I have this goal.....a long held, nearly impossible (for me) goal, but one I shall keep working on until the day I die. That goal? To have a well stoked, well organised pantry. Thing is, I don't own a pantry. I don't really even own kitchen cupboards which we could use as a pantry. We…
Category: Angelicscalliwags Home Economics
Around the House in 80 Hours: Progress Week One – Bathroom
This week we have concentrated on the bathroom, which has needed such a lot of work done to it. We only have one bathroom between the seven of us (we have a second loo upstairs but only one bath/shower), which means this bathroom has to work hard and, as a corner room off the kitchen…
Home Making – Soap Nuts
Over the past year I have tried out many different recipes for home-made laundry soap. We have very hard water and to be honest I wasn't that impressed with any of them. At least I wasn't until this summer. I had come across soap nuts during one of my forays into the world-wide web and…
Financial Studies for the 2014-2015 School Year
This was one topic all three older ones wanted as an elective. The younger two are just starting to show an interest with A6 methodically counting her money over and over again. I wasn't sure I would be able to find something that would be suitable for all ages from 12 down to 3, so…
Angelicscalliwags Frugal Challenge: September sum Up
Welcome to the September sum for our financial goal of paying of our mortgage in five years. If you've been reading this blog for some time you will know that right now we are focusing on increasing our savings rather than paying off our mortgage. We did this because we had a few bills come…
Angelicscalliwags Challenge: July Sum Up
For all my other posts in the series see here. My last post was written in March, 4 months ago! We are still at it. To recap, we were trying to pay our mortgage in 5 years and had done really well in our goal until September when we got a bill for the car…
Spar-Klean Science: What is the dirtiest place in the kitchen?
We did this experiment along side our dish cloth verses the loo germ growing fest. First we made the agar from gelatin, bouillon and water: The children decided to take samples from the door handle, the coffee machine, the fridge door, the floor and the sink: My heart sank as I watched C11 poke the…
Spar-Klean Science – Is the loo really cleaner than the dish cloth?
I need to be honest and say I am posting this against my better judgement. I mean, no one is going to want to eat at my house if the cloth we use to clean the dishes is actually dirtier than my loo! That said, 'dirty' may be a misnomer here because we all know…
Incr-Edible Science: Yeast (Micro Fungi – part 2)
After covering mold type fungi in Part 1, we moved onto the unicellular yeast: This is Leeuwenhoek, the man responsible for the discovery of micro-organisms through his very simple 'microscope' A labelled diagram of a yeast cell Yeast as we know it To find out a bit more about yeast we mainly used the same resources as before: We…
Spar-Klean Science – The Science Behind Microfiber Cloths
As you all might recall, I have been trying to reduce the chemicals I buy, reduce the amount of money I spend at the same time as enjoying the whole process of making my own products. I am focusing on the kitchen first and the last time I posted about my home-made endeavors it was…
Angelicscalliwags Challenge: March Sum Up
I was a bit negligent posting about the challenge in February. In fact, I was wondering if it was worth continuing with the challenge at all. We were getting nowhere very quickly on account of the car costs in September (£1000), the boiler costs in November (£600) and then cutting down of our tree in…
The Angelicscalliwags Challenge: August Sum Up
Sorry, I know I've posted it before, but I love this picture! Welcome to the August sum up of the angelicscalliwags' challenge. The challenge is on to pay off our mortgage by the end of 2017 How did we do this month? We have currently paid back 17% of our mortgage since January of this year. Only…
The Angelicscalliwags Challenge: Week 8
I'm running a bit late with my posts at the moment. We had our yearly family party on Saturday and it's been all hands on deck! We host the children for a garden party in our garden whilst my mum hosts the adults next door. It is always great fun, and this year the children…
A Summer of Little House Living: Learning the Hows of Cleaning with Spar-Klean Science
For all other posts related to our Little House on the Prairie Summer see here Meet our summer science curriculum! Spar-Klean science is the sister of Incr-Edible science and will make up our entire science curriculum this summer. I wrote Spar-Klean Science with the goal of teaching the children about the science of cleaning. It…
Incr-Edible Science: Making our own Baking Powder
Whilst my home-made Incr-Edible Science curriculum is primarily one of chemistry, my personal aim is to help L10 become knowledgeable in the 'why' of cooking, rather than just the 'how'. L10 craves to be in the kitchen every spare moment and would like to run her own business linked in some way to cooking in…