Fund Raising - Gospel Tabernacle Kids Church Style!

Last week in our Children's Church we started a fund raising project which will take the boys and girls through the whole process from making the product, to selling it and donating the proceeds. At the end of the time, we plan to visit the project site which is in a nearby town and see firsthand what the kids accomplished!

For our project, we purchased Easter candy molds and make pretzel rod chocolate pops and chocolate lollipops. It sounded like a great idea at the time, but after I purchased the supplies, I began to feel a little leery of how it would work. Thankfully we have a small group and were able to recruit enough adults so there was one adult for every 2 children to supervise the activity.

I placed the chocolate pieces in small squeeze bottles and melted it in warm water in the crock pot ahead of time. Then we lined the children up along the island in the church kitchen and allowed them to squeeze the different colored chocolate into their molds.

What fun! The children became enthused about the candy-making project and all of them worked hard the entire time. It was one of the best class times we've had! We even sold several pretzel pops immediately following church to one of the dads who came to pick up his kids.

This week we'll be adding homemade labels and bows letting everyone know the boys and girls made them as a fundraiser. We'll be selling them to family and friends as well as at work and at a small craft show at one of our sister churches.

Then the money will be donated along with some of the boys and girls offerings to a mission project in a neighboring community. I'm making an "It's Time to share Jesus clock" to show how close they are getting to their goal. I'll let you know how this turns out when we reach our goal. I should have taken pictures of them at work!

In the end, I think this will turn out to be a valuable lesson in giving for the boys and girls. Not only are they giving their time and energy to the Lord to make the candy, they're also earning money to give to the Lord for missions. I definitely will be doing this lesson again!

Frugal recipes for a more beautiful you!

For a long time now, I've tried to be frugal with health and beauty products. Over the years I've turned my shampoo and conditioner bottles upside down and drained every last drop into a new bottle. Those last few drops are hardly enough to do anything with, but they do add up over time. I can usually can fill my travel sized bottle over a few months so its full and ready to go when vacation time rolls around. It may contain several different scents so I just call it my fruit salad shampoo.

After I stopped working outside the home, I needed to be more economical when it came to purchasing beauty products like shower gel. I found I could lather up my bath pouf just as well with a bar of soap as I could with that nice gel - so I stopped buying the pricier shower gels and settled for a simple bar of soap.

But even with a bar of soap, there's waste - that little sliver that just isn't big enough to use effectively. Did you know the average person uses 656 bars of soap over their lifetime???????

This weekend I found some new frugal "recipes" I want to try - making my own shower gel and designer bath soaps from old soap slivers.

Boy was I impressed when I found this video showing how to make new designer hand soaps from stuff I already had on hand like soap slivers, olive oil, food coloring, oatmeal and oranges!


How To Turn Soap Slivers Into a New Bar Of Soap - These bloopers are hilarious

Sooooooo easy! I have some great cookie cutters that might work for molds and if I really wanted to get fancy, I could purchase some fancy soap molds to match the decor of my bathroom to make cute designer soaps. Or maybe for Christmas gifts (using new bars of plain soap instead of slivers of course!)

Of course, if you don't want to go to all that trouble of making these cute little soaps, you can always just put y our soap slivers in a sock (one of those mateless ones you can't wear anymore) and use it in the shower. Or another suggestion I found was to cut one leg from a pair of pantyhose that has a runner and put the slivers in that. Knot it and hang it from the shower. Not the most attractive way to do it, but it works.

I also made an amazing discovery - in all the recipes I found for shower gel, the main ingredient was unscented shampoo! The best recipe I found was on eHow.com

It uses equal parts of unscented shampoo and water, adding up to a quarter cup more or less water to get the consistency you like. The scent comes from inexpensive essential fragrance oils that are available in craft stores like A. C. Moore, JoAnns or Michaels. The other ingredient is regular table salt which acts as an exfoliating
ingredient.

I like citrus scents in my bath products so I used inexpensive citrus shampoo, added the water and salt and a few extra drops of citrus scented oil which made a great mix! However, if you have sensitive skin, you might want to purchase the unscented shampoo - even unscented baby shampoo.

Developing a frugal lifestyle is an adventure. Each day brings new discoveries - new things to try. Have fun on your adventure today!