The Fight against Fat

I am all for being healthy. I know that the right way to eat is to have plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables, some whole grains, and go sparingly on the meats. Of course I want to get in my cute smaller clothes after pregnancy, but here it is a whole year later, and I am still stuck in my "fat" clothes. The problem I find, is that I still love sugar, flour, oil and I don't just love it a little, I love it a lot. Give me an inch and I take the yard. So what can be done. I have looked at some of the websites that tout their special secrets to get rid of the "belly fat." If it isn't the acai berry scam then it is just another book that promises the perfect way for you to eat and exercise to lose weight. That is just it, I ALREADY KNOW how to eat and exercise to lose weight! I just have to DO IT! I have to stop making lemon bars, and cheesecake brownies, but even if I stop, my husband makes them. So how do I get rid of the mentality of eating sweets? Well before when I lost weight, I was so focused on my goal and the success was so fast that it was effortless to pass up the ice cream and eat a peach instead. It was easy to eat just the right amount of carbs and meat and load up on the veggies.

I get really frustrated when I see the other moms around me and they all started their pregnancies at size 4 or 6 and ended up in size 12, and my goal is to get to size 12. I know some of them have already lost their pregnancy weight too. Usually on Sunday I have more time to think, (probably because my husband is home to help with the kids) and I usually resolve in the shower that I will make time to exercise and say no to the extra sweets. Then Monday comes, and I get started. Then Tuesday comes and I am tired, but it is my rest day so it is okay right? Then Wednesday comes, and I get too busy, so I tell my self that Friday I can make up for Wednesday. But something always comes up and Saturday just won't work, here a week has past I have one day of exercise to show for it. Forget about what I ate anyway!

This time I have made a change in my mindset. The problem I found before was that I didn't make the time for exercise equal to the gym. I would say that I wanted to exercise on a given day, but I didn't set aside time for it. If something came up, I would say that I would exercise later, and never get around to it. When I had a gym membership, someone was taking care of my child while I was working out. I had 2 hours to do cardio, weight training and get a shower. I didn't have to deal with a phone usually, so my exercise time was planned and uninterrupted. But at home, I have no set schedule. I don't have a set plan for my days, excepting drop off and pick up for school and the baby's nap time. Even her nap times are adjustable. So my goal now is to plan my exercise time like I would plan a work schedule. I will plan other things around it and only miss it for emergencies or sick days.

I will report back in a month to let you know if it is working for me.

Multi-Level-Marketing: Scam or Legitimate Business?

I have done research on Multi-Level-Marketing Businesses (MLM) also known as Direct Sales Businesses. On the one hand, it sounds like a great opportunity, a company needs to sell a product and they are willing to trust you to represent them and sell it to friends, family and neighbors and pay you a moderate fee. For a reuseble product, one that gets used up like cleaning supplies or make-up it makes sense that the people you sell to would come back for more and you could build a clientele base and earn a regular income. A simalar business model is a hairdresser or manicurest. The drawback that I have found with MLM's, and they all seem to have this in common, the focus is on selling the job instead of the product. What I mean is that you decide you like the product enough that you think you could sell it. You decide to sign up for the business and then you are told that for every person you sign up to become, not a client, but a business owner like yourself, you will recieve more money and incentives. So you think, okay I will sign up my friends, but then your friends sign up their friends, and they aren't buying the product for themselves, but to sell it to the market, except that they want to sign up more workers, and not clients. It won't take very long for all the would-be clients to become would-be sellers with no one left to buy the product for the retail price. That is called Market Saturation. Also Pyramid Scheme. So, when you get invited to your next party that is going to sell a product to you and they switch from selling the product to selling you a job, you have been warned.

Here is an example of what a real business model should look like. I started a Lemonade Stand in my front yard with my son. The goal was to keep the school kids walking by my house to stop leaving their trash in my yard and give my son an opportunity to earn some spending money. I had no idea how much money we would make until I did the math. First I created a product. I made my favorite chocolate chip cookies. We took those outside and offered the big ones for 50 cents, the medium size for 25 cents and the small for 15 cents. We got seven dollars the first day and couple requests for lemonade. The second day we made 12 dollars and got more requests for lemonade. Thus far I did not know how much I was spending to make the cookies, but I decided to find out. My tree was not in season so I got a mix from Costco for 5 dollars and the smallest cups for about 10 dollars. We sold the lemonade for 25 cents a cup and changed the price of the cookies to 25 cents (I was getting the sizes more uniform). Also I cut a few of the cookies into quarter sized pieces and my son handed out free samples. We doubled our sales and made about 10 to 20 dollars a day. Of course we were getting generous people but we also had plenty of kids walking by our stand.

Now I will tell you how I knew what our profits were. I checked the prices of all the items we were buying and figured out how much each ingredient cost individually. For a large batch of cookies I was spending about 10 dollars. I made the cookies fairly large and with the free samples, we were earning about 7 cents per a cookie sold. The lemonade on the other hand cost so much less because I was adding a mix to cold water. I was going through about 4 gallons per a day so I would freeze them overnight and let them start melting a couple hours before we set up shop. It cost about 3 cents per cup to make the lemonade so I was getting a 22 cent profit. At the end of each selling day (we would sell to the kids walking home from school and were outside for about an hour or two) I would count up the money and pay for the cookie batch and the lemonade and then we would pull out 10 percent of the profit to pay our tithing money and I gave an equal amount to my son to keep in his bank for spending on anything he wanted. The 80 percent leftover was put into a saving fund. First for a bicycle, then for spending on birthday presents and Christmas presents. In a two month period we had made 200 dollars. All told, we had a great operation.

Why couldn't I just do this every day, why not now? Well for one thing my son is in school for the full day now so I can't get him home early enough to catch the rush. Part of my plan was that we set up while the parents were walking to the elementary school so they saw us on the way, could try a free sample and decide if they wanted to spend some quarters after they picked up their children. Secondly, the set up is a box, the cookies and lemonade, two chairs, (I do not leave my child unattended!) and an umbrella in a bucket full of rocks to give us shade. It is a lot of back and forth and that bucket is very heavy. At the time I was also in my third trimester of pregnancy. Now that I have a baby it is a lot harder to find time to bake a few dozen cookies. Also, we can't have the same consistency as before. I found that selling on day one was not as lucrative as the second consecutive day. Ususally, I had many people (especially the high school kids) say that they would bring money the next day to buy, and if we were there, they kept their promise.

So in my micro-cosmic business model, we had a real product, we had a real market, with real costumers that turned into clientele. (I literally had the same people come and spend 5 dollars on cookies each day.) The profits were real. The business paid for the supplies. The labor got ten percent of the profits. Ten percent was donated to a good cause (God) and the remaining 80 percent was held back to support the laborers for big bonuses (the bike, various other presents). This is how a real home based business should work. The next summer I had other moms asking around for work for their sons. I offered to hire them to help work our business. I thought, it would be worth it to share half the profits so I could just sit in the house and make the cookies and someone else could heft that bucket of rocks for me. Unfortunately, those other moms thought they would be not earning enough or that it would take business/money away from my son. Hey 5 dollars is still better than zero, I said, I couldn't do it everyday because I was getting tired, and it was really hard to take care of the baby when she was awake and help my son sell cookies. One mom said she asked her son if he would do it and he flat out said no. Even though we were really earning money (up to 50 dollars a week) he didn't want to do it.

So my question is how, can these Multi-level Marketing businesses sell their business to other people and still make profits, when they have no clientele, just business owners? It is because the business owners are paying the company more to be a part of the company than to be customers! This is why the MLM wants their employees to sell the job and not the product. They get paid more by their employees than their consumers. If you pay attention to the success stories you hear that they make a ton of money and support their family and have a lot of incentives from the company. What they don't tell you is how to succeed to their level until after they have sold the job to you. Why? Because to succeed in an MLM you sell the job and not the product!

So far, I have noticed the same lies about any con. You can be super rich...right now...without doing anything (hardly any work). The truth is "You can be super rich, right now, by changing your perspective." Look at anyone who is suffering and in absolute poverty, no food, no clothes, no warm place to sleep, and you will feel enormously rich. You can be even wealthier, in years to come, by spending less than you earn, working hard and saving your money and staying out of debt. That is the truth. But the beginning of any sale is dissatisfaction. You need greed to make a sell. Especially a sale where the consumer gets nothing for their money.

The typical MLM begins with the same sort of lie. You can become rich selling a product for us and it doesn't take very much work because we already have a simple technique for you to sell it. Then they show you success stories which are people who got really good at selling the job to people like you and me. As skeptical as I am I really thought there were good MLM's out there. I still haven't found one. If you google scam with any popular MLM company name you will find out from the honest people like me, who tried to sell the product and not the job, that you can't make money in the business unless you sell the job. Unfortunately, it is not obvious to everyone why they shouldn't sell the job, so I will use my business model to demonstrate why this should not work.

So here is my lemonade stand. A customer approaches to buy lemonade for 25 cents. I tell them, you can buy a gallon from me and sell it to other customers from your house. I will sell you a gallon and the cups for 5 dollars and you can sell it for 25 cents just like me. He says okay and I hand him the supplies. He goes to his house next door to mine. Later he comes back with 2 friends who want to sell lemonade just like me. I sell them each another gallon and cups and they go back to their houses all on the same street. Now remember before, I said that I typically sold 4 gallons in a day. Now I have one left. Those other guys paid me 15 dollars, and I just have to sell my one gallon and direct other customers to them. Instead they each bring me 2 more people who want to set up shop on the same street. Do you see the problem yet? If we are all selling lemonade on the same street and each person just wants to buy a gallon from me, I will make a ton of money and they will make none because all the customers are becoming salespeople.

I hope this simple model has opened your eyes to the con market. I have had many arguments with these sales people. They are really persistent so don't give in. You just tell them no, you are not interested in their business. Remember the truth. Earning money is hard work. It takes time and effort. If getting a million dollars was easy everyone would have a million dollars. Also, when someone tries to sell you dissatisfaction, remember your blessings.

Soap Dispenser Cover

Let It Snow!

(So what if I did this in 2009 and I am finally finishing and posting it in January of 2011. Better late than never right?)

So after a fun Thanksgiving, what am I in the mood for? Christmas Decorating of course! Last year I was pretty tired as we were expecting our second bundle of joy and I focused mainly on displays in our curio cabinet and the living room. I felt like Christmas ended in our hallway though and determined to extend the decorating to more areas the next year. So this year I started thinking about the bathroom. I had plenty of random decorations that I had been gifted and as I noticed a snow man theme coming out of them I felt a desire to make my soap dispenser match. So out came the christmas fabrics from quilts and tree skirts past.

I decided to use the blue with the snowflake pattern. For the finish I made a bow with a center and six sides out of a white sheer wired ribbon. I looked online to see who else had ever suggested such a brilliant idea before and the only one I found was crocheted. So now you too can copy my idea. Here is the tutorial. I chose this method for a more fitted look, but I can probably come up with an easier one that requires no sewing at all. (Maybe for Valentines day)

Materials used for this project: Fabric, elastic band, thread, sewing machine, safety pin, and ribbon held in place with a single straight pin.

I just used a rough measurement but if you want a better ruffle add a little more fabric to the top. (The triangle you see is what I decided to add on, I could have made it extend farther for more ruffle.) I used the piece of paper to varify the approximate height and circumfrence needed.

I folded the fabric over and created a casing for the elastic. The elastic is thin so I only needed about a quarter inch to slide it through. I use a safety pin to help slide the elastic through and then I pinned the ends in place so I could sew down the side. Turn it inside out and cover your soap dispenser!

I added the ribbon as an extra touch. You can make a bow by starting with the center loop. Then make your next loop angled so it comes back underneath and repeat on the other sides. You can make a bow as big as you like. I just did the six loops arranged around the center one to keep it simple and small--like a snowflake.

I measured the right amount of elastic by wrapping the elastic around and holding it without stretching it.

The fabric is longer than the elastic so it will gather. If you don't have elastic you could probably use a simple ribbon but you would want it to be much longer than the fabric and make a bow. (Maybe I will do that for the Valentine version)

To slide the elastic through you fix a safety pin on one end and start sliding the safety pin through. When the tail of your elastic gets to the end you started on make sure you fix it in place so it stops sliding through.

Now that I have the elastic in place I pin together sides with the wrong side of the fabric out. (That way my seam is on the inside of the fabric)

Add a little hand sewing to hide the extra flap of fabric.

Presto! Now you have a soap dispenser to match your decorations for the holiday season.

Make a bow could be another tutorial, but I will describe it here and see if that helps. You start with the center loop. Then curve your next loop so it makes a point on one side, make sure the ribbon crosses back under the center loop. Each time you will make three points as you guide the ribbon around. Just continue adding pointed loops until you like the size of your bow. I used a straight pin to fix this bow in place because I didn't need to make it permanent. A stapler works as well.

My Resume

So you may be wondering about my qualifications. What have I done before and what are my plans for the future? I have taken a couple pictures of examples of my work.

1998-1999 During my Senior year at Rancho Bernardo Highschool I was in Advanced Women's Ensemble, Advanced Art and Advance Placement English. To be honest, I did not realize my full potential in any of these subjects in High School, but my professors succeeded in stirring my desire to do so.

(The Sunflowers and the Girl are scratchboards that I made in Highschool--I was lucky to get them back!)

1999-2001 While attending Palomar College and focusing on my GED I enjoyed taking Critical writing classes and a Chambersingers course. I also started working on my first big quilting project for my brother and his new wife for a Christmas present. It took me a while to finish since I was a novice. I learned most of my sewing skills from my mother and my friend, but I never took a formal class so it was all by trial and error.

2001-2006 I sang and took a turn directing in my local church choir. Under the guidance of my former roommate and close friend who has a degree in sewing design, I created renaissance costumes for my husband and I to wear to the festivals and for halloween. I also created a quilt of my own design for my first child. The curtains inspired the design. I made the pillows this year to match. I even got the courage to alter a dress pattern for a pregnant friend who would be in a wedding party. (I wish I had a picture of that one she looked gorgeous!) I also got daring enough to design a dress using another dress as my pattern. (Not as easy as using a paper pattern, but possible.)

At this time in my life I was working full time from home as an Apartment Manager. So I did all these things in my spare time (to take my mind off of work since I lived there). My writing skills were used to create newsletters for the apartments and doing a lot of paperwork. I did finish my AA degree in Language Arts by the time my son was 3.

(I will not take credit for the child costume since we bought that at DisneyLand)

2007-2009 We bought a house and started working on it. I have some pictures of what I did--finishing furniture and redesigning a kitchen. Also, since I quit working when I moved I got pregnant (again) and worked on living on a single income. Saving money is definitely more challenging than earning it. My motivation to create rather than spend has increased tenfold, hence this blog. In upcoming posts I plan to show some of the things I have created in the past couple years and then I will be more thoughtful about photo documenting future creations for blogging. Expect to see some clothes I have made for myself, some furniture, and maybe I will even learn how to upload music for your listening pleasure. An ultimate goal of mine for this blog is to create traffic through prize drawings. Since the scratchboards are a more unique talent that I have developed I plan to create some for giving away. I may even take suggestions for subjects to turn into a scratchboard.

Shabby Apple Dare to Design Lawn Frock GIVEAWAY!!!!

Shabby Apple Dare to Design Lawn Frock GIVEAWAY!!!!

The Beginning

Well, I finally have enough reasons to begin blogging. My husband is starting a blog, my grandmother has been asking me about blogging for a while and a close friend is getting a blog as a birthday present and the only way I can comment is to create a blog account...so it begins.

What do I intend to use this blog for? I already have email and facebook to keep in touch with friends and family. So I named it the creative cache. This is because I have many hobbies. I am artistically inclined in several mediums and therefore I feel it would be appropriate to have a place to share my talents or to "stash" them until I am ready to fully "cash in" on them. (Note the pun since cache is pronounced "cash".) Could I ever make money from my ideas? Maybe. I write, I draw and paint, I sew, and I sing. I also have creative friends. This blog may be a possible outlet to share their talents as well. So I plan to post pictures of my creations and stories I have created.

Enjoy.