I'm Freezin'!!!!

Ever since I was little, I've loved being in the kitchen cooking and baking to my heart's content.  As much as I love to cook and bake, my schedule now is not nearly what it was even five years ago.  Now I'm a wife, mother, and have a full-time job, and have decided that I enjoy being involved in my church and community as well!  So I will freely admit that the thought of coming home after a long day and standing in the kitchen for an hour or two just doesn't seem to appeal as much to me anymore.

Enter the "lazy" cook's response: FREEZER MEALS!

Seriously though, as much joy as I find in slicing and dicing and coming up with new "creations," I just don't have the kind of time that I would like to devote to that type of cooking anymore.

Over the last several months, I've seen a ton of posts about freezer cooking and have found many blogs and sites that have a plethora of recipes to choose from and (yay for me!) some even include the grocery list! :)

A while back I decided to try doing a round of freezer cooking on my own.  About 3 hours and $150 later, and I had enough meals to last my family a month!  As rewarding as it was to do on my own, I decided "the more the merrier!"  So I asked a couple of friends if they wanted to try it with me and last weekend we got together and made 12 new meals EACH!  We had a blast!

The table was barely big enough to hold all of our pillage!

 36 meals total!

Here we are in all of our freezer-cooking, eyes-glazed-over, STARVING glory!

We definitely learned a few things that we'll need to change for the next round, but overall I would say that the experience was a success!

Heather

Joining the Crowd...

Well, I did it...I opened a Teachers Pay Teachers account.  If you know me, you know I'm not usually one to go along with the crowd.  In fact, I'm pretty independent and tend to be kind of rebellious at times!  Anyway, I've been a member of TPT for a while, but really only used it for ideas and to look at freebies.  The more I looked around on it, though, the more I began to think, "I could totally do this!"

Now, if any of you knew me in my previous life as a Premier Designs Jeweler, you'd know that I'm not that outgoing when it comes to selling things.  I love to buy products from companies that I like, but when it comes to trying to talk anyone else into buying the product, I just clam up!  So...that means that this post is most definitely NOT about pushing my latest entrepreneurial venture.  I'm just really excited because for me, this process was not just about signing up for my own TPT store.

Toward the end of last year, I began looking for ideas to improve my classroom organization and kept coming across lots of cute ideas and designs for Teacher Notebooks, Sub Folders, etc.  While I was looking through what seemed like a million of them, I began to think about how to make my own?  Of course, I saw lots of ideas on TPT, but I'm cheap, so I wasn't really interested in buying them when I felt I could probably come up with something myself.  Eventually I ended up just googling until I found a great website with free digital papers that I could just download and use as backgrounds in a simple Word document.  These were great and I came up with some decent dividers-even created tabs to cut out and glue on the edges!

 

 

All of this was great, but then I decided I wanted to figure out how digital pages like this were created.  I mean, they just looked like one shape repeated over and over again, right?  I've had some mild experience using Adobe products, so how hard could it be? (Graphic designers, feel free to insert laugh here...)

Since you guys don't really care about all the juicy details...long story short...I found a free graphic design program online, downloaded it to my school computer, started making some designs and voila!  I will admit that I spent quite a while on my first creations as I was learning the program and finding out what worked and what didn't, but now I've got a pretty good system down so I'm excited to see what I come up with in the future!

Here's one page from the new document I just posted to my TPT store.  I literally created every inch of this, except for the font, from scratch.  I don't normally brag about anything, but I'm kinda proud of this because I figured it all out on my own...(remember that comment about being independent?)!

If you like this and want to see what's in the rest of the file, head on over to my TPT store and download the freebie!

Have a blessed day! :)