This week we had our second shop update for Oscoey Shop located here or by clicking the link in the top menu of this page. Opening up the shop has awoken the creative side in me I forgot I had. My journey over the past year recovering from massive burnout has been rough and although I still have some ways to got I am doing a lot better. I love all of the things I am selling and using my creative brain instead of my analytical one has been a challenge but I am enjoying the work much more.

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One of my dreams ever since picking up cross stitching over a decade ago has been to make patterns. Life got in the way and I never even downloaded the software but a little bit ago I took the leap, spent the money and now I have made two patterns finished so far. The first is my Purple Tulip Fields pattern which I have not stitched yet and this Self-Care Every Day one shown above. I have a few more I am still working on that should be released in the next few months. My next few will feature flowers but I am also thinking of doing another version of my Self-Care Every Day pattern in darker colors. Is that something you would be interested in? If so leave a comment below and let me know.

Oh man were these holographic Midnight Rainbow Flower stickers hard to photograph! They are dark, holographic and beautiful but they reflect light like crazy. Believe me, in the sun they sparkle fabulously and I absolutely love how they turned out. These and my matching Midnight Rainbow Flower Postcards balance with my Brights collection which has the same pattern but in bright, vibrant colors. I really enjoyed making these and I am thinking of what to make for next time. I don’t think the new items will be in time for my May shop update but possibly for the June one.

Speaking of my Midnight Rainbow Flower Postcards, I love these too! The matte black finish on the side you write on is amazing. I used both metallic Sharpies and Pental Milky pens to write on the back and it is very clear to read. I preferred the Sharpies but I write with really large print so I don’t think I could fit very many words on the back. I may look for finer Sharpies and see if those work too. Do you like these? Let me know in the comments.

Another thing I did for this shop update was to lower all of my postcard prices and list my Nature Photography Series One postcards individually in case people wanted to just buy one or two. The five pack set still comes with the super cute mini-sticker pack while supplies last. I love how pretty all of these photos turned out as postcards. These have traditional white backgrounds and can be written on with regular pens. My May shop update will heavily feature tulips from my trip up to the tulip fields last week. I got some really great photos with the overcast sky we had!

One item that did not make it into Oscoey Shop this time around was puzzles. I am still trying to find a manufacturer that I love and produces a higher quality puzzle. If you have one and are happy with them please let me know! This sample the photo turned out fabulously but the pieces were very loose to the point that I couldn’t even brush my hands over the top without several coming apart. This would definitely not have passed a pickup test! I have three designs finalized and I’m working on a fourth. My goal is to have puzzles released in June of this year. Fingers crossed I can get everything together in time!!!

Thank you for reading about our newest shop update. I am going to aim for one update a month until the end of the year but I may skip one this summer to spend some time with my family. Please let me know if there is anything you would like to see more of in the shop. I am still finding my groove and open to suggestions.

Have a fabulous day! – Jennifer at Oscoey

Links:

Self-Care Every Day Pattern 

Purple Tulip Fields Pattern

Holographic Midnight Rainbow Flower Stickers

Midnight Rainbow Flower Postcards

Metallic Sharpies

Pental Milky pens

Nature Photography Series One Postcards

I started my blog in late March about five years ago so I thought I would write a little bit about it for my 5 year blogiversary. I started Oscoey as something to do while I was home with my kids as sort of a mommy blog but along the way I discovered the FIRE movement, went back to work and then sort of lost the ability to work on my blog. I have always wanted to do it full-time but like many other people work and life got in the way.

We are still making most of our own food but our budgeting has drastically changed in the last five years and although we are still focused on saving as much as we can our expenses are much higher and we have moved more in the direction of Slow FIRE. Slow FIRE is basically stretching out your timeline for retirement. My husband does not have plans to retire any time soon but I am toying with the idea of not going back to work after my leave ends in a couple of weeks so I can focus on my blog and my new YouTube channel. I would love for my husband to retire when we are done paying for college in about 15 years which is still technically early since we will be right about 60 but I feel like we could probably do better than that.

We have increased our urban homestead quite a bit in the past five years and this year we are hoping to add some chickens as well. I am installing several large garden beds this week as well as removing some grass in our yard so we can plant some trees. This year our yard was very wet and adding a tree or two will help with that and provide some much needed shade in the summer. I love gardening and will start putting more gardening content up on my channel in the next few weeks.

When I first started blogging George was a puppy but now he is 5 1/2 and has definitely slowed down. We got a puppy named Luna last year after a couple of years of debate and looking for a good fit. She has been a huge change for our family but we love her so much and George is so happy to have someone to play with. Zoey our dachshund is still around but is now very much a senior dog that really just wants to sleep all day. George sleeps with his “dog mom” Zoey every night and Luna tries very unsuccessfully to play with her every chance she can.

I am continuing to post mostly on Instagram about our food and how we are working on meal planning. One of my favorite things that came out of the isolation of Covid was our Sunday afternoon tea times. The kids really get into it and we have a bunch of fun with a more formal lunch. Over the summer we turn it into a picnic on the lawn with a pitcher of juice or sparkling water and the kids love that as well.

I have really enjoyed the friends I have met through my blog and writing to my readers over the past five years. I am really excited for my channel on YouTube to grow and I hope to be able to write more here this year. Below are my links for social media and some of my favorite posts throughout the years. Happy blogging!

Links:

YouTube

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

Victoria Part 1: Butchart Gardens

Garden Update 06.08.19

April 2022 Low Spend Month Goals

Dried Banana Chips

We made it to the end of January with our meal planning and although we didn’t follow the plan exactly, we did do a great job of eating through items in the pantry. Some of the highlights from this week were roasted potatoes, oatmeal and the cabbage soup I made on Sunday. I also did another pickup of school lunches and we did a decent job eating through what they gave us. They give you so much food sometimes it is hard to eat it all in a week. I probably won’t go again this week because we really don’t need it and we still have leftovers.

Free Lunches for Everyone

USDA Free Lunches

This week I made some cabbage patch soup. This is something my grandma used to make when I was growing up and I have been craving it for a number of years but had no idea where she got the recipe from. My grandma passed away a few years ago so I was not able to ask her but I did happen to mention it to my mom in passing and my mom somehow knew exactly what the name of it was and that it originated in a restaurant in Snohomish. Once I knew the name I was easily able to Google it and get the right one. I sort of used the recipe linked below. We were out of a few ingredients and since we were in a pantry cleanout I did not go to the store. I also used my husband’s homemade sausage in place of the ground beef. My grandma used whatever meat (if any) she had on hand so I am pretty used to having different meat in there. We ate this throughout the week and we still have one serving left that I will probably freeze since we won’t eat it today. I am so glad I mentioned this soup to my mom because it is one of my favorites!

Cabbage Patch Soup

Can you sense another theme here? I definitely did great job of eating through the oatmeal packets this week. I ended up using two at a time with some of the dried apples and a couple of fried eggs and it was an excellent breakfast full of fiber and protein. I love gluten-free oatmeal packets because they contain way less added sugar than the regular ones. I don’t like a lot of sugar first thing in the morning and honestly the peaches were not a good choice. I also snacked on an apple throughout the morning and that was delicious as well!

Another favorite  breakfast of mine is peanut butter toast with apples. This time I added a little bit of honey since local raw honey really helps with my allergies. The Seattle area had poor air quality last week due to some air stagnation and the honey helped with my sore throat. I needed to use up the bagels I bought so I had the last one with breakfast one morning and the others toasted with butter with my cabbage soup. They were pretty good but for some reason these gluten-free bagels were not salty at all. I am wondering if that is why they were at the Franz Outlet. I am going to eat through some frozen gluten-free bread I found in my freezer when I cleaned it out yesterday this week but I fully anticipate needing to go back to the outlet next week for more gluten-free goodness. We are set on regular bread for a few months but I may break down and get another pack of donuts for the kids if they are under a dollar again.

So this meal was a slight cooking failure. I pulled the potatoes out of the deep freezer earlier in the week to make fried potatoes but they just didn’t work out the way I wanted them to and they ended up more like mashed potatoes instead. They were still tasty though. We still have some of these leftover that I am hoping to eat up this week. I steamed the broccoli and the Kielbasa together and totally left them on the stove too long while I was trying to fix the potatoes so the broccoli was a little bit (I mean a lot) mushy but it was still edible and we ate it no problem. The Kielbasa was one of the items from the fridge I needed to eat up this week. This was an experiment buying Kielbasa in a large pack from Costco and honestly next time I will split the package up in to a few meals and freeze all but what we will need that week. I probably could have frozen these as well but I am trying to reduce our freezer this week so I didn’t want to add more to it.

Well since we had the ingredients leftover from our sushi bowls last week we just “had” to make them again this week. This time I remembered to take a picture before I dug in and I must say they are very pretty. We seared our salmon this week and ate it with some sprouts my husband started a week or two ago and it was delicious! This is definitely a highlight of the week!

We rounded out this week with pancakes and bacon for breakfast this morning. My husband made some gluten-free ones this time not from a mix and they were very good. My daughter and I had them with maple syrup and my son had Nutella on his. I didn’t get a picture of the bacon but it was pretty good too.

Looking back I didn’t get a lot of pictures this week. We had our usual Friday night pizza and ate a lot of the same thing just different ways to eat through what we had. The week is kind of a blur for me since I worked so much all week and didn’t really have any free time. Yesterday however I did clean out our main freezer in the kitchen. This is what I would call a working freezer and we use it all the time. I try to not go into the deep freezers very often since they tends to get freezer burn the more we open them so in our main freezer I keep open packages and things we use a lot, like frozen peas and bread. I only had to throw out a couple of things from this freezer when I cleaned it out which was pretty impressive to me. I last cleaned it over the summer so I am surprised there wasn’t more. We are going to try and eat up some things in this freezer this week. I moved items we won’t be eating to our largest deep freezer so what we needed to eat up wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle. If I had to choose another fridge I would definitely get one that is side by side instead of a french door fridge and a drawer at the bottom. It is too easy to just dump stuff in the bottom drawer and forget about it.

We finished out the month for Meal Planning and overall I would say we did a great job. We are not good at conforming to a meal schedule so the fact that we were able to mostly stick to the plan for the month is pretty great. We did however really only plan a few days at a time but it did help us learn how often we needed to cook and that we are cooking way too much. For February I am going to focus on our freezers. We are finishing up our storage room downstairs hopefully today and moving our smaller freezer down there. We will use it for mostly meat but it does need to be cleaned out very badly. I sort of cleaned it out last summer when we bought our big one but we never defrosted it or got to the bottom so I am a little nervous about that one. Most of the items in there are unlabeled since my husband froze them and has (or had) them memorized so I am not really sure what is in there. I am hoping that by eating through our freezers this month we will have room to hopefully buy half a cow next year and get some of our gardening goodies into there for next year.

My goal this week is to make enough room in the other freezers to completely empty our small one and defrost it. I am sure we can do it, but it may take more than one week. I am also hoping to avoid the grocery store this week. I still need to tally up our grocery spending for January and see how we did. I am not anticipating that we did a great job with spending. We spent way too much stocking up the first weekend of the month to have reduced our spending but we have not even started using some of the items we bought and should be good on those for another month or two. I am however setting a low spending goal for groceries this month and will try to get a post out later this week about it. We are only really out of a couple of things I will list below and aside from the usual fresh vegetables and eggs I might be able to stretch the groceries out a couple of more weeks, maybe even the month if we can plan it well and stick to it. I am going to take stock this afternoon and consult with the family to see if it will work. We are also going over to the mother-in-laws again today for a Lunar New Year lunch so I won’t know how many leftovers we have until later on today.

Grocery List for Feburary

• Eggs
• Cream
• Kidney beans
• Diced tomatoes
• Dog food
• cucumbers
• lettuce
• frozen peas (stock up item)

Look for another post later this week outlining our grocery budget for January and February. I am also working on some goals for 2022 and getting some content up on YouTube. Until then, happy pantry cleanout!

Meal Planning: A New Start

Stitching Update 07.20.21

Uber Frugal Month January 2018 Wrap Up!