Grandma’s Life Hacks
Join Stella to review and reinvent old fashioned home making skills for the 21st century.
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Description
Sometimes termed vintage or pioneer skills, this course teaches you tips and tricks from a past era. Serving as a way to negotiate contemporary global issues such as climate change and resource depletion, explore ideas and actions that your grandmother would have taken for granted. Become familiar with the ideas behind old world actions and become empowered in your domestic life. Learn ways to make your life easier, more affordable and that help you to live in a more self-sufficient and sustainable manner.
Course outline
- Benefits of cooking from scratch at home and preserving. Cheaper, fun, better for the environment. Explores the historical context (Great Depression era.) Types of preserves, basic principles of water bath preserving method explained. Food safety.
- Positive effects of growing a garden. Composting/ reduces food waste, can save money, a great hobby for mental and physical health, can serve as an empowering action. Know exactly what is in your food as it relates to GE and chemical use in mainstream horticultural practices. Can create community connections.
- Tea break
- Budgeting. Define what a budget is. State the positive results of not only having but sticking to a budget. Consider context of debt and savings in relation to personal/ household financial management. Discuss different considerations of wealth in society.
- Self-sufficiency verses community reliance.
- Fabric and Fibre Crafts. The value in knowing basic mending and sewing skills including quilting to extend longevity of clothing / domestic textiles which in turn saves money (personal financial gain) and saves the planet (mend and re-use values of green living.)
Expected learning objectives
- Be able to identify domestic food-based benefits as they relate to cooking, preserving and gardening.
- Have explored ideas around food politics and been introduced to issues such as GE, organic gardening and pesticide and artificial fertilizer use.
- Have explored ideas of wealth including evaluating ideas of community reliance and self-sufficiency. Within this be able to define what a budget is, why it is a good thing to have and how it help can create a sustainable future for you and your family.
- Name a range of useful needle and fibre crafts and their benefits for individual and community wellbeing.
Who should attend?
- People interested in green living and sustainable life-styling
- People who want a conceptual overview of areas they can make eco friendly changes to within their current lifestyles.
- People who want to reframe domestic work in their lives so it can play a more positive and proactive role in shaping the kind of life they want to lead.
- People who want to learn how to live in a more self-sufficient manner where they can meet more of their immediate needs within their individual families and local communities.
About Stella Peg Carruthers
Stella Peg Carruthers is passionate about sustainable living and green values. Areas of particular focus for her include food politics as well as low-waste-lifestyling. A writer and mixed media artist as well as an eco-lifestylist, she calls herself a radical homemaker. In this role she carries out domestic tasks to affect wider societal change. Stella believes small changes at a personal level can make a big difference on the global issues of our time. She sees eco-actions, no matter how small, as acting as an antidote to environmental apathy.
She teaches this course to show how through modernizing traditional domestic skills for the 21st century, people can use work in and around the home as a way towards a better future for both people and planet.
