Creating On a Budget; Living Simple!

Creating On a Budget; Living Simple!
Contributed by “Dakota”

Being rich is a state of mind, mostly. I’ve never had a lot of money, but I’ve enjoyed the riches of others through my culinary career. I have work, good health, love, friends, live among nature, and a spiritual path. To me that’s riches. I’ve never felt poor.

We talked about gman’s office in the last article, he made me a work desk too, so now we call the office the hobby room. We are making our hand made Christmas gifts as most years we do anyways. One of my favorite pastimes is scouting for building materials for these projects. Commercial building sites have lots of brick, boards, nails etc. Left without use. Their trash is our gold!

While building the office, we inherited a pallet of stone tile from a construction cleaning job, we restored an old stove that was sitting in the yard as a planter box, got a tip on cedar boards discarded from a fencing lumber yard. We got the whole inside walls for fifty dollars plus tons of kindling as a bonus! This is what we call self-sufficiency and living within financial means and still accomplishing a dream. Here are some of our projects.

Birdhouses, Bathhouses, stick ‘twig wreaths, emu egg art, candles, candle-holders, and walking sticks. From the yard there are dried flower arrangements, smudge sticks from lavender and sage. The gardens provide fresh basil for pesto’s and dried herbs for flavored cooking oils. The fruit bushes provide gooseberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and strawberries for jams. In upcoming articles I’ll share recipes for fruit glazes for game and wild birds.

The item I’d like to share on today is the walking stick I made for gman. First you hike to find a really cool stick one with an interesting crook in it. I designed this with survival aspects added to it sort like the para-cord bracelets.

There is orange hunting ribbon wrapped around for color as well as using to mark trails if lost. There is bailing wire that could be used for securing a bivwack, make a rotisserie for small animals over campfire, a clothes line, hanging food up in trees, or a fishing line. There’s extra hemp twine and shoelaces wrapped around stick which could be used for trussing game a clothes line, tying on bandages or splints, I’m a mystic so there’s feathers for power energy, and the Indians considered blue as protection so I added blue beads. My walking stick is a simple, naturally curved laced white birch with a dappled pea- hen feather with blue beads and ribbon. G-Man calls me the stick hoarder because I won’t let him throw any away during fire-wood cutting season. So that’s how we enjoy our time together and save money and get our art fix.

— Dakota; Living simple in the mountains!