Redneck?

My family is extremely large. 10 girls, 3 boys - different marriages, but every so often, we’d all be together at once. It was crowded. Since there were so many of us kids at any given time, it’s not a stretch to say my parents were…frugal, with their money. Hand-me-downs were the norm from bicycles to clothes. The only thing us kids didn’t share were shoes. Mainly because we were hell on them - shoes were better brakes than pushing backwards on a bicycle, apparently.

So I grew up making do with what I had until I saved up enough money to get what I wanted. It wasn’t easy, but it taught me how to be creative. I don’t know who said it, but “Necessity is the mother of invention” is a motto I have lived by.

Case in point: I love make up brushes. I do not know why. I don’t wear make up often. But I just can’t seem to pass up a make up brush on sale. The problem is, I don’t have a rack to dry them after washing when I do use them, so they didn’t get washed very often. I looked for racks in the stores. No one carried them. FOR YEARS, I have looked. Then, as money became tight, I just stopped using them and stopped worrying about cleaning them.

Let’s just say mistakes were made when I used them again. I had a bit of money, so I looked online to see if anyone invented one. LO! Amazon was filled with make up racks! I thought, “Sweet! I’m gonna get me one so I don’t have to worry about the rash from hell again.” Then I became discouraged again when I saw they were twenty dollars - during a time when a dozen eggs cost $5.50! Insanity!

I bought a couple of silicone mats (as I was baking like a crazy woman at the time) and had an old dollar store basket laying around. Snip, snip to the silicone mats and VOILA! Make up drying rack for five bucks! And I can still afford to get a dozen eggs!