Busy and Idle

First the busy stuff. This is the hat I knitted for Little Missy. She picked out the yarn at Joann's - it was on sale (my criteria) and sparkly (hers), then told me the design she wanted and I went to town. It's a thick and thin yarn, so there wasn't much to do but boring knit, but she loves it.

After that, I got a copy of the two Sew What? books from the library and made myself a fleece shirt. The fleece was also on sale at Joann's and I had coupons for the buttons and the pearl cotton. The books are really great, they teach you how to make a body template and then design the piece to make it fit you perfectly. I hope there are more books coming in the series.


And then I made these fun potholders. Our dryer is still dead and we have not deemed it an emergency at this point. While hanging our old potholders to dry the other day, I decided to just throw them out, they were that grungy. These were made from a pair of Mark's old jeans, stitched on top of felted wool from a blanket project last year. The wool came from sweaters purchased at Goodwill. The blanket was a disaster, but these potholders and the mittens I've made from the recycled sweaters are sure fun.



But no amount of craftiness could help today. Ever since discovering Dave Ramsey last year and agreeing with him that "debt is dumb, cash is king", we've sworn off credit cards. We had missed a payment, had our interest rate on a considerable balance zoom to nearly 30%, transferred the balance to a zero interest card and have been steadily paying it off ever since. We've realigned our priorities to paying of the debt except the house, bringing our emergency cash fund to 6 months of expenses, funding IRAs for us and educational IRAs for the kids (this is a good year or two off) and then tackling the mortgage. We've learned what really is an emergency - food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medication. And we've tried to learn what is not an emergency - Christmas, the dryer, new scissors, etc.

Today it was transportation. We have a 15 year old Buick, generously given to us by Mark's mom when the Honda hit 200,000 miles four or five years ago. The poor thing just gave out today, they really don't like to go over 100,000 miles. Mark had just moved to a 12 hour night shift last night and was leaving the plant when the car died in the left turn lane at 5:45 a.m. With a lot of help, we got the thing towed and asked the mechanic to call my cell. The guy was very honest, he said that he could fix the alternator and charge up the battery, but he's not sure that will make the car run - the engine is knocking, there's fluid in places it shouldn't be and something bad has happened to some gaskets. He wanted us to decide if the car was worth the money. We're thinking about it.

So, the kids and I are idle. It's not an emergency in the sense that we have to use credit to solve the problem. (Our emergency fund is only $1000 while we pay off the credit card.) We can walk to most of our classes and things locally, and skip a few weeks of far away homeschooling fun while we decide what to do. I need to take a fresh look at our stuff to decide what to put on eBay as cash raising, we need to play with the budget a bit to squeeze more blood from the turnip and find a rabbit to pull out of our hat.

One day at a time. Luckily, my yarn and paper stashes are big enough to carry me through without having to break that other resolution.