Thrifty Friday

I scheduled in Garage Saling today...you know, in our school schedule. unbeknownst to me it was city wide garage sale day in my city! Good thing I still have most of my garage sale money left (from the sale I had earlier this month)!

This pretty much has to be my most favorite thing I found today. It's heavy metal, painted white and so adorable. It's small, but very sturdy. I paid $15.00 for it. The girls love it!

This was one of the things on my "list." A winter jacket for Bubble Gum. This is a Land's End Down filled jacket. It was $5.00, that seems to be the going price for name brand jackets at garage sales this season. I couldn't have bought it new for that!

This little shopping cart was $1.00.

Blue-Raspberry...he's so funny. He gets pretty excited about some of the strangest things. Like this outfit for example. He actually found it on the table and BEGGED me to buy it for him! I kept trying to talk him out of it, but he really liked it. So I paid $3.00 and got him this Gap Soccer outfit. I think they kind of look like pajamas, but they are actually really nice fabric--two layers with little holes. I've already washed it and hung it on the line to dry so he can wear it tomorrow. He loves me very much. :o)

This is the rest of the stuff I got him today. The practical stuff. His whole summer wardrobe basically. Most items were .25-$1.00. The little boxer shorts I am using for summer pajamas.

This was on my list too: Another sheet set for the little boy's room. These feel and look brand new-$3.00.

a nice little pile of clothes for Strawberry Taffy. The pile on the left is for summer, the pile on the left is for the winter. Strawberry bought the "I love Ireland" shirt with her own money. :o)

This find made us both so happy. Aren't they ridiculously cute? They were trying to sell them for $8.00. They are PERFECT! (Lady told us her sister paid $80 for them at a fancy boutique.) Well...I'm not one to make an offer usually, I don't want to offend people, but I risked it for my daughter. We got them for $5.00. Which is feel is an absolute bargain, especially considering all her other clothes were between .50 and $1.00! These are already wash and dried and ready to be worn by my Sweet tomorrow.

And last but not least, an out-dated looking pair of Sorrel boots for Strawberry. $1.00

I got a few other little things, like some Warm and Natural batting, some Christmas gifts for some little girls in my life and some cars for Laffy Taffy.

We were exhausted by the time we got home. But I managed to put away the stuff and wash the clothes and take pictures and even make a good Chinese food dinner!

Joyfully,

Mrs. Taffy

Wanna share the cool stuff you found at Garage Sales or Yard Sales this week? Share your link! I'd love to see!

Thrifty Friday Week 1

Okay! I'm a day late, but I have good excuses! Namely, celebrating Mr. Taffy's new job and Strawberry's 12th Birthday (post coming after cake!). Remember earlier how I mentioned that I shopped at my neighbors garage sale? Here's SOME of the clothes I got for Bubble Gum.

There are three outfits in this first picture. All for summer. All size 7.

There is one outfit in this picture and one pair of summer jammies. The yellow shorts and the blue top both need a coordinating piece to complete the outfit. I'll have fun looking for those next week!These clothes are for her to grown into. Three long sleeve shirts and two outfits.

I also bought her a Gymboree dress with a matching purse and a spring jacket. I didn't get pictures of those. She's wearing the jacket daily now and the dress is hanging up already. All those clothes: $24.00! I really feel like I got a great deal, especially since they are all nice brands that I couldn't afford otherwise!

And don't you worry, just because Mr. Taffy has a job, I'm not going waste his hard earned money at full-price stores. I'm looking forward to the challenge of buying clothing for our children and buying our gifts for the year at garage sales!

This is my first attempt at using Mr. Linky! If you want to show me what you got at garage sales or thrift stores this week, link up! I would love to see! Happy garage-saling!


Joyfully,

Mrs. Taffy

Thrifty Friday

Okay...so I have a few cool things to share today. First off I just have to say how thankful I am for our wood stove. This beauty can heat our entire 2800 square foot home, except maybe the big boy's room in the basement, but they prefer it that way. We've been determined to figure out how to heat with wood this winter, since our furnace is run on natural gas, and that's not exactly cheap, especially when there is NO money coming in. So, thanks to my husband's perseverance and the hard work of the young men in my house, we've figured out a way to get cheap wood for the winter! Phew! This what we did, we bought a 25 dollar permit from some government entity (state parks I think). Mr. Taffy had to tell them the area we wanted, then we get the rights to take any fallen wood and dead trees in that location up to 3 chords worth! We just have to do the work to harvest it and chop it up! Awesome! Can you imagine heating your house in the Arctic tundra for $25? Thank GOD! I don't know if this will be enough wood for the whole winter here, and I'm sure the heater will kick on from time to time when we aren't here to keep the fires burning, still I think this is going to be tremendously helpful during this lean time!

Another thing we did recently was make an Azure order. If you can figure out their system and have the resources to do it, this is an awesome deal especially in regards to buying organic high quality food. A 50 pound bag of organic wheat berries is $18.00. Even if you aren't grinding your own flour, their price for wheat flour is equally as inexpensive! We bought wheat, raw sugar, rice, beans, salt and natural shortening for baking. An unexpected blessing was that the location where we picked up our order at was a potato packing plant, owned by the nicest lady around and she was so gracious to show us around her HUGE warehouse and invite us to buy some of her potatoes! Oh MY! What a deal! She started out telling me that a 50# bag sells for 5.00. Awesome! Then my Bubble Gum Taffy came in and started hugging her and telling her how wonderful she is...while all this hugging was going on I started to think it would great to get a bag for my sister-in-law, so I asked for one more bag. So then she gave me the bags for $4.oo a piece! I don't know if that's normal business practice or if my little love-giver brought about this gracious price. I'm thankful anyhow and I left with 150# of potatoes for $12.00! I bet those will last most of the winter! We had baked potatoes for lunch yesterday and I think we'll be having them at least once a week from here on out!

This is a picture of my bags of wheat. They are huge! The little yellow one is my last bag from my last trip to buying wheat down in Oregon.

I'll end this post with a yummy breakfast muffin. These had mixed reviews from my family. About half like them. Next time I'll make them with honey instead of molasses. Then I'm sure they will ALL like them!

Moist Molasses Bran Muffins

1 cup wheat bran

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

1/2 cups raisins

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1 cup milk

1/2 molasses or honey

3/4 cup applesauce

2 Tbsp. Oil

2 eggs, beaten

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Combine wheat bran, flour, baking soda and baking powder. Stir in raisins. In a separate bowl, blend applesauce, milk, molasses, oil and eggs. Add to dry ingredients and stir until just moistened. Spoon into muffin tin and bake for 15-20 minutes. Make 12. I doubled it and got 2 1/2 dozen...

Joyfully,

Mrs Taffy

Thrifty Friday

A couple things to share...Sunday we are going to an orchestra preformance, my sister-in-law won free tickets so Strawberry and I get a girl's day out! We thought it would be wonderful for Strawberry to have something new to wear so we stopped at our local Goodwill. We were so blessed because they had all green tags marked down to $1.49. This is what we found for her! It was sold as an outfit so the whole thing was $1.49!! What a deal! I also found some nice sweaters for my teens that they will be able to wear for our Christmas pictures and special occasions, also $1.49 each!

I want to share one of my favorite frugal recipes with you. I make these once a week, either for breakfast or a snack. The orginal recipe comes from a book called Miserly Meals by Jonni McCoy. I've changed the recipe and renamed it: Chocolate Banana Muffins.

3 cups pastry flour-not packed (you can use regular white flour too)

1 cup evaporated cane juice (organic sugar)

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1 cup apple juice (I've juiced my own and also used a couple juice boxes)

1/2 cup water (or use more apple juice for more flavor)

1/2 cup melted butter

2 T. vinegar (any type)

2 tsp. Vanilla extract

2-3 mashed bananas ( I'm thinking shredded zuchinni would probably work too)

handful of chocolate chips-just enough to make the children think there's chocolate in there.

Chopped up dates-(sneaky food)

In a large mixing bowl, combine dry ingredients. Stir until well mixed. In a seperate bowl, mix the wet ingredients. Mix well. Add the wet ingredients to the dry, add bananas, chocolate chips and dates. Mix until blended, but be careful not to overmix.

Pour into greased or paper-lined muffins tins. Bake at 375 for 18 minutes. Makes 2 dozen.

If you've been reading my blog for a while you might recognize this recipe. It was on my old blog and I copied the picture off of it. I'm about to delete my old blog so I'm going to start transferring some recipes over to this one!

Happy Friday!

Mrs. Taffy

Thrifty Friday

I don't have much to share on this Friday's episode of Thrifty Friday. I did get a couple good after "halloween" deals though. These cloth pumpkins are the best thing I found, I think they are actually more Thanksgiving-ish, but I guess this store thought they were halloween. Needless to say, the bigger one was $2.00 and the little one was $1.00.

At the same store I found a bag of mini granola bars for $1.00 that are perfect for the diaper bag! (obviously some are in the diaper bag already, that's why the pile is little!)

I also got a big bag of Tootsie Rolls for $1.00 but I'm saving those for stockings! That was hard to stash away, I love to give my children treats, but I know I'm going to appreciate having them on Christmas Eve when I'm stuffing stockings!

Another thrifty thing I did this week was unload my garage fridge and freezer. As far as I can tell, the fridge is still running even though it's cold out there. I just thought, why pay for that electricity? It's cold enough in the garage now that if I need too, I can just store stuff out there, but I do have a full size freezer in the basement and since money is so tight I can't exactly stock up on stuff to stick in the fridge anyway. I'm even considering selling the thing...BUT we do have a job lead and we are anxiously awaiting a call back. Please pray! While we still are walking this all out in faith, we are still human and struggle with worry and are begging for some relief! :o)

Joyfully,

Mrs. Taffy

Thrifty Friday

Okay, so I went to a couple different thrift stores this week. Mainly because I was just a little bit bored, maybe bored istn't the right word, more like unsettled. I went to Goodwill on Thursday. I had to run up the library anyway, so I decided to stop in and see what I could find. It just happened to be Toddler Thursday, so anything child related was 50% off. What a deal!

Two shirts for Blue-Raspberry, the tie-dyed one is for later, but it's a Land's End and it's NICE! I think I got the sweatshirt for 1.99 and the top for .99.

A movie for .50, some dominos for Laffy, so he'll leave the real ones alone and a container to keep them in, total: $1.50.

This is an awesome find! I've been wanting to get one of these for Blue-Raspberry for years and I've seen them from time to time, but this time it was so cheap!! $1.50 He's been having SO MUCH fun rearranging the different pieces and racing the marbles through!

A bag of ball-pit balls for Laffy Taffy. The whole bag was .50!! He's been having a blast throwing them all over the house. The big boys have been chucking them at each other in a sort of battle...they don't hurt though, they weigh nothing!

Today I stopped at the Salvation Army. I haven't been there in ages! Their prices are better than Goodwill, but their store is VERY disorganized!! Here's a new outfit for Bubble Gum: Jeans, turtle neck and jacket-$4.00

A shirt for Strawberry-$1.49, a shirt for Bubble Gum-$1.49 and a flannel dress for Bubble Gum-$1.99.

We've had a week full of emotional up's and down's, normally I clean to feel "more in control" of things. And trust me, I did a LOT of cleaning this week! But it was fun to find a few good deals too!

Joyfully,

Mrs. Taffy

Thrifty Friday

I'm going to start a new series. Since I can't garage sale until spring, I find myself still longing to find a good deal, a treasure, something! A few times since garage sales have ended I've gone to thrift stores and found some wonderful things, but I haven't blogged about them. I'm going to start blogging about them now! I had a million boring errands to do today (I don't really enjoy shopping) but the one fun place we stopped was Goodwill. Banana Taffy was with me and I promised him I wouldn't look at the clothes...only other stuff. He was a good sport! Here's what I found:

This cookie tray is actually for my mom (hi MOM!), but since she lives far away, I'm going to use it until I see her again. :o) .99

Abeka Health. Cool! Strawberry will do this third and fourth quarter. Each book .99.

Each of these books were .99 also. The Calligraphy book is for Strawberry, the cursive book I'm saving for Blue-Raspberry and the Cul-de-sac Kids book is for Blue-Raspberry too, he's ALMOST ready for it!

I gave away my copy of Nourishing Traditions, but I found this brand new copy for $1.99! What a deal!

The last thing I have a picture of is this cute decoration I bought for the girl's room. Our last name begins with B, and this is just so Strawberry! You can't see it, but there is a hook that hangs down off of it too. $1.99

I also bought a couple movies to save for a rainy day. We don't have cable, don't rent movies anywhere, and don't go to movies, so it's fun to have a "new" movie to pull out from time to time. They were .99 each, I think I bought 3.

Tonight was haircut night...we watched the PBS Masterpiece Theater's version of the Wind in the Willows. It was enjoyable enough, Toad cracks me up, "Pooop Pooop!"

Joyfully,

Mrs. Taffy