Your Cheapskates CLub Newsletter 25:23
In This Newsletter
1. Cath's Corner
2. From the Tip Store - Perfect Slow Cooker Roasting; Bag Up a Slow Cooker Liner; Broaden Your Horizons When it Comes to Slow Cookers
3. Share Your Tips
4. On the Menu - Slow Cooker Favourites
5. The $300 a Month Food Challenge - Getting the Most from Your Slow Cooker
6. The Weekly MOO Challenge - Caramelised Onions
7. Cheapskates Buzz - It's all about the slow cooker
8. The Cheapskates Club Show
9. Handmade Christmas Challenge
10. Join the Cheapskates Club
11. Frequently Asked Questions
12. Contact Details
1. Cath's Corner
Hello Cheapskaters,
It's slow cooker season. Or at least it is in our house. Wintertime means the slow cooker rarely gets put away. I love that I can dump ingredients into it in the morning, set it and then forget it until it's time to serve up dinner.
I'm in love with my slow cooker, and I know many of you are too. If you're new to the wonderful appliance that is the slow cooker, or wondering if they're really as good as claimed, or you are a slow cooker expert who loves to learn new ways to use your slow cooker, this week's newsletter is going to make you smile.
It is full of wonderful hints and tips and recipes to help you get the most from your slow cooker and save money too (and who doesn’t need to save a little money these days!).
So enjoy the read, try the recipes and fall in love with your slow cooker.
Have a great week everyone.
Happy Cheapskating,
Cath
PS: Love our site? We love referrals! Send a note to your favourite newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations, friends and relatives, and tell them about us!
2. From The Tip Store
Perfect Slow Cooker Roasting
Usually when you're cooking a chicken or piece of beef in the slow cooker you need to either use a rack or balls of foil to keep it raised. This is so it doesn't stew in it's own juices, but rather roasts.
Instead of wasting foil, use whole potatoes. Scrub them, but leave the skins on, then arrange them in the base of the slow cooker. Place your chicken or beef on top and cook.
The potatoes will cook in the juices, becoming soft and delicious, and the chicken or beef will "roast" away. It's usually fork tender by the time it's cooked. Serve it with the potatoes, and use the juices in the bottom to make gravy.
Yum!
Contributed by Ann
Bag Up a Slow Cooker Liner
Liners for slow cookers are not widely commercially available in Australia, oven bags work just as well. I use them if I am making something particularly messy (I make ribs using my slow cooker) or something I want to have available for several hours like cocktail meatballs for a party or keeping mashed potato warm for a big meal to free up my stove. The size I use is 35cm x 48cm which is the large size. Clean up is a breeze.
Contributed by Heather
Broaden Your Horizons When it Comes to Slow Cookers
My best advice is broaden your horizons and consider an all-in-one cooker. Not only are they an awesome slow-cooker, they are also a pressure-cooker, rice-cooker, pasta-cooker, steamer, and baker! You can do everything from ribs to risotto, cakes to casseroles, and soups to slow-cooked anything! Best thing is, the included recipe book (and online resources) will give you the slow-cook AND the pressure-cook option for relevant recipes. So if you are prepping in the morning, you can select the 8-hour slow-cook option, and if you didn’t have time in the morning and need to whip up dinner after work, you can select the 20-minute pressure-cook option. Same-same! Plus, everything becomes a one-pot meal due to the sauté/sear functions. I have the Philips All-in-one and LURVE it! If you have littlies that are likely to try to open a pressure cooker, then perhaps worth paying the extra for the Pro version, but otherwise save your money and get the original. You’ll wonder what you used to do without it!
Contributed by Tracy
There are more than 12,000 great tips in the Tip Store
Add a Tip
3. Share Your Tips
The Cheapskate's Club website is thousands of pages of money saving hints, tips and ideas. There are over 12,000 tips to save you money, time and energy; 1,600 budget and family friendly recipes, hundreds of printable tip sheets and ebooks.
Let's get together and make the Cheapskates Club Australia's largest online hint, tip and idea library. Share your favourite money saving, time saving or energy saving hint and be in the running to win a one-year membership to The Cheapskate Club.
Share your favourite hint or tip that saves money, time and energy and be in the running to win a one-year subscription to The Cheapskate Journal.
Remember, you have to be in it to win it!
Share Your Tip
4. On The Menu
Slow Cooker Favourites
Slow cookers make life so much easier when it comes to getting food on the table. Just dump everything in the crock, turn it on and let it do what it does best - cook your food slowly, so that it is moist and tender, and delicious when it's time to eat.Crockpot ChilliOne of our favourite winter and slow cooker meals is chilli, and this recipe is warming and frugal and feeds a lot of hungry people.
Ingredients:
2 cans baked beans in tomato sauce
240g can tomato paste
400g can diced tomatoes
500g mince, browned and drained
2 cups TVP rehydrated in 1 cup boiling water or stock
2 medium onions, coarsely chopped
1 cup diced celery
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp chilli powder (more or less to taste)
salt and pepper to taste
Method:
Put all ingredients in slow cooker in order listed. Stir gently to blend, being careful not to break up beans. Cover and cook on high for 5-6 hours or low 10 - 12 hours. Times will vary between slow cookers. Test after the minimum time to see if the meat is cooked and the sauce has thickened. Serve with rice and cornbread.
Cost:
$8.50 for 12 serves or 70 cents per serve
Chicken & DumplingsThis recipe is delicious as is or add vegetables to make a hearty, healthy meal. Use beans, corn, carrot, celery, onion or sweet potato to round the dish out.
Ingredients:
1kg chicken thigh fillets
4 cups chicken stock
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 cup plain wholemeal flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 tbsp cold butter
½ cup buttermilk
Method:
Put the chicken in the slowcooker. Pour broth over it. Sprinkle with pepper. Cover and cook on low for 8 hours. Remove chicken and shred with two forks. Set aside. In a small bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt. Cut in butter until mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in buttermilk until combined. Drop dough by tablespoons into broth mixture. Cover and cook on high for 30 minutes or until dumplings are done. Stir in chicken. Serves 6.
Cost $8.70 or $1.45 per serve
Easy Spaghetti & Meatballs
Ingredients:
500g mince
1 egg
1/2 tsp Italian herbs
2 x 750ml jars passata
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/2 cup water
Method:
Beat herbs and egg together. Add to mince, mixing in well. Take teaspoonfuls of meat and roll into meatballs. Put meatballs, passata, onion, garlic, and water into crockpot. Cover and cook on LOW for 6 to 7 hours. Cook favourite pasta according to directions on package. Serve pasta with hot spaghetti sauce and meatballs with Parmesan cheese on top if desired.
Cost $6.75 or $1.12 per serve (makes six large serves)
Slow Cooker Chocolate Self-Saucing Pudding
Ingredients:
100g butter, melted
½ cup milk
1 egg
1 cup self-raising flour
2 tablespoons cocoa
½ cup caster sugar
Sauce:
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 cups boiling water
Method:
Combine melted butter, milk and egg. In a separate bowl, sift flour and cocoa together and mix in the sugar. Gradually add the wet ingredients into the flour mixture and mix well. Spoon this mixture into a buttered 6 cup pudding basin. Place a saucer upside down in the bottom of the slow cooker and sit the pudding basin on the top. Combine the cocoa and brown sugar together, sprinkle over the top of pudding. Carefully pour boiling water over the mixture. Cover and cook on High for 3 1/2 hours or on Low for 5-6 hours. Serve hot with ice cream or custard.
Cost $2.80 or 46 cents per serve (serves six)
Next week we will be eating:
Sunday: Roast Beef
Monday: Chicken Cordon Bleu Casserole
Tuesday: Spaghetti Alfredo, green salad
Wednesday: Fish Cakes, salad
Thursday: MOO Pizza
Friday: Tacos
Saturday: Hawaiian Haystacks
There are over 1,800 budget and family friendly recipes in the Cheapskates Club Recipe File, all contributed by your fellow Cheapskates, so you know they're good.
Add A Recipe
Recipe File Index
5. The $300 a Month Food Challenge
My slow cooker is rarely away. It's one of the most used appliances in the kitchen, all year round.
I use it to make soups and stews, to slow cook corned beef, to caramelise onions, to cook puddings, to make curries, to slow cook tomato sauce and plenty of other things too. It is a very versatile appliance.
So to get the most from it (and so you can get the most from your slow cooker) there are a few things to do, for successful slow cooking and a fabulous result.
1. Fill it at least three quarters full. The food will cook better and you'll get better power use.
2. For roasts, brown the meat first. Slow cookers don't brown the meat, so if yours has a browning function (and some of the newer models do) use it. Otherwise brown the meat in a pan and then place on a rack in the slow cooker. Don't have a rack? You can scrunch up balls of foil or if you are doing vegetables too, put the veggies on the bottom and place the meat on top.
3. Timing is everything. As a general rule, if something takes 2 hours in the oven it will take 4 hours on high in the slow cooker, 8 hours on low. That will vary of course depending on your particular slow cooker, some cook faster than others, and the quantity of food you are cooking (see No. 1).
4. Don't Peek! When you're using your slow cooker, leave the lid on unless the recipe directs you not to. If you take the lid off during cooking, it can take up to 25 minutes for the food to resume its proper cooking temperature, and that extends your cooking time.
5. In most slow cookers, "Low" is around 100 degrees Celsius, and "High" is about 150 degrees Celsius. Cooking takes about twice as long on Low as it does on High.
6. Slow cookers produce very moist heat. This means your recipe will retain more moisture than it would if it were baked in the oven. A good rule of thumb is to reduce the amount of liquid in your recipe by about half. However, if you're cooking rice or some other grain, then you should use an amount of liquid that is just shy of the standard amount.
7. Roasts, corned beef and stewing or casserole steak stand up well to long cooking, usually requiring 10 to 12 hours on Low or 6 to 8 on High. If you're doing a recipe with soft vegetables, add them towards the end of the cooking time. Root vegetables, or more dense veggies, can be cooked with the meat, on low for 8 - 10 hours. Just like with conventional cooking, poultry cooks more quickly than red meat, and fish cooks faster than both.
8. Generally speaking, a family of four can do well with a slow cooker that's about 4 to 6 litres. However, having more than one slow cooker size can come in very handy.
The $300 a Month Food Challenge Forum
The Post that Started it All
6. The Weekly MOO Challenge
Caramelised Onions
We were out of caramelised onions, akin to a major culinary disaster in our house. I've been putting off making more because onions have been so expensive, and then the local greengrocer had 10 kilo bags of onions for $8 - that's 80 cents a kilo and I don't mind paying that.
We use caramelised onions on chicken, and meat, but our favourite way to eat them is on burgers. A spoonful on a burger makes that plain meat patty something special, it really does.
Everyone was happy when they saw the bag of onions in the kitchen; they knew what was going to happen - family assembly line!
We set up with someone peeling, someone slicing and someone else bagging up the onions. I kept 3.5 kilos out to make caramelised onions. I melted butter in the slow cooker, stirred in some brown sugar and when it was a syrupy sauce, added the sliced onions. Gave it all a good stir, put the lid on and let them cook on HIGH for 4 hours. After 4 hours it was stir and mix time. The onions do cook down, slowly, so they need stirring up. Put the lid back on and let them cook another four hours. They were perfect (if you're going to do this, the times may vary - it will depend on your slow cooker and the onions).
The onions were soft and a lovely rich brown colour, and the sauce was thick, almost like a jam.
They were spooned into sterilised 1 cup jars and water bathed for 15 minutes. And now we have enough for a few months.
How to Make the Best Ever Caramelised Onions
Get in on the fun and discussions here.
7. Cheapskates Buzz
From The Article Archive
Adapting Recipes for the Slow Cooker
Beating the Can't Be Bothered Dinnertime Blues
Ways to Use the Powdered Milk in Your Pantry Stockpile
This Week's Hot Forum Topics
Favourite Slow Cooker Recipes
Cakes in the Slow Cooker
Okay, I finally bought a slowcooker. Now what?
Slow Cooker Recipes
Slow Cooker Soup
Crockpot Caramel Sauce Recipe (Dulce De Leche)
8. The Cheapskates Club Show
Join Cath and Hannah live Tuesdays and Thursdays on You Tube at 7.30pm AET
Latest Shows
1. Cath's Corner
2. From the Tip Store - Perfect Slow Cooker Roasting; Bag Up a Slow Cooker Liner; Broaden Your Horizons When it Comes to Slow Cookers
3. Share Your Tips
4. On the Menu - Slow Cooker Favourites
5. The $300 a Month Food Challenge - Getting the Most from Your Slow Cooker
6. The Weekly MOO Challenge - Caramelised Onions
7. Cheapskates Buzz - It's all about the slow cooker
8. The Cheapskates Club Show
9. Handmade Christmas Challenge
10. Join the Cheapskates Club
11. Frequently Asked Questions
12. Contact Details
1. Cath's Corner
Hello Cheapskaters,
It's slow cooker season. Or at least it is in our house. Wintertime means the slow cooker rarely gets put away. I love that I can dump ingredients into it in the morning, set it and then forget it until it's time to serve up dinner.
I'm in love with my slow cooker, and I know many of you are too. If you're new to the wonderful appliance that is the slow cooker, or wondering if they're really as good as claimed, or you are a slow cooker expert who loves to learn new ways to use your slow cooker, this week's newsletter is going to make you smile.
It is full of wonderful hints and tips and recipes to help you get the most from your slow cooker and save money too (and who doesn’t need to save a little money these days!).
So enjoy the read, try the recipes and fall in love with your slow cooker.
Have a great week everyone.
Happy Cheapskating,
Cath
PS: Love our site? We love referrals! Send a note to your favourite newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations, friends and relatives, and tell them about us!
2. From The Tip Store
Perfect Slow Cooker Roasting
Usually when you're cooking a chicken or piece of beef in the slow cooker you need to either use a rack or balls of foil to keep it raised. This is so it doesn't stew in it's own juices, but rather roasts.
Instead of wasting foil, use whole potatoes. Scrub them, but leave the skins on, then arrange them in the base of the slow cooker. Place your chicken or beef on top and cook.
The potatoes will cook in the juices, becoming soft and delicious, and the chicken or beef will "roast" away. It's usually fork tender by the time it's cooked. Serve it with the potatoes, and use the juices in the bottom to make gravy.
Yum!
Contributed by Ann
Bag Up a Slow Cooker Liner
Liners for slow cookers are not widely commercially available in Australia, oven bags work just as well. I use them if I am making something particularly messy (I make ribs using my slow cooker) or something I want to have available for several hours like cocktail meatballs for a party or keeping mashed potato warm for a big meal to free up my stove. The size I use is 35cm x 48cm which is the large size. Clean up is a breeze.
Contributed by Heather
Broaden Your Horizons When it Comes to Slow Cookers
My best advice is broaden your horizons and consider an all-in-one cooker. Not only are they an awesome slow-cooker, they are also a pressure-cooker, rice-cooker, pasta-cooker, steamer, and baker! You can do everything from ribs to risotto, cakes to casseroles, and soups to slow-cooked anything! Best thing is, the included recipe book (and online resources) will give you the slow-cook AND the pressure-cook option for relevant recipes. So if you are prepping in the morning, you can select the 8-hour slow-cook option, and if you didn’t have time in the morning and need to whip up dinner after work, you can select the 20-minute pressure-cook option. Same-same! Plus, everything becomes a one-pot meal due to the sauté/sear functions. I have the Philips All-in-one and LURVE it! If you have littlies that are likely to try to open a pressure cooker, then perhaps worth paying the extra for the Pro version, but otherwise save your money and get the original. You’ll wonder what you used to do without it!
Contributed by Tracy
There are more than 12,000 great tips in the Tip Store
Add a Tip
3. Share Your Tips
The Cheapskate's Club website is thousands of pages of money saving hints, tips and ideas. There are over 12,000 tips to save you money, time and energy; 1,600 budget and family friendly recipes, hundreds of printable tip sheets and ebooks.
Let's get together and make the Cheapskates Club Australia's largest online hint, tip and idea library. Share your favourite money saving, time saving or energy saving hint and be in the running to win a one-year membership to The Cheapskate Club.
Share your favourite hint or tip that saves money, time and energy and be in the running to win a one-year subscription to The Cheapskate Journal.
Remember, you have to be in it to win it!
Share Your Tip
4. On The Menu
Slow Cooker Favourites
Slow cookers make life so much easier when it comes to getting food on the table. Just dump everything in the crock, turn it on and let it do what it does best - cook your food slowly, so that it is moist and tender, and delicious when it's time to eat.Crockpot ChilliOne of our favourite winter and slow cooker meals is chilli, and this recipe is warming and frugal and feeds a lot of hungry people.
Ingredients:
2 cans baked beans in tomato sauce
240g can tomato paste
400g can diced tomatoes
500g mince, browned and drained
2 cups TVP rehydrated in 1 cup boiling water or stock
2 medium onions, coarsely chopped
1 cup diced celery
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp chilli powder (more or less to taste)
salt and pepper to taste
Method:
Put all ingredients in slow cooker in order listed. Stir gently to blend, being careful not to break up beans. Cover and cook on high for 5-6 hours or low 10 - 12 hours. Times will vary between slow cookers. Test after the minimum time to see if the meat is cooked and the sauce has thickened. Serve with rice and cornbread.
Cost:
$8.50 for 12 serves or 70 cents per serve
Chicken & DumplingsThis recipe is delicious as is or add vegetables to make a hearty, healthy meal. Use beans, corn, carrot, celery, onion or sweet potato to round the dish out.
Ingredients:
1kg chicken thigh fillets
4 cups chicken stock
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 cup plain wholemeal flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 tbsp cold butter
½ cup buttermilk
Method:
Put the chicken in the slowcooker. Pour broth over it. Sprinkle with pepper. Cover and cook on low for 8 hours. Remove chicken and shred with two forks. Set aside. In a small bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt. Cut in butter until mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in buttermilk until combined. Drop dough by tablespoons into broth mixture. Cover and cook on high for 30 minutes or until dumplings are done. Stir in chicken. Serves 6.
Cost $8.70 or $1.45 per serve
Easy Spaghetti & Meatballs
Ingredients:
500g mince
1 egg
1/2 tsp Italian herbs
2 x 750ml jars passata
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/2 cup water
Method:
Beat herbs and egg together. Add to mince, mixing in well. Take teaspoonfuls of meat and roll into meatballs. Put meatballs, passata, onion, garlic, and water into crockpot. Cover and cook on LOW for 6 to 7 hours. Cook favourite pasta according to directions on package. Serve pasta with hot spaghetti sauce and meatballs with Parmesan cheese on top if desired.
Cost $6.75 or $1.12 per serve (makes six large serves)
Slow Cooker Chocolate Self-Saucing Pudding
Ingredients:
100g butter, melted
½ cup milk
1 egg
1 cup self-raising flour
2 tablespoons cocoa
½ cup caster sugar
Sauce:
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 cups boiling water
Method:
Combine melted butter, milk and egg. In a separate bowl, sift flour and cocoa together and mix in the sugar. Gradually add the wet ingredients into the flour mixture and mix well. Spoon this mixture into a buttered 6 cup pudding basin. Place a saucer upside down in the bottom of the slow cooker and sit the pudding basin on the top. Combine the cocoa and brown sugar together, sprinkle over the top of pudding. Carefully pour boiling water over the mixture. Cover and cook on High for 3 1/2 hours or on Low for 5-6 hours. Serve hot with ice cream or custard.
Cost $2.80 or 46 cents per serve (serves six)
Next week we will be eating:
Sunday: Roast Beef
Monday: Chicken Cordon Bleu Casserole
Tuesday: Spaghetti Alfredo, green salad
Wednesday: Fish Cakes, salad
Thursday: MOO Pizza
Friday: Tacos
Saturday: Hawaiian Haystacks
There are over 1,800 budget and family friendly recipes in the Cheapskates Club Recipe File, all contributed by your fellow Cheapskates, so you know they're good.
Add A Recipe
Recipe File Index
5. The $300 a Month Food Challenge
My slow cooker is rarely away. It's one of the most used appliances in the kitchen, all year round.
I use it to make soups and stews, to slow cook corned beef, to caramelise onions, to cook puddings, to make curries, to slow cook tomato sauce and plenty of other things too. It is a very versatile appliance.
So to get the most from it (and so you can get the most from your slow cooker) there are a few things to do, for successful slow cooking and a fabulous result.
1. Fill it at least three quarters full. The food will cook better and you'll get better power use.
2. For roasts, brown the meat first. Slow cookers don't brown the meat, so if yours has a browning function (and some of the newer models do) use it. Otherwise brown the meat in a pan and then place on a rack in the slow cooker. Don't have a rack? You can scrunch up balls of foil or if you are doing vegetables too, put the veggies on the bottom and place the meat on top.
3. Timing is everything. As a general rule, if something takes 2 hours in the oven it will take 4 hours on high in the slow cooker, 8 hours on low. That will vary of course depending on your particular slow cooker, some cook faster than others, and the quantity of food you are cooking (see No. 1).
4. Don't Peek! When you're using your slow cooker, leave the lid on unless the recipe directs you not to. If you take the lid off during cooking, it can take up to 25 minutes for the food to resume its proper cooking temperature, and that extends your cooking time.
5. In most slow cookers, "Low" is around 100 degrees Celsius, and "High" is about 150 degrees Celsius. Cooking takes about twice as long on Low as it does on High.
6. Slow cookers produce very moist heat. This means your recipe will retain more moisture than it would if it were baked in the oven. A good rule of thumb is to reduce the amount of liquid in your recipe by about half. However, if you're cooking rice or some other grain, then you should use an amount of liquid that is just shy of the standard amount.
7. Roasts, corned beef and stewing or casserole steak stand up well to long cooking, usually requiring 10 to 12 hours on Low or 6 to 8 on High. If you're doing a recipe with soft vegetables, add them towards the end of the cooking time. Root vegetables, or more dense veggies, can be cooked with the meat, on low for 8 - 10 hours. Just like with conventional cooking, poultry cooks more quickly than red meat, and fish cooks faster than both.
8. Generally speaking, a family of four can do well with a slow cooker that's about 4 to 6 litres. However, having more than one slow cooker size can come in very handy.
The $300 a Month Food Challenge Forum
The Post that Started it All
6. The Weekly MOO Challenge
Caramelised Onions
We were out of caramelised onions, akin to a major culinary disaster in our house. I've been putting off making more because onions have been so expensive, and then the local greengrocer had 10 kilo bags of onions for $8 - that's 80 cents a kilo and I don't mind paying that.
We use caramelised onions on chicken, and meat, but our favourite way to eat them is on burgers. A spoonful on a burger makes that plain meat patty something special, it really does.
Everyone was happy when they saw the bag of onions in the kitchen; they knew what was going to happen - family assembly line!
We set up with someone peeling, someone slicing and someone else bagging up the onions. I kept 3.5 kilos out to make caramelised onions. I melted butter in the slow cooker, stirred in some brown sugar and when it was a syrupy sauce, added the sliced onions. Gave it all a good stir, put the lid on and let them cook on HIGH for 4 hours. After 4 hours it was stir and mix time. The onions do cook down, slowly, so they need stirring up. Put the lid back on and let them cook another four hours. They were perfect (if you're going to do this, the times may vary - it will depend on your slow cooker and the onions).
The onions were soft and a lovely rich brown colour, and the sauce was thick, almost like a jam.
They were spooned into sterilised 1 cup jars and water bathed for 15 minutes. And now we have enough for a few months.
How to Make the Best Ever Caramelised Onions
Get in on the fun and discussions here.
7. Cheapskates Buzz
From The Article Archive
Adapting Recipes for the Slow Cooker
Beating the Can't Be Bothered Dinnertime Blues
Ways to Use the Powdered Milk in Your Pantry Stockpile
This Week's Hot Forum Topics
Favourite Slow Cooker Recipes
Cakes in the Slow Cooker
Okay, I finally bought a slowcooker. Now what?
Slow Cooker Recipes
Slow Cooker Soup
Crockpot Caramel Sauce Recipe (Dulce De Leche)
8. The Cheapskates Club Show
Join Cath and Hannah live Tuesdays and Thursdays on You Tube at 7.30pm AET
Latest Shows
Subscribe to our You Tube channel and never miss a show.
9. Handmade Christmas Challenge
Hello! We're 25 weeks into our handmade Christmas challenge, how are you all doing?
It has been so cold this week, all I've wanted to do is sit in front of the fire and stay warm. So that's what I've been doing in my down time. I'm on a crochet binge at the moment, so another tea cosy was added to the present box, in a pretty pink. I think this may be my favourite so far, and a knitted dishcloth in cool blues, grey and white.
I've been making birthday cards too, as we are moving into birthday season for our family.
A friend gifted me some gorgeous wools over the weekend, in stunning colours, so I've put them aside to make beanies and fingerless gloves to donate.
And as I am going to be away for a few weeks, with a fair bit of time spent travelling, I've packed a bag of goodies to keep me occupied. There should be enough crocheting and knitting to fill in driving time and waiting time and I'm hoping to put a good dent in the beautiful yarns and come home with lots of beanies and gloves. My MIM show and tell may be a bit boring for a few weeks, but I'll do my best to share what is accomplished.
The beanie pattern is very simple. I just make a chain of 30 (for a women's beanie) or 40 (for a men's beanie) then work a half double crochet into each chain for the foundation row. The next rows are simple: work half double crochets into the back of each chain to the end of the row. Turn and repeat. This creates a ribbed look. For a women's beanie work 18 rows, for a men's beanie work 20 - 22 rows. To make it up, with the ribs running vertically, form a tube and stitch the sides together. Run a gathering stitch around the top, pull it in to close and fasten off. Make a pompom if you are so inclined and stitch to the top. Fold up the bottom to form a hem and you're done. Very quick and easy, using 8 or 10 ply yarn and 6mm or 6.5mm crochet hook.
Don't forget to check in for our Make It Monday show and tell over at Cheapskates Chatter, we'd love to see what you've made.
Handmade Christmas Central
The Handmade Christmas Forum
10. Join The Cheapskates Club
For just $30 you can join the Cheapskates Club and get exclusive access to the Cheapskate Journal, the monthly e-journal that shows you how to cut the costs of everyday living and still have fun for a full year.
That's unlimited 24/7 access to EVERYTHING in the Member's Centre!
Click here to join the Cheapskates Club today!
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How do I change my email address?
This one is easy. When you login to the Member's Centre just click on your name at the top of the page to go straight to your profile page where you can update your details, change your password and find your subscription details.
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Memberships are active for one year from the date of joining. You will be sent a renewal reminder before your subscription is due to renew. You can also find your membership expiry date on your profile page.
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12. Contact Cheapskates
The Cheapskates Club -
Showing you how to live life
debt free, cashed up and laughing!
PO Box 5077 Studfield Vic 3152
Contact Cheapskates
9. Handmade Christmas Challenge
Hello! We're 25 weeks into our handmade Christmas challenge, how are you all doing?
It has been so cold this week, all I've wanted to do is sit in front of the fire and stay warm. So that's what I've been doing in my down time. I'm on a crochet binge at the moment, so another tea cosy was added to the present box, in a pretty pink. I think this may be my favourite so far, and a knitted dishcloth in cool blues, grey and white.
I've been making birthday cards too, as we are moving into birthday season for our family.
A friend gifted me some gorgeous wools over the weekend, in stunning colours, so I've put them aside to make beanies and fingerless gloves to donate.
And as I am going to be away for a few weeks, with a fair bit of time spent travelling, I've packed a bag of goodies to keep me occupied. There should be enough crocheting and knitting to fill in driving time and waiting time and I'm hoping to put a good dent in the beautiful yarns and come home with lots of beanies and gloves. My MIM show and tell may be a bit boring for a few weeks, but I'll do my best to share what is accomplished.
The beanie pattern is very simple. I just make a chain of 30 (for a women's beanie) or 40 (for a men's beanie) then work a half double crochet into each chain for the foundation row. The next rows are simple: work half double crochets into the back of each chain to the end of the row. Turn and repeat. This creates a ribbed look. For a women's beanie work 18 rows, for a men's beanie work 20 - 22 rows. To make it up, with the ribs running vertically, form a tube and stitch the sides together. Run a gathering stitch around the top, pull it in to close and fasten off. Make a pompom if you are so inclined and stitch to the top. Fold up the bottom to form a hem and you're done. Very quick and easy, using 8 or 10 ply yarn and 6mm or 6.5mm crochet hook.
Don't forget to check in for our Make It Monday show and tell over at Cheapskates Chatter, we'd love to see what you've made.
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