Snovej is BACK!

The Snovej blog is back online. Finally! It took a while due to technical problems, travel, moving, a baby, a wedding and other personal pursuits. There’s still some things to solve and change when time permits.

This hiatus gave me the opportunity to rethink the purpose of this blog. It’s not just about craft and good food.

It’s about being THRIFTY!

I grew up being thrifty. The old Swedish saying “Man tager vad man haver” has been for me a guiding light in solving everyday problems. It roughly translates to “Use what you have” and is attributed to Cajsa Warg, an 18th century famous cook and author.

Dictionaries explain “thrifty” as being frugal or not wasteful. To me it means to solve everyday problems with whatever you have at hand. Like MacGuyver!

It also means to utilize one’s creative juices and to look at things in a different way. Turn them upside down and inside out … or turn yourself!

My intention from now on is to include as much thrifty-ness as possible in my postings. I’ve found some interesting solutions online and I have collected them on my Pinterest. I started a new board called Thrifty!, but there’s a lot of thrifty ideas in the other boards.

Here’s one thrifty story. Last spring I spent time at my daughter’s new home in Minnesota. She had a baby boy and had decided to use cloth diapers. Cloth diapers dry best in the sun since the sunlight bleaches stains in a natural way. But she didn’t have a clothesline and her husband, who could have put up a real system, was not home when she needed it. What could we do? Suspend a line between trees? But that was in the shade. Hmmm …

The clothesline was attached to the porch railing, then to a freestanding ladder and back to the railing. Some weights were added to the ladder to keep it from toppling over from the weight of the laundry.  The weights were made of a water filled milk jug and sand filled paint buckets. And the rope for the jug was made from grocery bags!

Thrifty, eh!?

– Marina