as well. If you're working with synthetic ribbon, you can use a lighter to lightly just kind of singe the edges and it does prevent them from unraveling. This metallic ribbon does ignite pretty quickly so just be careful and keep that in mind. Maybe hold it with a pair of tongs. But it is useful to keep it from fraying or you can just add extra glue to where you attach it and make sure that you catch the edges of the ribbon in the glue so that it doesn't unravel. If you are reusing these ornaments, they can start to unravel from the bottom of the ribbon up and eventually your knot will not exist anymore because the ribbon's starting to come unraveled. It does happen over time. It sounds unlikely you'd think the knot would be enough to hold it in place but especially with like satin ribbons that start to kind of come loose over time just from jostling and being in storage. It does happen. I've had it happen. And it's really unfortunate when you find that some of your ornaments are losing their strings. So I do recommend sealing the edges or just like sealing them in the glue when you attach it. So put a dab of hot glue on one corner, being careful not to burn yourself. If you're like me, you're probably gonna do it anyway. So just be careful. And I'll stick that on just to get the knot right in the glue. Try not to get my fingers. I left a little bit extra down here I can pull on to help with that. Once it's cooled off a little, I usually end up just pressing it on. And from there, I've got a little star. Like I said, my beaded garland is small enough that I can slip these over the beaded garland, have something personalized. And then if I wanna slip these off and use them for something else later, use them just as ornaments as is, I can. Or you even use them as gift toppers. They're really cute tied onto gifts especially with a larger ribbon strung on, super cute. So highly recommend that as well. They're just a very versatile craft. Hey, I hope you enjoyed our three thrifty things video for December. If this is stuff that you are actually using and find helpful, go ahead and subscribe to our channel. We really appreciate it. And definitely comment if you have other ideas to add to our list of things. All us here at A Thrifty Notion would like to wish you a happy holiday season and happy sewing.