Saturday: Projects

As a wife and mother, you may find enough to do at home without any extra hobbies but, in the past, what are now considered hobbies were essential household crafts. Certainly, my mother and mother-in-law both made their own and their children's clothes by sewing or knitting. I've done my fair share of both too, although I am far less skilled than they were. One of my grandmothers kept chickens and grew all her own vegetables. The other, who lived in a city, still had a patch of garden and crocheted beautiful clothes for her grandchildren.

All women were taught to cook, sew, knit, take care of babies, clean their homes etc at school when I was a child, even in our very modern, feminist, academic girls' high school, where all the girls were expected to go on to university. All boys were taught 'handicrafts', which included knitting, in primary school too!

Once, such things were an important way of making the household budget stretch further. Perhaps now, they are just a great way to fold love into a handmade gift. It would be sad to think that such skills were on their way to being lost altogether.

As you think about your work at home, is there a skill you wish you had? You could ask an older woman to teach you.

One skill I don't remember being taught at school was gardening. This strikes me as a little odd. Most people in the UK live in homes with gardens. Even the most brown-fingered of us have a lawn, a couple of flower borders, some plants in pots. If you need to live frugally, then keeping a vegetable patch or having an allotment is vital.

This June, I have masses of raspberries and strawberries coming into the kitchen every day, for the outlay or a few pounds several years ago and very little effort. I have a variety of tomato plants just flowering, some runner beans winding their way up canes, a couple of peppers, an aubergine plant and several purple sprouting broccoli plants for next spring's table.

However, he most cost-effective plants to grow at home are herbs. There are herbs which will keep providing you with what you need year after year, with almost no tending: marjoram, mint, sage, lemon verbena, rosemary, chives and thyme are my favourites. Barely a day goes by when I don't use one of them.

Each week, we'll have posts about various household crafts and projects. Do join us, Dear Daughter.

Mimi is a wife to Jamie, mother to two grown up children, a mother-in-law and a grandmother to a darling little grand-daughter. She home-educated her children and now teaches exam subjects to groups of home-educated children. She's a Worship Leader in her church and has a passion for helping women raise children to adulthood with a strong faith in the Lord Jesus.