January Spending Freeze, Day 3: Using up the fridge treasures (and saving $$$ on groceries)

As I mentioned on Day 1, I have a bad habit of forgetting about items in my fridge (or anywhere in the kitchen, but it's usually the fridge) until they spoil, and have to be thrown out.  I feel so terrible when that happens!  So the first thing I knew I needed to do during this spending freeze was to find those things and figure out how to use them.  Here's what I have found so far, and what we did with it all.

1) A turkey carcass.  We boiled this, simmered it for about a day, then strained it and threw in some small pieces of turkey that were left on the bones.  I make turkey noodle soup with some of it--easy lunch, plus leftovers for dinner!  The rest I froze to be used later.

2) Rotel/sausage dip.  I reminded my husband to eat it, and he did.  Easy!

3) Overripe bananas.  This is something we waste regularly, and I need to quit.  They are so easy to save and use that there's no excuse not to!  I used about six bananas to make these mini-loaves of gluten-free banana chocolate chip bread.  I wrapped them in plastic while they were still warm (it forces moisture back into the bread) and am storing them in the fridge to be used for breakfast and snacks.  There were still several bananas left, so I peeled those, broke them into pieces, and froze them.  I'll tell you what I used them for later.

4) A whole pomegranate.  This one must have gotten shoved to the back, or we would have eaten it sooner.  The outside was dry and hard, which worried me a little, but it was still beautiful on the inside!  The kids love these, so they had some with their lunch.  We'll eat the rest soon.

Ivey decided to photobomb, eggnog mustache and all!

5) Eggnog.  I didn't like this when I was a child, so I hadn't tried any in a decade or two.  A few weeks ago I thought I'd try it again, and bought myself a carton.  Turns out I was right the first time.  Even with alcohol added, it is much too sweet and thick for me!  I started googling for ways to use it in a recipe, and found that it can be used as coffee creamer.  Alcohol optional--it's good either way.  The kids didn't seem to mind drinking it plain, but I don't think they'd be able to drink much of it.  Either way, I'm happy it's getting used up--and since coffee creamer is NOT an essential grocery item and I can't buy more until February, it's nice to have a little bit extra!

6) Cottage cheese.  After years of thinking it was gross, one day I was out grocery shopping and had a strange urge to buy some.  I'm so glad I did, because cottage cheese is a delightful, affordable, protein-packed food that can be eaten lots of different ways.  I enjoy having it with vegetables, chips (especially spicy ones) or crackers.  I also eat it with quinoa or dirty rice.  At least two of my kids will even eat it!  The problem was that I accidentally bought extra cottage cheese, and this was a nearly full forgotten container that didn't have much time left!  So, I decided to use some of it to make "milkshake" smoothies for the kids.  This is where the frozen bananas come in, too.  I didn't measure anything, but here's about what I used:

~3 frozen bananas, in pieces

~1 cup cottage cheese

3+ tablespoons cocoa

~1 cup milk

honey (kept adding until it was sweet enough)

I threw it all in the Ninja, blended until it was smooth, tasted it, and adjusted the honey and milk until it was the right flavor and consistency.  When it was done and I tasted it, I was worried the kids wouldn't like it.  I think using sugar instead of honey would make it taste more like a conventional milkshake.  But I served it to them and they enjoyed it!  The lumpy bits were pulverized, making the cottage cheese unnoticeable as an ingredient.  There was some left over, so I poured it into these little popsicle molds my mom gave me.  The kids are already asking when they will get to eat them.

As for the bit of cottage cheese left in the container, my husband plans to mix it with hot sauce and eat it with chips.  Such a versatile fridge treasure!

7) Spaghetti sauce.  We opened a new jar of spaghetti sauce a few days ago when we made quinoa crust pizza.  It was lovely.  Next time I'll make the crust a little thinner.

Sometimes when we make pizza and use just a little spaghetti sauce from a jar, the rest of it gets left for too long, or we can't tell how long it's been left, and it goes to waste.  Fortunately, we are having spaghetti tonight and will use it all up!

Confession:  We did lose most of a jar of salsa that had been shoved to the back of the fridge for an indeterminate amount of time.  It was just too late for that one.  I'm going to try to do better from now on.  It's amazing how far groceries can be stretched when you're careful to make sure they get used!

January Spending Freeze, Day 2: Confessions

Have you seen this movie?

(Here it is on Amazon)

DON'T go buy/rent it now if you're in a spending freeze (we already had it)--but someday, you might want to check it out.  The reviews are very mixed, but I think it's a cute, funny movie.  Also, though I've never blown my finances in such a spectacular fashion, a couple of Rebecca's thoughts and behaviors were familiar to me.  After she has realized how badly she has overspent and is trying to get things under control, a big, important SALE tempts her back off the wagon.  Who doesn't hate missing out on something special?  It feels terrible.  And advertisers know this and use it all the time, don't they?

One of my favorite quotes from the movie is this one: "When I shop, the world gets better, and the world is better, but then it's not, and I need to do it again."  This could describe addiction in general, but I also think it applies to occasional or intermittent shopping while not content.  A new outfit found on sale, or the UPS man arriving with a box of fun stuff from Amazon does make my world feel a little better... for a minute.  I know, of course, that it doesn't really improve anything.  In fact, it might even make things worse by adding clutter.  But since actual, lasting life improvement takes time, energy, and hard work, sometimes when we are stressed or upset it is tempting to try a shortcut.

For these reasons and more, this movie helped get my head in the right place for tackling a spending freeze.  The kids and I watched it together, and although I'm not sure Ivey and Robert understood many of the details, it offered several opportunities to point out what certain money mistakes might look like.  It also reminded me of something important I wanted to share with my children.  I mostly discussed this with just Suzi, because the others are a little young to fully understand and I'll revisit it with them later.  I wanted to "confess" some of our financial mistakes, in the hopes that our children can avoid them.  I am sure we will talk about a variety of increasingly complicated financial missteps as the children grow older and closer to being in charge of their own bank accounts, but for now, I simply explained to Suzi what it meant to have an overdrawn bank account, and why that might happen.

I realize that some people might have a negative balance because they are living in poverty, and I don't mean to dismiss anyone's genuine need for help.  However, that was not the case with Jordan and me.  It has been many years since we have had this issue, but the few times we did, there are several reasons it could have happened:

1) We shared a bank account but did not communicate about it
2) We did not keep a budget or keep track of transactions
3) Instead of building an emergency fund, we made dumb purchases

I explained to Suzi how the initial impact of the negative balance can be compounded by fees, especially if several transactions hit after the account is negative but before you can correct the situation.  We talked about what it means to bounce a check.  Most importantly, we discussed the importance of having money in savings.  If you have an emergency fund in an easily accessible savings account, preferably linked to your checking, a minor overdraft is a non-issue.  All you have to do is transfer the appropriate amount of money to checking, avoiding a barrage of punishing fees, and then make it a priority to rebuild the emergency fund as soon as possible.  If you don't have that, you could end up way far down in the hole.  I told Suzi about a time or two that this happened to us when we did NOT have savings available, and the unpleasantness of dealing with it some other way.  I even sheepishly confessed some of the dumb things we spent money on instead of saving.  The saddest part is that I can barely remember most of the stupid stuff we bought... or I remember donating it later after hardly using it.  Shortly after I had Suzi, I am sure some thrifty ladies were thrilled to find my beautiful but painful like-new high heels on the thrift shop shelves!

In conclusion, I told my kids today and I'll tell them again (and again):  You should have at least $1000 in savings at all times, and if you don't, you should be actively working toward it.  We will delve further into how NOT to end up with a mangled mess of a bank account later on, when I show them the basics of building a budget.

January Spending Freeze, Day One: What do my kids know about money?

HAPPY NEW YEAR!  I hope it's off to a great start!  We haven't spent on non-essentials since December 26th, but today is the official first day of our New Year's spending freeze and I'm excited!  I think the approach I'm going to take is to post about a project or issue we tackled each day, as well as a topic or project we did with the kids.  For the grown-ups, today we have...

Fridge treasures!

How many heartbreaking times have you looked in your fridge and found food that WAS perfectly good a few days ago, but ended up spoiling after you forgot about it?  This happens here far too often, and it really hurts my feelings.  However, we recently caught two almost-victims in the nick of time.  The first is a turkey carcass that we used to make broth.  We covered it with water, brought it to a boil, simmered it for about a day, and salted and seasoned to taste.  We will probably boil some noodles in some of the broth and have turkey noodle soup for a lunch.  The rest will be frozen and used in potato soup or any recipe calling for chicken stock.  The other treasure we found was leftover sausage dip made with Rotel and cream cheese.  This made the perfect snack for my husband while he watched our bowl game!  I'm planning to go through our kitchen again in a few minutes and look for other useful items that are running out of time.  I know I have a bunch of bananas I could use to make muffins or mini-loaves of banana bread!  My kids love it when I throw a few chocolate chips into the banana bread batter, and I already have everything I need to make it.  Putting these items to use helps keep grocery spending to an absolute minimum.  Taking homemade snacks when you go places can also help you avoid fast food purchases!  What forgotten treasures are hiding in your kitchen?  Is there still time to save them?


And now for the kids...

All four of my spending freeze buddies during a recent shopping trip.

We won't be doing this again for a while!

I feel like my parents set an example of good financial stewardship for me.  As a child, I watched them wait until they could afford the things they wanted, make smart purchases, and plan for my college education and their retirement.  I remember my dad sitting at the dining room table with his threadbare plaid checkbook, looking over his glasses as he wrote checks to pay the bills and balanced his checking account.  However, I was not privy to details.  Several years into our marriage, I realized that I actually love keeping track of our finances, and I worked out my own little system for doing it.  It works great, if I do say so myself.  Sadly, during those awkward years between getting married and figuring out how to do this, mistakes were made.  It was not always pretty.  I am hoping to help our kids learn how to make a budget and keep it early, so that by the time they have their own first checking account, they can avoid the dumb mistakes we made.  Maybe they can avoid the sweaty panic of an unexpected negative account balance!  They are only 8, 6, and 4 years old, so we are keeping it simple for now so I don't bore them.  It's so simple I hesitate to even write about it, but here it is.

I told my kids we were having a voluntary spending freeze.  I explained that we did have money, but we wanted to use it to accomplish certain goals, and therefore we were choosing to save it.  I asked them to tell me a few things we might need to save money for.  Here is the list they gave me:

Vacations/travel ("Disney World!!!")
Birthdays
"Important property" (I think Ivey meant things like expensive tools)
Garage (adding on to our house)

Then they seemed to be drawing a blank.  Since we have discussed money with them before, of course, I was surprised they did not mention the most important things!  I added to their list:

Emergency fund
Kids' education/future
Vehicle replacement
Retirement

Then I explained why it's important to save for each one.  We briefly discussed the debt that can result from NOT saving up for these things, and the consequences of that debt.  I explained the concept of interest--both paying interest on a debt you owe, and receiving interest on money you have saved/invested.  I'm sure Suzi will retain a lot more of this information than Ivey and Robert.  One of the benefits of me blogging it is that I'll be able to refer back and offer a refresher course in a year or two!

As we talked, I made a list of questions they had and things I wanted to discuss in more detail later.  So far, we will be going over the basics of a monthly budget, how and why to avoid a car loan, and the importance of an emergency fund.  I'm looking forward to diving into these topics and many more!  Of course, they will also see Jordan and me working on our little projects and participate when possible.  If you have any tips or ideas for helping kids learn about money, please share!

Sharing a No-Spend January with our kids

Santa has been here, we have lots of new things to enjoy, and we are READY for this!

A couple of years ago, after losing my dad and going through a very difficult and emotionally draining Christmas, Jordan and I realized we were coping by backsliding in our financial habits.  We had made some understandable convenience purchases (fast food, especially) because we were stressed and busy.  I had indulged in a little "retail therapy."  Once the dust settled after Christmas, we realized our finances were headed in the wrong direction and we wanted to put on the brakes.  So, we embarked on our very first spending freeze to kick off the new year!  As I look back on January 2014, I have happy memories of getting creative together instead of going shopping, and realizing how much we loved what we already had.  I remember a sense of accomplishment replacing buyer's remorse.  The clutter left our house, the money stayed in our bank account, and it felt wonderful!

This year I knew right away that I wanted to revisit this experience.  Now that we've been through the highly motivating Living Well Spending Zero daily challenges a time or two, this time we are changing things up a bit.  Our daily challenges will be tailored to our family and focused on areas in which we need to improve.  Also, I will use this month as an opportunity to discuss personal finance and practice frugality while homeschooling my kids, and will be blogging about how that goes.

I will start posting tomorrow, and it is my goal to write every day in January!  It feels good to be back to my little blog after neglecting it for so long.  My babies are finally old enough that I might have a few minutes a day to focus on writing!

Are you starting the new year with a spending freeze?  I'd love to read about your approach too!


*I'm editing to add our personal spending freeze guidelines.  Here are the things we may spend on:

Regular bills and budget items - utilities, mortgage, internet, Netflix, etc
Essential groceries - milk, eggs, and ingredients needed to complete what we have
Coffee - which we will make at home
Dog and cat food, cat litter, other pet needs
Haircuts for me and Robert - his hair is in his eyes
Gas for the car

We will NOT be buying candy, alcohol, soft drinks, or other similar items.  Luckily we are pretty well stocked on candy from Christmas!  We will not be going out to eat all month, unless we must do so in order to not miss spending time with a group.  I may be leaving a thing or two out, but this is the general spirit of it.  Here we go!

Quick and easy 15-minute fix for damaged couch cushions

Our poor little couch.  It was a hand-me-down gift from my in-laws about seven years ago.  It was in very good condition and we were happy to have it.  Since that time, however, we have had three babies (now 3, 5, and 7) and have adopted a couple of dogs and a couple of cats.  This couch is probably one of the top five most-used items in our house.  If you have kids, I don't need to explain to you how rough little ones can be on furniture--and some pets are just as bad.  (Our kids are much worse.)

We do plan to get a new couch, but not right now.  Therefore, making this one last has been an ongoing project.  Several years ago when we had exhausted our cushion-flipping options, I started sewing up minor holes by hand.  That worked for a while, but any little hole that pops up is soon made much bigger by destructive, poky little fingers.

Finally the holes were bad enough to require patching, so a couple of months ago I cut some fabric from the back bottom ruffle of the couch (it sits against the wall) and patched the holes.  It looked nice, but did not last long.  I then realized that with the type of fabric this couch is made of and the amount of wear and tear it receives, that approach was a no-go.

I resorted to tucking an incredibly mismatched blanket over the injured cushion while I figured things out.  That looked REAL purdy.

Then I began searching online for solutions, knowing that some person smarter than me surely has fixed up a holey couch before--and if you do a Google image search for "diy couch repair" and similar phrases, some great ideas do pop up.  I found this idea, or something very similar, doing such a search, and meant to go back and link to it in my post, but I can't find it anymore!  Please tell me if you know where the original post is so I can give credit.  I am certainly thankful that someone shared it!

I don't have process photos, but this is so simple that none are needed:

1)  I had some no-pill fleece in a neutral green that blended with the couch.  I measured around the cushion (back to front), and subtracted several inches (fleece is stretchy and I wanted it snug) to get the length.  Then I measured across the cushion and subtracted an inch or two to get the width.  The width will shrink a bit after you stretch it onto the cushion, so cutting it the exact width of the cushion might be best if you want a lot of coverage.  I mostly needed to cover some holes in the middle.

2)  After cutting a length of fabric to these measurements, I folded it in half--right sides together, short ends together--and sewed up the short ends on my machine to make a band.  I didn't bother to hem the edges, because fleece does not fray.  I love fleece!

3)  Then I slipped the band onto my holey couch cushion!  It was just what we needed, so I made two more for the other cushions.  I had exactly the right amount of fabric to do this.  It was meant to be!  Now my couch seat cushions each have an easily removable protective fleece band that can be quickly machine washed and dried if needed.  And I'm sure it will be needed.

Ta-da!  It took about 15 minutes!

These covers will undoubtedly get rumpled and need straightening, but they still make me feel much better about this couch until we get our new one.  One reason we are waiting is that I see my children jumping, climbing, and generally wallowing all over this couch and can't bear to think of what they'll do to a new one.  The longer we keep this couch, the better off the new one will be.  And when we finally DO get our new couch, the first thing I am going to do is sew protective fleece bands for all the seat cushions.  I wish I'd had the foresight to do that for this couch.  If I had, it would look a LOT different right now.  Live and learn, I guess.

Do you have any favorite ways to make frequently used furniture last longer?  I would love to hear them!

A painful lesson I learned about money

Has it really been so long since I've posted?  Life has been SO busy.  I hope that perhaps I'll be back sometime to write about more of it.  But for now, I just want to tell you a little story.  Most of all, I want to tell it to myself so I'll remember.

I already posted about how my father died after his long illness last December.  We were all heartbroken--and naturally Christmas felt achingly empty without him, especially since it came so soon after we lost him.  Nevertheless, we gathered in my mom's living room on Christmas Eve.  There was no Christmas tree except for the twelve-inch one we had bought and decorated in Daddy's hospital room just two days before he died.  I'm not sure if he ever saw it, but it now presided over our Christmas, standing on a table as if it wanted to be acknowledged.  There were few gifts for the adults, and the children's large gifts were not wrapped, but they didn't mind and we did the best we could to honor the holiday somewhat properly.  If nothing else, we were glad to be together.

My dad had never been the type to make handmade gifts, even though he was artistically talented and could have made some wonderful things.  He rarely picked out gifts for us at all.  He usually just gave us money, and this year he had of course been sick, too.  So, less than two weeks after we said our goodbyes in that dark little hospital room, we sat in my mom's living room opening a little box that contained a beautiful ornament my mother had bought, and the very last Christmas gift we would ever receive from my Daddy.  He had been in the habit of putting money into a special Christmas account, and by checking how much was in the account, Mama knew about how much he had intended to give each of us.  It was what most people would consider a lot of money.  It certainly felt like a lot of money, as I held it and wished I had something he had doodled on the back of a napkin just for me.  But we got money.  And as I sat there thinking how large and generous a gift it was, a nauseating thought occurred to me.

In the stress of his illness, in our grief, and because we were strapped for time and energy, we had run up our credit card balance.  We never carry a balance on our credit card, only charging what we know we can pay off right away.  But this particular year I'd had to buy more gifts than usual because, though I had tried, I just didn't have the creative energy to make gifts.  I had spent a lot of time at the hospital.  We'd stopped for fast food a lot, and I had shopped just because I felt bad.  I thought maybe if we bought the kids a few extra gifts, things they would really love, at least they might not be miserable at Christmas.  By December 24th, we had a credit card balance large enough to negate Daddy's last Christmas gift.  It hurt.  When you receive that kind of a gift, you want to use it to do something permanent, or at least something good.  Something that the person who gave you the money might have wanted you to do.  It hurt my heart to think that we would be using that money to pay off junk toys, a half dozen fast food meals, and a bunch of other stuff I can't even remember--most of which we could have said NO to.  Growing up, I always watched my parents wait at length on non-essential purchases, saving up and shopping carefully.  I remember exactly how my dad looked, sitting at the dining room table, working contentedly in his old plaid-covered checkbook, using a pen to balance it.  My parents always set a financially responsible example.  That made me feel even worse.

Christmas finally ended and we struggled to fit 20 times more toys than any child needs into our relatively small home.  Despite all we had spent and all we had been given, I was deeply unhappy.  On December 29, I stumbled upon a blog post entitled 31 Days of Living Well and Spending Zero.  31 days straight of zero non-essential spending?  It sounded, at once, both suffocating and liberating.  After reading the blogger's personal story, I was touched and intrigued.  After discussing it, Jordan and I decided to begin the spending freeze that very day.  It was evening already, but we reasoned that since we had not spent anything all day, it could count as day one.  It was one of the best months of my life.  It helped us get back in control of more than just finances, and gave us something to be happy about.  I'm so thankful that Ruth has put this gift out there for anyone who needs it to pull themselves back up.

This sad story has a happy ending.  We cut our spending off cold turkey, paid off the credit card, and had a little money to save, too.  Then, once the 31-day freeze was over, we continued limiting our spending.  We finally knew for sure that it truly didn't make us happy; quite the opposite, actually.  Instead of buying more stuff, we started selling things we didn't need!  We continued putting money into savings, and finally decided to find a new piece of furniture to replace the tiny, scratched-up yard sale table that was the first thing anyone saw upon entering our front door.  We wanted something with storage, yet beautiful and with character, too, and we didn't want to spend too much.  Just as spring was beginning to creep in, we visited a local antique mall and found the perfect piece, on sale--a buffet with two cabinets and three drawers.  We were told it was made in the 1940's.  So was my dad.  Every time I walk by it, I am reminded of the redemption that hard work and a little determination can bring.  I am also reminded of my dad and the way he probably would have jokingly called it a "fiiine piece of furnityure."

Harry Potter likes it too.

It's been too long since that first cleansing spending freeze, and we have found ourselves backsliding a little, so now we are doing another one.  Last time, thanks to Christmas and a few other factors, we were able to put money into savings and meet several financial goals.  This time will be different.  We have a dental check-up next month for all three kids.  I'm just praying there are no cavities this time.  We didn't have a car payment last time we did the freeze, but we do now because our dear old Betty broke down and we had to buy a new (to us) van before we wanted to.  Yes, we have some expenses coming up that can't be helped.  But even if we don't put a single dime into savings during this spending freeze--even if all we do is just barely stay in the black, keep our credit card balance at zero, and leave our emergency savings untouched--it will be totally worth it.  It will be so much better than letting things spiral because why bother, we won't get ahead anyway.  Someday soon, a gift or a Godbreeze will come, and we will be ready to receive it.  That's what I've learned.  That's what I'm reminded of when I look at our buffet.

How to make dryer balls out of wool sweaters

Have you heard of dryer balls?  They are wool balls, generally made of yarn or wool roving, that you throw in the dryer with your wet clothes.  They can be used instead of dryer sheets, reducing static cling.  But more importantly, they SAVE ENERGY by absorbing some of the moisture in your clothes as they dry!  Our power bill has been annoyingly high, especially during the cold part of this winter.  I've been wanting to lower it, and I've also wondered for a long time if I could make dryer balls out of old sweaters.  Sweaters are one of my favorite craft materials!

One day some time ago, I came across a pin on Pinterest showing how a lady had done this.  I repinned, but when I finally got ready to click through to her tutorial, the entire blog refused to come up!  Maybe it'll be back someday?  Anyway, I was inspired by a photo from An Owl's Nest.  Here's how I made some dryer balls out of old wool sweaters, and used up a bunch of scraps!

1)  Round up: 

--Your scrappiest wool or cashmere scraps (mine were left over after I made a Valentine wreath*)

--A thick wool sweater or two--some holes are fine, doesn't matter if it's crappy-looking

--A nicer-looking wool sweater with some decent non-holey sections for the outside of the ball

--Embroidery floss in complimentary colors

--A needle and scissors, of course  :-)

My tiniest scraps, excited to fulfill their destiny

Your sweaters should preferably be clean already, because you don't HAVE to wash and felt these after they are made.  I've done both.  It's optional.  Also, for this project I would not compromise on sweater content.  I used some cashmere for the scrappy core, and the rest 100% wool.  I would recommend avoiding any percentage of polyester, nylon, acrylic, etc., just to be sure they work properly.

2)  Go ahead and thread your needle so it's ready when you need it!  Cut your crappy-looking, possibly holey sweater into long strips.  Grab a handful of your scrappy-scraps and squish them into a ball, then begin tightly rolling as shown.  Keep adding strips until your ball is the size you want.  Mine ended up about softball-sized.  Bigger balls are easier to find when mixed in with clothes in the dryer.

3)  Once your ball is a good size, sew the end of the last strip tightly to the ball with embroidery floss.

  

But WAIT!  Before you go on to the next step, there's another option you could choose.  If you have a little wool roving and would like a more traditional dryer ball, you could apply your roving to the ball you already have.  Just pop over to Crunchy Betty's felted wool dryer ball tutorial and pick up at step 2.  It's a genius way to save on expensive roving while getting a dryer ball that looks about the same!  But if you'd like to continue with sweaters only, go on to step 4.

4)  Now you are going to sew a snug-fitting tube to serve as a case for the ball you just wound up.  So, pull a piece of your nicer-looking wool sweater around the ball to measure where you need to sew, and sew right sides together with your embroidery floss.  Be sure to make the tube an inch or two longer than it needs to be to fit around the ball, because we will be turning the edges under in the next step.

Mine happened to be a sleeve that was a bit large.

When you cut the excess off, be sure to leave enough that it doesn't unravel!  Then throw that cut off piece into the scrap pile for your next ball!

Turn it right side out and try it on your ball to see if it fits.  It should be tight.

5)  Now that you have a well-fitting sleeve, grab one end and turn the edge down to the inside.  We are going to sew a few big stitches around that edge to gather it up.

6)  Pull it tight!  Once you get the first knot tied, tie a couple more to be sure it doesn't come undone.  Then you can snip the thread off.

7)  Repeat steps 5-6 on the other end.

8)  Explain to your ball-loving son that the ball is for the clothes dryer, not for him (if applicable).  He took off with a couple of my first ones and crammed them into his sister's hot pink Barbie convertible.  I'll make him some balls later.  I have plenty of material!

9)  Try them out!  If you'd like the outside sweater to felt up a bit, you could wash it on hot and dry it a time or two.  It might turn out even nicer if you tied it up in pantyhose first (not sure, because I didn't try that).  You don't have to wash it, though.  I was just as happy with the ones I threw straight into the dryer and began using immediately.

These I washed and dried.  They are a little linty.

I haven't been using these long, but I have been able to significantly dial down the time my dryer runs.  I even washed the kids' sheets today, which normally take extra dryer time, and they dried fast!  I think there is also less static, but I'll need more time to say for sure.  Sweater balls are a bit lumpier than traditional dryer balls and not quite as pretty, but since they spend most of their time in my dryer, it doesn't really matter.  Also, if they ever start to come undone, they'll be super easy and cheap to fix!  I'm pretty happy with how this little project turned out.  Can't wait to see our next power bill.

 *Here's the Valentine wreath.  Made it with a coat hanger.