For the lucky few who have extra leisure time this summer, I thought I’d put together some suggestions for productive and fun activities that will help enhance your personal, academic and/or professional life. Some of these suggestions are addressed as if to young people (students, adolescents, etc.) but can also apply to grown-ups.

My suggestions are divided into the following subsections:

• Summer Hobbies - activities with lasting benefits and meaning
  
• Summer Studies - develop skills that will be useful in life
  
• Summer To-Do’s - a few ways to get your life or home in order
  
• Summer Fitness - ways to keep cool and stay fit
  
• Summer Pet Bonding - make your pet happy and you healthy

Summer Hobbies

Here are some ideas for catching up on tasks that may have been neglected during the year.

• Write in your journal
  Write about your past year, what’s on your mind, who and what you like and dislike, your daydreams, anything. In future years you will be glad you did it and also amused by your younger self. You think you will always remember what happened when, but as time goes by, memories do fade and become forgotten. (Trust me, I’m speaking from experience and I’m not yet 30 and have a memory better than most.)
• Make a family video
  Go around the house and take a video of your family going about its regular business. You will be glad for the memories one day.
• Scrapbook
  Organize family photos, report cards, birthday cards, artwork, concert programs and other keepsakes from the past year into a scrapbook.
• Reading
  Reading (even fun fiction) can help improve your mind, vocabulary, grammar and writing skills. If you go to the library, you can read in an air-conditioned environment without having to pay for the air-conditioning or the books.

Summer Studies

Yes, summer should be fun, but there’s no reason it can’t be both fun and productive.

• Learn a new language
  The benefits of learning languages are endless. Learning a new language can help you to:
  • Get ahead in your career
  • Make new friends from different parts of the world. When you show an interest in someone’s language or culture, they are often appreciative and take an interest in you in return.
  • Improve your English (or first language)
• Learn to play a musical instrument
  Music enhances the mind in many ways. Studies have shown that children who study music at an early age do better in school than those who don’t. Aside from that, it is also just plain fun.
• Learn to sew
  Sewing is a very useful skill to have regardless of your gender. You can learn to mend clothes, make your own clothes and other things for your house, which can save you a lot of money. Older and more skilled children can even make their own clothes for the coming school year. Check out one of our earlier articles for more info: Save Money by Sewing Your Own Clothes.
• Take a computer class
  Learn to type properly, use a spreadsheet or database, design websites, make presentations, etc. Most jobs these days involve computer use, so knowing as much as you can about computers might help you get a higher salary.

Summer To-Do’s

A few suggestions for improving life at home and getting ahead on the coming year.

• Get a head start on your Christmas shopping
  This could save you time and money because you can shop at your leisure and take advantage of summer sales. Leaving your shopping to the last minute usually costs more because you are up against a deadline and usually have fewer options.
• Sort through your stuff
  Go through your clothes and things and prune out those you no longer want or need. You could donate the things you no longer need or hold a garage or yard sale and make some money to put into your college or retirement savings.
• Re-arrange your room or home
  Re-arranging your room or home can have a positive impact on your life. A change can be uplifting and produce an overall feeling of well-being and accomplishment, renew your energy and increase productivity.
• Clean out your computer
  Ideally you would do this several times a year, but if you use the internet and download a lot of things, it’s a good idea to clean out your computer on a regular basis. If there are programs you don’t use, uninstall them. If there are files that you no longer need, delete them. Clean your registry if you’ve had the computer for a while. Keeping your hard drive from getting too full will extend its life.

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Tell a friend

One of our readers, Anne, asked us where we find affordable fabrics for our sewing projects described in Madoline’s post Save Money by Sewing Your Own Clothes, so here we will share our favorite sources. Our information on physical fabric stores dates back 1-2 years, as we have moved to a remote area and no longer shop for fabrics in physical stores. However, online prices mentioned here were current at the time the post was written (March 7, 2008).

Our Favorite Sources for Discount Fabrics

• Walmart
  Some Walmart stores have discontinued their fabrics departments, but if a store in your area has not done so, it is the best source for affordable fabrics. While they carry many “fiber content unknown” fabrics, they also have many good quality fabrics suitable for clothing in the $1.00-$2.00 per yard price range. When some of their pricier fabrics run low on the bolt, they often lower the price to $1.00-$2.00 to clear it out - usually with between 1-3 yards left on the bolt, which is ample for making a regular sized outfit. Even the “fiber content unknown” fabrics can be used for some projects such as home decoration and miscellaneous crafts.
• Jo-Ann Stores
  The physical Jo-Ann stores, especially the superstores, carry a huge selection of fabrics for all sorts of purposes - clothing, costuming, upholstery and crafts. While regular prices are often in the $3.00+ range, they often have large sections of quality fabrics on clearance for $1.00-$2.00 per yard.

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Fabric scraps are the natural by-product of a sewing project. Bags and Bags of fabric scraps are the natural result of many sewing projects and the frugal impulse to keep every potential resource. While these collections of small and irregular pieces tend to be a nuisance, they are usually of beautiful or expensive materials that I could not throw away with good conscience.

My spring cleaning therefore begins with using up these scraps as fast as possible and disposing of the remaining shreds. One easy way to use fabric scraps is to make patchwork berets which are highly individual and as colorful or demure as you choose. My recent hats are very colorful as I have a large variety of small pieces to deal with, but I intend soon to make some with fabric choices limited to one or two tones.

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Once upon a time, sewing was a widespread skill common to the poorest and richest of women as well as men of many professions. The reason for the former popularity of sewing is that it is a skill both basic and necessary. Nowadays, because of manufactured clothing and looser fashions, we are more inclined to search for clothes that we fit into rather than have clothes made to fit us. Compared to the apparent convenience of purchasing ready-made clothes, a great number of people wrongly believe that the sewing of clothes is either an antiquated custom, a hobby for “creative” people, unreasonably difficult, or simply a waste of time.

Logically the process of manufacturing products en masse seems the cheapest way to get things. This is true: manufacturing in large quantities is the cheapest way for large companies to get their products. But all the savings from using cheap labor and bulk supplies do not become your savings but someone else’s profit. Manufacturing is not always the cheapest way for you to get things, especially clothing.

Below are some of the first items of clothing we made when first learning to sew. Each item cost no more than $1.00 to make.

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Semiannually, I take a pair of scissors and work my way through box after box and bag after bag of yarns which seem to have the ability to form tangles without human assistance. I untangle what I can, cut loose impossible knots, and roll up dozens of tidy yarn balls which will somehow unravel themselves in the next few months.

I have no trouble with the yarn I purchased for myself; these I keep in resealable plastic bags organized by fiber type. The real trouble is the accumulation of “interesting” yarns which my grandmother—a highly skilled knit and crochet artist—gifted regularly to me as a solution to her own yarn buildup. These yarns come in a larger variety of fibers than I usually buy and range in appearance from extremely beautiful to frightfully gaudy. There is rarely enough of one type of these miscellaneous yarns to make a whole project.

I have now resolved once and for all to reclaim the hours I spend reorganizing yarns for more profitable use. Having just become aware that many people are troubled by yarn accumulation and resort to giving away or donating materials which had cost them money, I would like to share my solution for disposing of yarn without waste. (more…)

As an artist I am always eager for the creative challenges provided by frugal living and the quest for unconventional solutions. I view limited means and materials as a criteria or assignment and constantly ponder over the possible uses and adaptations of old, broken, or left-over items. My sister and I have always viewed saving money as winning at a game and making something useful out of something unwanted is the same as getting it for free, which is quite a victory.

Even while growing up in very comfortable circumstances, I had a fascination with the potential of objects to be used as they were not intended. This interest may have begun with finding furniture for a doll house from household objects and making clothes for my dolls and cats from old clothing and yarns.

My pursuit of improvisation in furniture and clothes was furthered by literature such as novels by Charles Dickens which portray extreme poverty with infinite charm. There is also a children’s series by Mary Norton describing the lives of resourceful little people called Borrowers who see caviar tins as bathtubs and postage stamps as wall art. In one instance of borrower-like behavior, I used for a drawer pull the steam control knob from a clothes iron which had suffered a fall. Close examination will reveal that the knob bears the words “Max”, “Low”, and “Off”. The other embellishments used on this drawer were 2 pieces of star anise and untidy swirls of hot glue under a coat of paint.

A few years ago, while reading about Commedia dell’Arte, I learned that the colorful look of Harlequin costume originated from the practice of medieval jesters and fools, who were poorly treated and probably poorer paid, to fashion clothing from found scraps of fabric for the simple luxury of keeping warm. The romance of the pathetic significantly increased my fondness for patches and deliberate mismatching. The result is that some of my favorite clothes and household items are made entirely of materials left over from other projects.

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