Rediscovering the Joys of Traditional Homemaking

Fourteen years ago, I was a young newlywed who deeply wanted to be a great wife and future mom, but I had no idea where to start. I didn't know how to cook, clean, budget, or even grocery shop. To make matters worse, I got swept up in the hustle culture and the pressure to be a successful boss babe or mompreneur. While I did find a lot of success, it also left me feeling burnt out, exhausted, and craving something more. So I started going back to the basics, rediscovering the lost art of traditional homemaking. It felt like uncovering a hidden treasure, the simple, beautiful skills our grandmothers knew by heart. I began trading the frantic pace of modern life for something slower, more intentional, and surprisingly fulfilling. I was finding myself again, not in striving, but in sewing, baking, gardening, and creating a home filled with peace and beauty. Now, as a mom of four, I've seen how these old-fashioned skills have brought purpose into my everyday life, and how that joy has overflowed into my marriage, motherhood, and even my work. Today, I'm sharing a part of that journey with you, and a peek into the creative projects I'm working on this week. Welcome to my house. I have a fun week planned, and so I'm going to take you along through my week, and also talk about something that I'm very passionate about, and that is developing creative skills as a homemaker. I'm talking about gardening, sewing, and all those traditional old-fashioned skills that our great-grandmothers were most likely doing. I'm just mixing up a double batch of bread dough, and before I knead the dough, I'm just going to let it rest so the flour can absorb the liquid, and then I'll go back to it later, and I'm also feeding my starter. I don't plan to use the starter anymore today, but I'm feeding it, and I'm going to let it rise, and then I'll stick it in the fridge, and then I can use that the next time I need to bake something. I am also going to put some dinner in the slow cooker. I haven't made this recipe before, so I'm just trying it out. It seems to me that we now have a few generations of women who may have forgotten how to do these creative things at home, things like baking, cooking, sewing, gardening, and that sort of thing. Now, I grew up without any of these things being a noticeable part of my life. I do have amazing parents, and I had a wonderful childhood, but I had a very typical childhood. I went to public school, and I didn't learn about any of these things. When I got married, I was truly clueless. I didn't know how to cook, clean, maintain a home, a budget, you name it. I didn't even know how to grocery shop. I'll never forget the first meal I tried to make for my husband after we got married. I had a recipe I was excited to try, and I went to the grocery store, and I wandered the aisles for over an hour trying to figure out where things were, and I spent way too much money getting all these specific little things. I just didn't know. I didn't know the tricks, and by the time I was done, I realized I had a lot to learn, but I had a deep desire to be the best wife and future mom that I could be. I desired to have children and raise them well and just create a little heaven in our home. God blessed us with our first child, and she was born just a few days before our first anniversary. I was so excited to be a mom, but I still had a lot of personal growth to do. So here we were in a new town. My husband had his first real job out of college, and we were trying to make ends meet with a new baby and me staying at home. I had a lot of bad habits I needed to break—consumerism, wasting time watching TV, and scrolling online. But God is merciful, and He began the slow and gentle process of purifying me from these things. Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, and it was necessary for me that I learned how to budget and meal plan and trim back on my desires for the latest, prettiest thing. I'm so thankful for those years. It taught me so much. I learned to cook food and use up what we had to not waste anything. I was washing plastic bags, cloth diapering, and even line-drying clothes sometimes. I realized that every little bit counts. This led me to more creative endeavors. I started sewing little outfits and skirts and found that these things brought me so much joy. We eventually bought our first home, and even though we had barely any yard space, I started a little garden in the front yard. I was coming alive, blossoming, and discovering my God-given identity. I found out that I truly thrived on the challenge of cooking, making things beautiful with creative skills, gardening, and sewing my own clothes. In fact, I would much rather thrift something and sew it to alter it than to buy something new because I found so much satisfaction when I made it myself. I also just want to quickly share with you what I'm doing here. So I'm making sweet potato fries, and this is my new favorite way to make them. So I'm just seasoning the sweet potatoes with some, about a teaspoon of salt, about two tablespoons of avocado oil, and also a tablespoon of either potato starch or tapioca starch or corn starch, whatever you have on hand. And then mix that up really well, and then you can air fry it at 385 for about 20 minutes, and you're going to want to flip it halfway so that everything gets nice and crispy. I began to love the challenge of cooking meals for the week within a certain budget, and I tried to make those meals as special as possible. I woke up excited to take my kids to the library, sew something new, and cook a good meal. A note on this recipe, I ended up transferring the chicken from the slow cooker to the air fryer and just air frying it for about 10 minutes or so just to crisp up the bacon so that it wasn't mushy or anything like that. This is that amazing green rice that I cooked in my past freezer or meal prep video. I just thawed it out and then I spread it out onto a sheet pan and toasted it up I probably didn't see it that way completely at the time, as I wished we had more expendable income or more yard, and the list goes on. I think that we women, we have a desire for so much, and I think we are always desiring more, and honestly, I think that's how God made our heart. When you give a woman something, she wants to make it better. She wants to make it grow. She wants to make it fruitful. She wants to make it more beautiful. I think this is the beauty of God's design. I was lucky enough this week to have my sister helping me out in the garden, so I've been wanting to do a cattle panel trellis for a while, and I just had a hard time figuring out how I was going to get it to our yard. Thankfully, my brother has a truck, and he came to the rescue. Just keep going. Bye. Nice knowing you. Look at that. Isn't that cool? Do you have any more piece bars? See if you can put another right. Ready? These cattle panels are really awesome because each panel is only about $25, and you just fold them between T-posts, and you have an amazing trellis so that your plants can grow up instead of all over the ground, which is ideal for most plants. Wait, wait, wait. Stuck on the outside. Awesome. Perfect. So pretty. And they're going to grow, hopefully. Oh my God. They're going to grow up. These are the plants that I've been growing from seed, and now that the garden is fully prepared, I can get them in the ground. My sister helped me out, and we got it done pretty quickly. I'm so glad that I got my garden planted, and it was supposed to rain the rest of the week, so it was perfect timing. Now I'm milling some flour, and I'm going to make some delicious homemade tortillas. I'm making a double batch in my mixer here, and so I'm just putting all the dough together, and then I will knead it, and then let it sit and rise in that bowl for the rest of the day. These are sourdough tortillas, and the recipe is from the book, The Perfect Loaf, so you can look that up. I will leave a link in the description. This is my anko shroom mixer. It does a really great job at mixing together the dough and then gently kneading it. I've been really, really loving it so far. So yesterday, I cut out my fabric for a shirt I'm making. This is a free pattern from thefabricstore.com. It's called the Augustina Top. I've been needing some more tops, and I already had this fabric in my stash, so I was able to quickly sew it together. I love sewing because it's helped me to curate a minimalist capsule wardrobe of pieces of clothing that I find are timeless and perfectly suited to my style and my everyday life. I end up appreciating these pieces of clothing 1,000 times more than I would if I had bought it off of Amazon. I also love that I don't need to follow the whims of the fashion industry, but I can imagine and dream up something I'd like to figure out how to increase our income, and I had always wanted to really focus on my photography business and see if I could make it successful. So when my oldest kids went to school, I dove headfirst into learning all the things around marketing and building a business. I had been taking photos for so many years, but I just couldn't quite figure out the business side of it, and so I really dedicated myself to this, and before I knew it, I was a full-time working mother. I did this for six years, and my photography business was very successful. I am still doing that today, but around year six, I really hit a period of burnout. So for some reason, a lot of events collided for me that year, which led me feeling like I just needed a break from everything. We also had just moved into this house. We were leaving a pretty traumatic situation with an old neighbor, and I was really desperately in search of some healing and some rest. And by rest, I don't mean a rest from doing things. In fact, I wanted to do more. I wanted to pare back a little bit on my business and dive back into these things that brought me so much life. So I started baking bread again. I started a big garden, and I started sewing again, and all these things really brought me back to life, brought me so much healing, and just sparked a few minutes sewing here and maybe even finish my shirt tonight, which would be one of the fastest sewing projects I've ever done. All right, I'm done. Here's the shirt that I sewed. I sewed it in one day, so I'm very, very happy with it, and I'm planning to sew a skirt with it to complete this outfit. So I'll be doing that very soon, and you'll see what my vision was. But I think I can make a few more of these shirts and even like modify them and make a dress. You can kind of whatever. If you find a base pattern that works for you, and I think I found one. To finish this outfit, I'm making a simple skirt. I had this blue linen skirt in my head for a while, and so I ordered some blue linen from thefabricstore.com, and I chose the clow by a skirt pattern from Soften Studio, and it pretty much exactly matches the vision I had in mind for this outfit. I wanted something classy, simple, modest, beautiful, timeless that I could just wear around the house. I usually like to open a window when I sew if it's nice weather or listen to an audiobook or listen to the bible on audio, and all these things are very calming, and you just have a lot of time to think while you're sewing. One realization that I've had is that sewing and baking bread and things like that seem like they could be a waste of time, especially in a world that tells you that your worth is tied up in what you produce and how successful you are. But I actually think that it's not about what you produce, but what it produces in you and in your heart and in your soul, and that hopefully that will produce good fruit in your life, give you more peace, make you feel whole, and in turn help you to be a better person. When you raise it up like this... I'm about to fly! I hope this video has inspired you to learn some more old-fashioned traditional skills and hopefully find some joy in the process. Society may try to tell us that this is silly or make fun of us for wanting to sew our own clothes or spend more time at home, but I promise you that is the farthest thing from the truth. This is good work, this is holy work, and this is meaningful work. If God plants a desire in your heart, then you can trust that it is going to lead you to good places. Thank you so much for watching this video. I've left some links in the description for some resources of things I used or mentioned in the video. I would also really appreciate it if you liked and subscribed, and I will see you next time.