EXTRAVAGANT ECONOMIES

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 24, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 12.

EXTRAVAGANT ECONOMIES.

Do you not know many homes where the supply of cooking utensils is so unnecessarily limited that a good deal of time is daily wasted, and much extra labor expended in preparing the meals, by having to wash one saucepan in which to cook a second dish that could as well have been cooked with the same fire, and watched at the same time as the first? Or a towel must do duty as strainer or colander, no account being made of the time required to wash the towel, nor of its becoming worn and stained? Or a silver spoon is used to stir or lift food for lack of iron or wooden ones? Why not afford such kettles and pans as are really needed for advantageous cooking, and "save" in some other department?

Have you ever seen some busy housewife hanging out clothes on a cold, windy day, taking off a clothes-pin each time a garment is added to the line, trying to make one pin hold two and sometimes three articles? Since good clothes-pins can be had for five cents per dozen, it seems rather far-fetched saving to stand on the icy ground double the time really required to shake out and hang the clothes, and run the risk of taking cold while so doing.

Could any arithmetician compute the number of hours spent, in rearing a family of half a dozen children, in untying "hard knots" in shoe-strings that are too short, or are so worn as to require tying in more than one place, and must again be untied before the little shoes can be taken off? Shoe-strings cost, it may be, ten cents per dozen pairs. Could not the hours which some mothers spend, during one year alone, in managing worn-out shoelacings in order to save a few cents, better be utilized in doing some sewing, or other useful work, by which enough could be earned to stock the family with shoe-strings for life?

Neat hemp carpets of neutral tints can be bought for thirty-five cents per yard. These are simple, durable, and easy to wash or clean; and yet, in farming districts, how many an over-worked wife and mother wearies hand and brain alike by the slow manufacture of rag carpets—heavy to handle, difficult to clean, and seldom of any esthetic value! The shocking mosaics made by cutting up large bits of colored calico and sewing them together into "blocks," to be joined together for quilts, are not yet unknown to American homes, although good, strong, white counter-panes can be bought as low as one or two dollars each. If fragments of calico that have accumulated are put together with little reference to size or shape, and then simply fastened over cotton batting to the cloth taken from a half-worn dress, possibly the labor required for this might be worth the while, especially if one of the family were reading aloud while others sewed. But to buy new cloth with intent to cut it up for the fun of sewing it together again, is certainly worse than foolish.—Christian Register.