Tip Tuesday!

Welcome to

"Tip Tuesday!" - Spend Time in the Sewing Room, Not the Kitchen

I love learning new things and then sharing that knowledge with my quilting friends. So, every Tuesday I'll provide some tips, hints, tricks, tutorials, shortcuts, etc. that I've learned over the years and share them here on the blog. 

"Tip Tuesday" will be a collection of information about a wide variety of subjects garnered from a large variety of sources.  I am not an expert by any means and do not take credit for being the great wizard behind all of these hints and tips. I will gladly give due credit whenever possible.

These tips will be archived and accessible to you just by clicking on the "Tip Tuesday" tab above. 

Read, enjoy, and be inspired! 

This post may not seem like it has much to do with sewing and quilting, but it really does. I promise!

Since I've been working anywhere from three to five days most weeks (and I don't always know the night before that I'll be working), I've lost quite a bit of sewing time and I really needed to find a way to get that back. 

Besides some basic reorganization of things around the house and simply making some different decisions, I knew that I really needed to adjust the time I spent in the kitchen. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a chef and I don't spend hours preparing meals, but I felt like I was spending way too much time in the kitchen and not enough time in the sewing room. I really needed to change that.

A couple of years ago, Lynn and I spend an afternoon putting together freezer crock pot meals. 

Most of the meals were ok, a few were really good and a few others were not too good at all. It was a trial and it was pretty successful.

Now, jumping back to how this all relates to sewing and quilting...

Even if you only cook with a crock pot or other methods of "start it and leave it" recipes once a week or every two weeks, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much time that frees up for you. You can choose to cook your entire meal in the crock pot or just a part of it. No matter which way you go, you can't go wrong. 

Here are a couple of my favorite slow cooker websites/blogs to help you get started.

http://stephanieodea.com/


http://www.365daysofcrockpot.com/

Now, to do this effectively, planning is important. 

Decide which recipes you want to try and make a list of the grocery items you'll need. 

Cut up veggies and other items right away or they'll probably spoil before you remember that they're in the drawer in the the kitchen.  :-)

Put everything in the crock pot, go to work, sew or whatever and spend the time creating and not fretting about what to cook for dinner.

See, I told you it would relate to sewing!