How many times have we thrown away make-up before its time simply because it cracked?  Let’s face it.  Once it cracks, it’s difficult to keep it from turning into tiny, unusable chunks.  Well, here’s a wonderful little tip on how to put those broken pieces to great use.

Make your own lip gloss!  All you have to do is finely crush the make-up with the back of a spoon, the handle of a table knife or whatever you have.  It’s easy to turn it back into powder.  Then mix it with a little petroleum jelly and voila!  Lip gloss!  Eye shadows are the best.  They offer many shimmery colors.  It’s great to use old blush as well.  That way you’ll have lip gloss that matches the color of your blush!

You can store your creations in those tiny little lip balm jars.  I get 3 of them in a bag for $1 at the dollar store.

There you have it – a frugal answer to recycling those old, broken make-up compacts all women have stored somewhere in the back of the bathroom cupboard.  For more fabulous tips, check out all the “Works for Me Wednesday” posts over at Rocks in My Dryer.  If you just came from there, check out my home page for more frugal deals.

Frugal birthday parties work for me! When my kids were younger, we always did parties at home. I have since sworn off boy parties at home. Even five boys in our house deafens me. We had indoor and outdoor games (mostly outdoor). Here’s our list.

1. Races – running, running backward, rolling peanut with nose, blowing a cotton ball across the floor, crab walk, with an m&m on a spoon, with a balloon between their knees, hopping on one foot, 3-legged, after twirling around with forhead on a bat.

2. Teams – toilet paper cocoon, treasure or penny hunt, tug-o-war, hoola-hoop pass (Each team holds hands and the hoola-hoop is placed on someone’s arm. It must get passed all the way around the circle without any team members letting go of hands.) Always name the teams.

3. Misc. – guess the number of items in a jar, draw items while blindfolded (turtle, house, mother, etc.), musical pillows, spit the pit (boys love this) – use a target and sunflower seeds, frizbee toss, freeze tag, balloon stomp (tie a balloon around each persons ankle and let them try to pop each others’ by stomping on them, limbo contest, pinata

Pass the socks please – each person gets a wrapped candy (smarties work well), the kids on each team get in a line. Each team gets one pair of socks. The first person to go has to put the socks on his hands, unwrap the candy and put it in his mouth, take the socks off and pass them to the next person on the team (who does the same thing). First team done wins!

End it all with a massive water balloon war! This is fun in hot or cool weather. Just make sure each child brings a towel to the party.

The winner of each game always gets about 5 m&m’s. Every once in a while you might want to yell “Everyone wins!” and just give everyone 5 m&m’s. This works well when little ones start to pout about not winning.

For over 300 more Works For Me Wednesday ideas, go to Rocks in My Dryer. You’ll find a lot of great tips. Hope you look around while you’re here.

Works For Me Wednesday is what works for me! I absolutely love checking out all the sites. I don’t click on your link to read only your one article for the week and give you one hit. If I like you, I check you out daily or weekly depending on how often you post and I enjoy linking to your good articles. Just look at my blogroll. I’ve found most of you through your WFMW post or through someone’s blog roll who posted on WFMW. Now I visit you often.

I started my blog in March and now, on any given day, I get somewhere between 500-1400 hits, and my stats keep going up every week (last week was my biggest jaw dropper). WFMW is one of the reasons. There is nothing comparable to participating in this every week.

What is important to me when scouting a new blog? 2 things are of utmost importance. Content and frequency. Content that appeals to me personally is anything about frugality, simplicity, finances, green living, easy recipes, home and family ideas, etc. You know, the content y’all are so good at posting. Belly-button musings aren’t my thing. I also want to be fed daily, so I frequent blogs with daily posts. Staying up and in tune is important to me as I check out my daily reads.

Still important, but not as much as the above mentioned, are a personal touch and linkage. I love to see your personality in your blog writings – especially your humor. It’s sweet and prods me when you’re constantly pointing me to Christ. I appreciate an obvious love for the Lord, family and wholesomeness. I also like seeing that you’re not afraid to give credit where credit is due. I’ve learned acknowledging a good find, whether it’s a shopping deal or a good read, is noble in the blogging world and, in a round about way, is self-promoting. I also like to see a long blogroll.

Of no importance to me is how much advertising you have, or how much “importance” you have in the blogging world. There are some incredible “small time” blogs out there that I just LOVE! I love the heart behind the writing.

Overall, what I prefer is daily writing salted with personality. I may not know you in real life, but I do consider you my friends. Isn’t that funny? So, if I haven’t met you yet, introduce yourself to me in an email or comment and I’ll come visit!

If I had the time, I’d spend all day Wednesday checking out all 300+ of you who post on WFMW. Sadly I can’t but I look forward to tryin’ my darndest.

Yes, along with suffering from migraines, I also deal with lower back pain. Not that I’m falling apart, it’s just that I’m in my 40’s and…well…you know how it goes. I think those are my only problems right now (knock on wood).

A couple years ago our youngest son was in a body cast for a broken femur (another story in itself) – you can visualize the kind of body cast with one leg straight, the other leg bent, and a bar between them. He was 5 years old at the time, but lifting him was difficult because of the spread out position his body was in. In the cast for 6 weeks, my back finally blew.

I spent months visiting a chiropractor who came highly recommended. After no relief from the pain, we were at a Christmas party and a gentleman (who is a physical therapist) came up to me and my husband. He asked if I was suffering from low back pain. Later he revealed he could tell by the way I moved. And I thought I hid it so well. He asked us to step into a bedroom with him and he showed me how to properly sit. Not kidding! With that alone, my back pain subsided within a week. Completely subsided. He told me to sit in a chair with a rolled up towel (secured with duct tape) behind my lower back so I had pressure. He told me to keep my legs in front of me and try to make sure my knees were lower than my hips. That’s it folks. Since then, whenever I sneak back into old habits all I have to do is put his advice into practice.

I know it sounds simple, but it’s worth a try. I was on the verge of considering seeing an M.D. and going the traditional medical route – yikes. Talk about a frugal save! I don’t even need to take ibuprofen. Just thought I’d pass that along.

The worst heat of a Texas summer is almost upon us (mid-July through mid-August). The kids still enjoy running and playing outside in 100+ heat. They drink plenty of water and eat plenty of snacks.

Here’s a great way to organize snacks for little ones (even big ones). Dole it out in the morning and leave them to their all-day grazing.

One muffin tin per person. It can be a 6 or 12 cup tin. Any color, any make, any model works fine. Much to our children’s chagrin, we only do healthy snacks unless we have company in the evenings. Fill each tin with an assortment of:

raisins, nuts, cantloupe, grapes, seeds, cherries, strawberries, whole apple, pineapple chunks, baby carrots, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, cucumber slices, celery, natural popcorn, etc.

You can leave the tins on the table or in the fridge. Little hands can help themselves and that means less interruptions for you! That’s the goal anyway, right? Just a handy little idea that I’ve picked up along life’s way.

For more “Works for Me Wednesday” ideas, visit Rocks in My Dryer.

Thanks for stopping by and feel free to look around my site while you’re here. I enjoy new friends.

Today at Rocks in My Dryer, we’re all giving our recipes with no more than 5 ingredients. Y’all know I love to eat but hate to cook, so I have a bunch of recipes to share. These are all dessert recipes, so get ready to print!

NO BAKE TOFFEE

No kidding – this is so good and quick you can make it when no one is home and eat half of it before they get back. Ok you can eat the whole thing but you’ll have to clean up your evidence too.

1. Coat an 8 or 9″ square glass pan with cooking oil.
2. Spread 1/2C chopped pecans on the bottom of the pan. Set aside.
3. Melt 1/2C butter in a 1 qt. saucepan, add 3/4C brown sugar and bring to a boil over medium heat. Set timer for 6 minutes. Boil mixture for 6-7 minutes until it starts to smoke, stirring constantly. Following this is the crucial step.
4. Drizzle mixture over pecans.
5. Sprinkle 1/2C chocolate chips on top. Cover pan with a cookie sheet for about 6 minutes. Uncover and smoothe out melted chips with the back of a spoon.
6. Refrigerate for 30 minutes. Chop into pieces and gorge.

SUPER MOIST BUNDT CAKE – NO ICING NEEDED

I like to serve this instead of coffee cake.

Prepare any yellow cake mix as directed. Add one can of German chocolate pecan or coconut icing. Mix. Pour into bundt cake, cook as directed on cake mix box, but add 10 minutes to baking time. Cool completely before dumping out of pan. YUMMY!

ICE CREAM PIE

1. Smash a pkg. of Oreo cookies and place in the bottom of a 13×9 glass pan.

2. Drizzle 2 jars of Mrs. Richardson’s fudge over the cookie crumbs. This is the best fudge in a jar ever.

3. Microwave (just until soft) 1/2 gallon ice cream of your choice (I like Blue Bell’s Moolenium) and spread it over the fudge. Freeze until ice cream is hard again, then dig in! My kids request this one.

You can add nuts, m&m’s and other toppings if you prefer. We like it plain.

CREPES – to be filled with your choice of fruits and syrups.

Mix 2 eggs, 1/4C sugar, 1/4t salt, 1C milk, and 1C flour in a bowl.

Heat a small, crepe size, non-stick pan to med.-low. Pour in enough batter to coat the bottom of the pan. Flip with fingers (fork will tear crepe). Be careful not to brown the crepe. You don’t want it crispy or it will break when trying to roll it.

COOKIE BARS

1. Preheat oven to 350 (325 for glass dish). In 13×9″ baking pan, melt 1 stick of butter in the oven. Sprinkle 1 1/2C graham cracker crumbs evenly over butter; pour 1 (14 oz.) can of sweetened condensed milk evenly over crumbs. Top with 2C chocolate chips and 1 C peanut butter chips; press firmly.

2. Bake 25 min. or until lightly browned. Cool. Cut into bars.

Need a tall glass of milk now? Thanks for visiting. Hope you look around my site while you’re here.

That’s right, I said “Remedy”. Even though this is a repost (though never under the WFMW category), it still works for me! I’m hoping it will work for you as well.

A couple of months ago, my mother went into the hospital. My family all had colds. I felt a cold coming on (I can always tell when I’m coming down with one) and certainly didn’t want my mother to come down with it, so I went to the health food store. The people who work at this particular store are very knowledgeable. I said, “I’m coming down with a cold and need to take care of someone coming out of the hospital tomorrow. Give me the best of what you have.”

They gave me:
GSE Liquid Concentrate (Grapefruit Seed Extract) 2 fl. oz. cost $10.95
CC-A made by Nature’s Sunshine – 100 Capsules cost $15.25

I was told to put 15 drops of the GSE in 8oz. of water and drink this mixture 3x/day.
I was also told to take 5 CC-A capsules every hour on the hour with water.

Not kidding…the next morning I felt better and never came down with the cold. I’ve tried this twice since then and it worked. My daughter and I did this routine the day before we flew to Washington D.C. because someone in our family always picks up crud on airplanes and brings it home to share. We never caught anything.

Just wanted to share this with you in case you have a situation ever come up where it’s truly detrimental to have a cold around someone. For our family, seemingly we can spend $35 in kleenex alone when colds get passed around our house. FYI.

For more Works for Me Wednesday posts, go to Rocks in My Dryer .

What works for you? Go to Rocks in My Dryer and see What works for everyone else on the Works for Me Wednesday post.

With all the freebies & cheapies I’ve been getting, I can come up with some pretty great gift basket ideas that work for me (and others).

First off, get the basket from a dollar store, garage sale or the attic.

1. Leave in the guest room – shampoo, conditioner, body wash, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and maybe even some perfume samples. You could get a huge basket and include bath towels and washclothes that your guests will be using while they’re there.

2. Take to a friend in the hospital – fruit and granola bars. Even if the friend is in ICU (where no flowers are allowed) a basket like this can go a long way for family members who are there to help care for the patient. Our local hospital doesn’t even allow balloons anymore.

3. For those dealing with a recent death – sometimes the swarm of family and friends during the time of the funeral can be overwhelming. Toilet paper, paper plates, plastic ware, paper napkins, etc. are greatly appreciated if someone is hosting guests.

4. A new mom – diapers, wipes and all things baby. I’m sure you already know that. Throw in a few pick-me-ups for Mom. Candy is a sweet treat. Even some boxes of cold cereal to help get her through mornings with her older little ones would be appreciated. I remember those days of waking up to needy little people.

5. Any family you know in need – anything you can think of would be great to give! The sweetest game of doorbell ditching I’ve ever done. It’s fun and they don’t get mad

6. Going to a BBQ? Take the condiments in a basket for the hostess. Even if she doesn’t use them at the bbq, she’ll always have them as free replacements. It’s a thoughtful gesture.

7. Someone a little sick – could use some freebie meds, band-aids and a box of kleenex.

8. Thank you gift baskets – match great deals to the occasion. It just takes a little creativity.

Got any other ideas? Feel free to share.