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Creating a Handmade Home

KatieC — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 05:01:46 +0000

Written by DIY contributor Katie Clemons of Making This Home.

When we were young, our families often ate our food off of china. That’s what we called our very best dishes. Today, most of us are eating food on Made in China plates with Made in China forks.

This transformation in our culture makes everything cheap and abundant. It also means we’re spending more time trying to figure out how to simplify and declutter on a constant basis, more than anyone in history.

The best way we’ve started simplifying at our house is to just flip an item over and see where it was made. We start wondering:

1.What’s this item’s story?

Each dollar we spend is a vote YES to that company and the way they’re doing business.

For example, we have a local wheat farm that makes flour and bread. They’ll let you tour their farm and facilities. You can buy their products at any supermarket in the state. I know their story. I know many of their values. Their products don’t cost any more than all the other options. My dollar goes to them.

2. How about the stories of the people making it?

We can’t know how products are being produced in undeveloped countries. They lack a lot of the environmental and workers’ rights laws that developed countries have. Incredible bribes and masks are created to block the truth from consumers and even the companies employing these factories.

You and I often just don’t know the stories of people building these things. But with each dollar we vote, saying that we’re okay not knowing.

That’s why I love places like Etsy.com. We’re constantly getting peeks into peoples’ shops and methods. They tell their stories — their products are a piece of who they are, and we know that the profits are going to those makers.

3. Can we make it ourselves?

Making handmade brings your family together.

Photo by Katie Clemons

My husband and I built the kitchen shown above. We hauled sheets of wood up to our Berlin, Germany apartment together. He used the table saw while I balanced out the window, holding cut wood. We sanded together. We varnished together. We talked and dreamed together.

Choosing to make things yourself (from cookies to the kitchen itself) connects family. It also teaches future generations how to create and to cherish the gifts they receive.

4. Do we know someone or can we find someone who makes this item?

“China” at my grandma’s house was really the clay plates and bowls she’d thrown on her pottery wheel in the basement. The real paintings on her walls came from artists exhibiting in outdoor art shows. Her jewelry was all always handmade. She had little sculptures, furniture, containers, clothing, blankets, and even switch plates for her lights; they were all handmade by the craftsmen she met.

She used to tell me:

“Katie, artists carry these incredible, enriching stories. They put those stories into the work they create, and you just can’t find that flavor anywhere at the mall.”

She proved that handmade is very alive and very available. With the Internet, it’s only gotten easier.

Go to art and craft shows
Stop by local galleries and fabric shops
Ask artists for recomendations for something you want to find
Check the newspaper and Chamber of Commerce
Visit Big Cartel or Etsy
Visit tourist shops and coffee shops
Contact the senior centers in your community (they often have guilds of knitters, embroiderers, and sewers)

Photo by Katie Clemons

But what about the extra costs?

It’s true — handmade is often going to cost a little more. Yet for us, we’re actively trying to make it a priority at our house. It means:

we’re buying a little less at the store so we can save up,
we’re really, truly loving the things that we are bringing home,
items are (generally) lasting longer because the quality of workmanship is better, and
we’re hanging onto items longer because they carry stories and mean more.

Is there anything handmade in your home? What’s the story it brings to your family?

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Creating a Handmade Home is a post from Simple Mom

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Get Things Done at Home By Getting Stuff Out of Your Brain

Tsh — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:02:21 +0000

Photo by Andrea

Reader Alyssa asks, “I’m wondering – are you still going to do, or have you done the GTD for Home Managers? I’m sooo interested in that!”

Thanks for asking, Alyssa. My short answer – No, I haven’t “done” the GTD for Home Managers yet. Between getting my e-book out, keeping up with this blog, editing Digital Bliss, and getting our family ready to head to the States, I’ve been swamped. It’s still very much on my radar, and I’m still mulling over ideas and thoughts. I love the idea, and I feel like it needs to be done, if not by me, then by someone.

Some of you might be wondering – what is GTD? If you Google it, you’ll see that there’s quite a pseudo-cult following on the idea, even though GTD simply stands for “Getting Things Done.” Coined by David Allen, his system of productivity spawned a whole generation of people embracing the idea of sticking with a simple system to – well, Get Things Done.

While I like a lot of his original ideas, as well as the many mutations of GTD that have since been created online, none of them are perfect and THE go-to for making your life productive – especially for home managers. Hence, the evident need for something to be created, in my humble opinion. Especially one that emphasizes the idea that productivity is not the most important thing in life!

The main idea I want to share today is the foundation for GTD, and it’s something I do happen to agree with. And the idea is just as important for home managers as it is for Fortune 500 CEOs.

Write it down.

Write everything down. Get it out of your brain and on to someplace else. Whatever “it” is that’s on your mind – your to-do list, the chocolate chip recipe you just concocted, your need to call your husband and ask him to pick up milk on the way home – everything. Leave nothing in your brain. Don’t make your brain the holding place for all those bits and pieces hovering around your day.

How often have you said to yourself, “I don’t need to jot down a reminder; I’ll remember this.” And then how often have you forgotten that very thing?

Yeah, me too.

Forgetfulness is one of the main reasons you need to write stuff down. Other reasons are:

You’re more stressed when your brain is thinking about a thousand little things.
You’re not able to fully concentrate on the task at hand.
You overcommit, because you can’t clearly see what’s on your plate.
You don’t have true, relaxing downtime because you hold on to that nagging feeling that you should always be doing something else – but you’re not sure what.

So for me, the cornerstone to even hoping for a productive day is to write everything down, and to leave nothing in my brain. (Ha.)

What Does This Look Like?

To simply start a basic GTD pattern at home, you need to grab yourself a blank something – a piece of paper, a white board, a new text document on your computer, something. I prefer paper because I like to doodle my thoughts in a more haphazard manner a la Todoodlist.
.

Photo by Brendan

Then, jot down every. little. thing. on your mind. Everything. Don’t worry about making sense of it or putting things in order just yet – simply transfer it from your brain to paper. Don’t hold on to any of it - your body will physically react to it (stress, fatigue, not concentrating), and your soul will react emotionally (stress, frustration at innocent people, bitterness from having too much on your plate).

When you start seeing everything that’s been on your mind, it won’t take long for you to start seeing patterns, to begin making order of your agenda, or to simply file away ideas that you’ve held on to needlessly.

How It Works for Me

When I first started this idea in my life, there was a lot to write down. I was floored with how much I let stay in my brain. But since I’ve made it more of a regular routine in my life, doing this is not nearly as overwhelming.

Each morning, I expel everything from my brain to paper. I do this on the bottom half of my Daily Docket using the Todoodlist method.

From there, I start visually connecting the dots, and make my day’s to-do list on the Docket.

If there’s anything I need to remember while I’m on the computer (blog management, checking bank accounts, or browsing for a book I need, for example), I add it to my Remember the Milk list in my Gmail account.

If something involves a date, I add it to our family calendar, which I keep in my momAgenda.

Throughout the day, as I think of more things, I add it to my blank space on my Daily Docket as quickly as possible.

Designate One Place

The most important part of writing everything down is to do it all in one place. If you have a separate sheet for your work to-do list, a different one relating to each family member, and another one for family finances, that’s too much. You’re still adding stuff to your brain – keeping track of all of these papers and remembering where they go. When you take the first step of emptying your brain, it needs to be all in one place. You can then organize from there, if you want.

Some people have a basic notepad or journal dedicated solely to their brain-emptying, and not using it for anything else. That’s a pretty good idea, especially if you feel overwhelmed at first with how much you’ve been holding on to.

So, Alyssa, to get back to your question – even though I haven’t yet developed a GTD for Home Managers just yet, if I were to, this is where I’d start. Having you write down every last thing that’s on your mind, so that you don’t have to cart it with you wherever you take your brain. Allow your brain cells to know something else.

Do you make a habit of writing everything down? Has it helped? If you’ve never done this before, I recommend taking five minutes right now and starting, just to see how it feels. Then comment below on how it felt to you. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

CURRENT SPONSORS:

Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
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Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

Get Things Done at Home By Getting Stuff Out of Your Brain is a post from Simple Mom

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My Daily Docket is My Daily Lifesaver

Tsh — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:44:23 +0000

My Daily Docket is a personalized form I made to help me manage my day at home. It’s my most often-used form in my home management notebook, and it really works for me.

There’s a lot of info on the internet about scheduling your day as a stay-at-home mom, and I’ve tried to apply a lot of these different tactics. They never worked for me. They were too rigid — a system would encourage me to write out a specific timetable for my day, and rotate weekly jobs set in stone on different days of the week. By writing this schedule out and hanging it visibly, I’d know what to do next.

It’s a great idea, but my life’s a lot more… unpredictable. When I tried to make Thursdays my Laundry Day, or One-On-One Time With My Daughter at 11 o’clock Monday through Friday, I was trapped.

I was trapped because life happened — one week I’d have an abnormally large amount of laundry, so by trying to do it all in one day, I set myself up for failure because I just couldn’t do it all. Time with my daughter would get pushed back because we really needed to run errands at 11 a.m., or she needed an earlier nap and 11 just wouldn’t do.

I wanted to throw any semblance of routine out the window. But I really didn’t want to do that, because a routine helps me. I love checking things off a list. I’m visual, so it helps to see my day’s plan.

What has evolved as my Daily Docket is a marriage of scheduled routine and flexibility. It provides the skeleton for me to hang my agenda, but it allows for wiggle room because I fill out a new sheet each day.

Instead of a set routine for Mondays, I fill out a fresh sheet for that very day, using a Weekly Checklist as my resource (also found on the downloads page). My week’s goal is to get everything done I need to do by that week, but I’m flexible as to when specifically I should do it..

Let me show you how this works.

The night before, I take one of these and fill it out for the next day. It helps if I fill it out in pencil because things are so unpredictable in our home that I have to be flexible.

The smaller categories on the page are as follows:

My MITs – The three most important things on my agenda today.
Current Scripture I’m working on memorizing/meditating over.
What’s for Dinner? – When I write it down, I remember way in advance what the dinner plans are, and what I need to do in advance for preparation, so I’m not scrambling at 5:45.
Health stuff – I’m trying to log my water and my food choices, so I like checking off that I’ve done that. And by writing down my work out plans, I’m more apt to do it.
Blog and/or Graphic Design stuff – To-do items for my blogs and my graphic design business.

The bigger items are my day’s to-do list and my day’s general plan.

Photo by Jessica F.

My to-do list: it’s short.

I limit myself to 10 things, because I know I realistically can’t get more than that checked off. I’ve actually almost never gotten all 10 accomplished in one day. By keeping it short, I’m making success – finishing my list – more of a reality. If I remember additional things throughout the day, I jot them down in my notes section, possibly for tomorrow’s list. I like Jamie’s idea of sticking with six items.

My day’s general plan: it’s general.

General is the key word here. The Docket looks a lot more structured than it is, but I don’t write out every last thing I have to do that day. I only assign a time and slot to those things I want to get done at a time of day. I want to get computer work during my kid’s nap time, so I remind myself that it’s a 2 o’clock job. I want to get breakfast on the table by 8, so I make a note of that. And most importantly for me, I want to get to bed by 10:30. Seeing it on paper reminds me that it’s important.

Here’s an example of what a Daily Docket looks like filled out (click to enlarge it):

Application Time

Feel free to download this Daily Docket (or the smaller one) for free. But you don’t have to use this — use what works for you. The point is to have a plan for your day, and to approach it proactively.

Whatever you use, keep it simple, easy-to-read, very easily accessible throughout your day, and thorough enough to manage your whole day on one sheet.

What do you use to get you focused on the day? If you use the Docket, do you have any suggestions or feedback? I know several of you have asked for an even smaller one than the Pocket Docket… I might get to that. Someday.

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Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
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My Daily Docket is My Daily Lifesaver is a post from Simple Mom

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My Brain – aka, my Home Management Notebook

Tsh — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:00:40 +0000

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” -William Morris

This is my favorite mantra for home management. I’m sort-of a minimalist by default, but it’s still not easy to keep a well-organized, efficient, peaceful home when you’ve got three-foot mess makers running around. Or six-foot mess makers, for that matter.

Sometimes, oftentimes, it can just get overwhelming.

Photo by jeffk42

This is when grace comes into play – giving heaps of it to yourself and your family members, remembering that the stage of littles at home is so short. If you believe relationships are more important than a perfect house, you really can cut yourself some slack.

But – you still need to keep up the house. Our life stage doesn’t give us a Get Out of Jail Free card when it comes to home management. In fact, I’m finding that this stage makes it all the more important to find a management system that works well. Kids are happier in a home where things have their place. Moms can hold on to a string of sanity when there’s at least a tangible goal towards house cleaning. And dads come home to an actual haven, not a chaotic zoo. Well, most of the times. It’s a good idea, anyway.

My Home Management Notebook is my lifeblood for giving me some direction, goals, and checklists for my job here at home, and I’ll be talking about its contents for the next few weeks. And in the end, I’ll be sharing some tools I’ve created for my own personal book – maybe they’ll come in handy for you, too.

Do you have a Home Management Notebook? Have you wanted to make one but wasn’t sure where to start? What works well for you? What doesn’t? I’m curious.

• Next up in Home Management Notebooks: What are your three most important tasks today?

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Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
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My Brain – aka, my Home Management Notebook is a post from Simple Mom

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Toggl: a nifty time management tool for COOs of the Home

Tsh — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:57:23 +0000

I work at home as a part-time graphic designer, and I also manage a lot of my work as a stay-at-home mom on the computer. Combine that with using language learning software, writing two blogs, reading plenty more, and keeping up with friends and family far away, that can equal a lot of computer time.

If I’m not careful, I can end up spending all day on the computer. My kids could become Computer Orphans if I don’t make time management a priority.

I’ve recently found a tool that can really help a mom manage her computer time. Toggl is a free service that monitors your computer time. It’s nothing more than a time logger, but it watches the clock so you don’t have to.

Let me show you how it works for me.

When I log into my Toggl account, I click on “new project.”
I create a project name – something obvious like “Balance Checkbook.”
It requires that you have a client’s name attached to a project, so for this project I’d use “Family.”
I decide how many hours I WANT to spend on this task – let’s say 2.
Whenever I’m ready to start that task, I click the start button next to that project. It immediately starts tracking my alloted time.

I’ve attached a screenshot of what my Toggl page looks like:

You can see that Toggl is actually created for tracking billable hours, like for folks who are self-employed or who telecommute from home. It’d be nice if moms COULD bill their hours, but since we can’t, just ignore this feature. (Or you could give your kids an invoice on Friday, letting them you know can accept straight up cash or whine-free dinnertimes as forms of payment.)

Even though this obviously works best for your computer time, you can also use it for whatever project on your to-do list. If you need to sort through your kiddo’s outgrown clothes, you could add that, and just start the timer on the computer when you start. I can see it working well for getting ready for a garage sale, planning a birthday party, or tracking your child’s homework time. Anything on which you want to spend time wisely.

When you finish your project, you simply click on “task completed.” If you want to see how you’ve managed your time so far, click on “see report,” and it will itemize each task and your time spent on each.

This works very well for me. I’m a list maker, I’m task-oriented, and it helps when I have a reachable goal for my many unseen mom jobs – I’m working to beat the clock, in other words. I also need accountability sometimes! This provides me with a time card for my full-time job of Mom, COO of the Household. And it encourages me to get things done and stay on task.

Another feature that’s great for moms of preschoolers is that you can start and stop your Toggl timer all day. So when you sit down to reply to emails, get the “Dear Mom, Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you” written, then have to stop to fish a Nemo toy out of the toilet, you can pause the timer at the click of a button. Then you can start it up again. And of course, stop it again when your baby’s diaper is now emitting its contents up his back.

At the end of the week – or month, or day, or whenever, I can look at my hours logged, and look at my time management technique square in the face. Did I mean to spend only three hours this week reading blogs, and ended up devoting eight? Did I stay on task for four hours this week writing blog posts, or researching money market accounts, or planning Suzy’s homeschool curriculum – or whatever you need that smidge of accountability for?

With Toggl, I can create my own timesheet. Mom’s the COO, but sometimes it helps to also be the boss.
Photo by Jana Christy

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Toggl: a nifty time management tool for COOs of the Home is a post from Simple Mom

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Adding Background Music at Home for Free

Tsh — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:57:14 +0000

I love music, and I love to have it playing all day at home. It adds to the mood and the ambiance of our environment – when I clean, I have more energy and a better attitude if I’m listening to this song; I love reading and writing with anything by this guy in the background, and who wouldn’t love to eat dinner to this? (Or your husband, who shall go unnamed, can make fun of you for liking this song.)

Photo by Arlo J

But I digress. The point is, I love music, but I’m not made of money. We keep iTunes up most of the day, but after awhile, you can get tired of the same tracks, especially if you play them as much as we do.

I know this isn’t new to the internet, but it’s new to our home. At playlist, you can create a free playlist using mp3s from around the internet, and you can play it directly from the website. The tracks aren’t yours to keep; in a way, they’re sort-of borrowed from cyberspace. Playlist encourages you to buy the track if you like it.

But the great thing from my perspective is, free background music at home! You can play a playlist up to 100 songs, which will last you quite a while. Here’s a playlist I made recently, entitled “Lazy Afternoon Music – background music for reading, cleaning, cooking, vegging”:

On a side note – you can indeed add playlists to your blog or site. May I make a request of you, though? Please don’t have them play automatically. It’s kind-of a pet peeve of mine when a website automatically plays music. That’s just me, though.Another side note – the first song, Gravel Lines by Amy Seeley, is my current favorite song. Don’t you just love her voice? Sigh.So there you go – playlist definitely works for me.

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Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
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Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

Adding Background Music at Home for Free is a post from Simple Mom

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Busy at Home

Tsh — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:21:57 +0000

Crystal has a guest poster today, who excellently and convictingly writes about what it means to be “busy at home,” per Titus 2. She says:

Let us first consider the difference between “busy” and “busyness.”If we have a home in perfect order, but a two-year-old that has been begging Mommy all day to read a story, then we are caught in “busyness.” If your 10-year-old has to beg you to quit what you are doing on the computer to show him how to do his math equations, then we are caught in “busyness.” “Busyness” will allow you to complete your “to do” list so carefully posted on your refrigerator but will not allow you to nurture those to whom the Lord has entrusted you.

Love it. Read the whole post here.

CURRENT SPONSORS:

Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
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