Pinterest Inspired Scarf

Hi all!
Here is a 30 min pinterest inspired project for you. It is super easy and I'm sure when Miss Priss sees my finished product she's going to want to make one also. If a 9 year old can do it, so can you!

Supplies:
Yarn.
Scissors
3 or 4 dining room chairs (depending on how long you want your scarf).
Seriously....thats it.

I didn't take any pictures of the set-up or the process so you'll have to bare with me here while I try to explain this.
I placed 3 chairs side by side. I wrapped the yarn once around the backs of the chairs and tied the ends together. I then continued to wrap the yarn 9 more times. That makes a total of 10 times around the chairs. I tied off the end and slid the loops off the chair backs.
I did this 2 more times creating 3 loops of yarn total.
I then put Lil E in his Bumbo and put the ends of the loops under him to hold them steady (this step is optional).
I braided the 3 bundles of yarn together.
Tied the ends together tightly.
DONE.

Yeah thats it.
heres the finished product:



I look so serious! haha

Fall Crafting

Hello Folks!
Long time I know. I've been busy with life and stuff...sue me.
Anyways, this week I decided to decorate my front porch. All my flowers died due to the weather and mostly becuase I didn't water them enough...or really at all. Plants and flowers come to my house to die, green thumb I do not have.
So looking out onto my front porch I find dead plants and dirt in pots and needless to say its not an attractive sight. So its time to spruce it up!
Have I mentioned I love Pinterest? Well I do, it's a wonderful invention for bored stay at home mommies.

Front Door:



Moss and foam pumpkins.
So Cute!

Other Wreaths I made:

Pumpkins:
I decided I didn"t like the chrome look of these so I spray painted it black and added some glitter. Miss Priss says it looks like dragon scales.





Decoupaged with Cloth I had
Laying around the house

For the rest of the porch I bought some foam pumpkins, gourds, and leaves from the dollar store

Found at the Dollar store
How cute are these srsly!?

Adventures in bread making

As we speak dinner is in the Crock-pot and It smells divine. A spicy roast Fiance loves. Round roast rubbed with dry italian dressing mix with a whole jar of pepperchini's and their juices, slow cooked until it falls apart. Place it on a roll or hoagie bun and dip it in the juice its made for an unbelievable "french dip."
Wait...
Where are the hoagie buns!? Oh no I forgot to buy some during the monthly shopping trip. Crap! Now what do i do?

The easy solution would be to go to the store and buy some but when do I ever do things the easy way? I'll make some...yes, that sounds like a fabulous idea! Only theres one little catch:

I've never made homemade bread before.

Ok I lied, I made banana bread once but that doesn't count. Making bread is intimidating, scary, and time consuming. I'd have to use Yeast. Yeast is the scary part. What if it doesn't activate? What if I kill it? What if my bread doesn't rise? What if the yeast explodes!?

Does yeast explode? I don't know but it was in the realm of possibility this morning when I went to the grocery store.

Upon arriving in the baking aisle and looking at the top self I see: Dry active yeast, instant yeast, rapid-rise yeast, quick-rise instant dry yeast, yeast in jars, yeast in tiny packages...

Initial response?
GAHHH!! RUN AWAY!!

Thank goodness I didn't do that. I think I would've received some pretty odd stares from Lil E and Miss Priss and the rest of the store would've wondered what drugs I was on.
After calmly consulting the recipe I bought Dry active yeast in the little packages (less commitment that way) and quick-rise instant dry yeast (just in case). I could've at this point gone to the bakery and bought some rolls or buns or french bread as back-up in case this little adventure into baking failed but I did not. I live on the wild side like that. I have no back-up plan so this HAS TO WORK.

I followed the directions, set it out to rise, and crossed my fingers I didn't mess up the yeast part because everything else was stupidly easy up to that point. After an hour (and to my complete astonishment) it had doubled in size. I seriously wanted to jump up and down yelling "I did it, I did it!" WOO!
Now to form loaves or buns or rolls or whatever and...
Let it rise for another 40 min.
What!? You've got to be kidding me. This is more stress then this mamma can take. Ok, I can so totally do this. Cross fingers, pray to the kitchen gods (s), and wait...

While we wait why don't I show you a little project I did 2 weeks ago

That, my friends is a can of formula. Ok, it WAS a can of formula. I have a ton of these things floating around due to Lil E's growing appetite so I decided to recycle one of them into a coffee holder. I pulled out some craft paper and my handy-dandy Modge Podge and voila! Instant makeover. Do you have these tubs lying around too? What did you do with yours? I need some crafty ideas to transform these into something spectacular.
....
ok time to check on the bread.
O.M.G It's like magic. My mini loaves of bread have once again doubled in size (mainly width). Baking bread is kinda cool. Chemistry can be fun! Now time to bake these suckers and hope they don't turn out dense or hard as a rock or doughy in the center. Or God forbid after all this work (when I say work, I mean sitting around drinking coffee and blogging) I burn them!
Praying to the kitchen gods again.

25 minuets later we have SUCCESS! I have officially made bread. Ok, well, technically I made Sandwich rolls but whatever. They aren't perfect but I'd say today was a successful day.

Drowning in Cherries

My mother has a giant cherry tree in her back yard and this year (as with most years) they have more cherries then they know what to do with. I took some off their hands thinking I'd make a pie or 2. I received 2 grocery bags full.

That's a crap ton of cherries if you didn't know.

Thought to myself what can I do to save these delicious red jewels because they weren't going to last long enough for our house to devour them. I came up with raisins.
Ok well not raisins but dried cherries.

I don't own a dehydrating machine so I thought I'd do it the old fashioned way and dry them in the oven (opposed to the old old fashioned way of drying them in the sun).
After 7 hours they were finally ready.

and they taste AH-mazing!

So I did the smart thing and borrowed my mother's food dehydrator (which I believe is older then I am BTW) and made a large batch.

clean and cut cherries

170 is the lowest my oven goes.

This is a sexy retro beast!

7 hours later we have yummy cherry raisins

And with my newly made dried cherries I made homemade granola. I substituted the British Golden Syrup with plain maple syrup and added the dried cherries. They taste super yummy.

The Culinary Master (ok not so much)

This week I've been thinking a lot about food and how to make EASY meals for my family on a budget. I scoured the Internet (and the oh-so-handy Epicurious app for my Kindle) and came across a real gem. Fiance is known for loving (seriously LOVING) hot wings but they are very messy to make and eat and the battering and frying of chicken parts isn't all that healthy. What I stumbled across was Buffalo Chicken meatballs. PERFECT for a packed work lunch, appetizer, or quick snack. Cook these puppies up and refrigerate (or freeze) until ready to eat then just pop them in the microwave. They smell pretty dang delicious but I'm not a fan of hot sauce. Fiance and Miss Priss give them an enthusiastic 2 thumbs up.



My next cooking experiment is dinner this week. I'm making Pork Carnitas. I got an extra large pork shoulder for this recipe so I can freeze the leftovers (assuming Fiance and Miss Priss don't go all out and devour the whole thing) to use as the stuffing for enchiladas later in the month. Killing 2 birds with 1 stone is a super time saver and I'm all about making things easier in the long run.

Moss Terrarium for $0

When baby sleeps, mama plays. I *should* be folding laundry and doing the dishes but housework is boring so I decided to make a little terrarium instead. A good friend of mine (Linky to her blog) bought Miss Priss a terrarium for Christmas this year and it seemed like a fun little project to undertake. I had left over potting soil in the garage from  planting our spring vegetable garden, there were a couple of jars sitting around collecting dust in my kitchen cabinet, I used rocks from our driveway, and the moss was growing under a shrub in the backyard. Oh and I have a ton of polymer clay to make little mushrooms to decorate with so this project literally cost me nothing...$0.

Mossy in my flower bed

So first things first: clean your jar(s). A little soap and water to knock all the dust off.
2. Go outside and put some rocks or gravel at the bottom of your jar. This will help with drainage and prevent mold from building up.
3. put some potting soil or dirt in your jar.
4. add moss and arrange so it looks pretty. At this point you can plant a tiny little shade plant in your terrarium if you want to. I just stuck with the moss.
5. put a little water in your jar and wait for it to soak in. You want your rocks in the bottom to be wet.
6. Add the details. I made some mushrooms out of polymer clay. They were super simple to make. I put a pin in the bottom before I baked them so I'd have a little spike to poke my mushroom down into the moss.

*NOTE*

do not fill your jar too full with soil. I totally failed on my first one. I had no room to add "stuff" because I filled my little jar too full. My second attempt was with a mason jar so it was bigger and the project was more successful.

When I pulled up the moss I left some of the bark
attached. It give it more character

You can also do this project with fake moss and dirt. Here a couple of examples.

The lull between projects

I've finished some projects this past week but I'm not ready to publish them yet so I thought I'd share with you one of my passions
painting.
One of my fondest memories growing up was going to my grandmas house and watching her paint. She paints with oils, draws with pencil, charcoal and pastels, and she even used to own a ceramic shop. She is a true artist. I remember walking with my sisters and cousins to her ceramic shop and collecting the broken or discarded pieces of clay and using them as chalk on the sidewalk outside her store. My sisters and I used to paint a ceramic ornament to put our school picture in each year for the Christmas tree (one day I'm hoping to steal these little treasures from my mother for my own tree).

When I was about 10yrs old or so my grandmother decided to give my little sister, my cousin, and I a few painting lessons and I believe it was at this moment my view on art changed drastically. I developed a whole new respect for grandma because being an artist was hard...
like REALLY hard.
I learned all things worth doing are difficult and the pride in the outcome is worth all the frustration and struggle.

This is my first painting...ever (notice the sloppy 4th grader cursive handwriting). I remember Grandma holding my hand in hers and guiding my brush strokes until I got it just right. She taught me how to hold a paint brush correctly and her voice still echos in my brain to this day when I pick up a brush: "stop holding it like a pencil Missy."

This is the second painting I did. I was 11 or 12 yrs old at the time (notice I gave up on the cursive). There are far less "examples" and far more of my own brush strokes by now and in just a few lessons my ability to paint leaves improved drastically. My cherries however, look like apples. Perspective...something I still struggle with to this day.

By the time I was 14 or 15 I was on my own. Grandma gave me the basic skills to do the job and it was all on me to use my creativity and knowledge to create a masterpiece. I chose a purple rose. This is the painting I am the most proud of. This is the first piece of art I did 100% on my own. Grandma was always there to offer some guidance but all brush strokes belonged to me. I entered this into the fair and won first place. It was a very happy moment.

I did one more painting when I was a teenager and then packed up my brushes, paint, and creativity to focus on high school and choir and family and life.

After a long hiatus I started up again when I was 22yrs old. After completing my first painting in what seemed like an eternity I realized I forgot to apply 90% of what grandma taught me. 

It was a horrible piece of artwork

Back to square one.

After re-teaching myself much of what I was taught 10 years prior (and a few "I don't know what I'm doing" pleas to Grandma) I finally got it down.

Please excuse the poor photo quality on some of these (please note these are NOT in chronological order):

Sunset

Midnight at the park

Fjord



Study

My first painting using acrylics

Hibiscus

coffee beans.

Brooklyn Bridge experiment
using Gesso

Summer Stream

Morning Sky

I've learned that there is beauty in everything...its all around us. Its hard to see at times because our view is shaddowed, darkened, and narrowed by lifes unexpected trials and tribulations. By opening our eyes and finding the right collor pallet, the beauty around us shines through even the darkest of times.

I stopped painting again when I got pregnant with Lil E. Apparently inhaling Oil paints and paint thinner is bad for fetal development (pout). Now that Lil E is here I have a list of painting projects that will last me for years. I better get started before I forget how to paint again :)