Cooking and Crafting

I struggled to decide where some of my crafting pictures would land, so while there is more cooking here than crafting, rest assured there has been plenty of both this spring!

My local mom's group allows me to make all of the beautiful Kroger magazine foods!  This deviled egg salad was beautiful and delicious!

For Emily's tennis banquet, we made the adorable banana dolphin fruit cups!  They weren't the most adorable, but way cuter in person!  We made some non-dolphin cups to use the other half of the banana.

This post is going to have some cleaning/projects too, because it felt like they belonged here.  Right after our manor party, I thought it was high time to defrost our refrigerator.  It kept freezing at the bottom, and one of the troubleshooting ideas was empty and defrost it.  I'd been prepping for that scenario for a few months, by using up extras from the basement, so that we would have room to move everything.  So that evening, between 'using up' the extra candles and our defrosting fridge, it looks like we lost power! lol.

Sadly, after a night of defrosting, and another night of allowing the machine to cool back down, we never hit our necessary temperatures.  Our freezer was working fine, but the fridge was not.  A repair guy was able to come out the day after I called, but his news was not good.  We had a broken fan and needed a 'software' update to the tune of $800.  sigh.

$800 is much cheaper than a comparable replacement for this refrigerator, so we set it up and the next week he came out to repair our broken machine.  It was a long week of running to the basement every time we needed milk, but I was thankful to have the redundancy!  I'm pleased to report that the fridge has been running like a champ!

I needed some tables from the shed for our manor party, but our shed looked like this.  Critters had gotten in and wreaked havoc on our shed insulation.  So, on family shed clean out day, we donned our PPE and emptied the shed, and pulled out all the insulation that we could!

It was gross, and we were gross, but we got it all out, and in decent time, with the seven of us working.  We're about a month out now, and I've been able to feed it into our weekly trash, but it is going to be a slow process!

The after is a much happier sight!

Online, I saw the cutest pompom garland idea!  You take dandelions that have closed, and thread them onto a length of string.

Then, like magic, the next day they are beautiful dandelion pompoms!  You are also supposed to spray them with hair spray once they seed, but I haven't done that yet, and just enjoy seeing them in the mud room each day!

Once we finally hit some warm weather, I made a charcuterie board to enjoy for dinner one night.  The flowers were the real inspiration.  To cut the center piece of the cheese out, I used the 'wrong end' of our icing tip!

One a different mom's group Tuesday, I had no time to collect groceries, and so used things I had around the house already.  The final box of spice cake muffins that I bought earlier in the year, some split carrots and Swiss cheese!

Billy drew me a second design for my earrings, so that I can give them to people, but the ones that he made for me get to be uniquely mine!  This picture doesn't do the filament justice; it's a very shiny yellow-gold color!

We got a beautiful thankyou card from Billy's aunt, and I just had to put it on display!  I found the perfect square frame at a rummage sale, and hung it using scrapbook photo corners, so the card is still readable, should someone ever feel the desire to read it!

When we got our mattress, the delivery workers accidentally broke our bannister support. = (  I bought a replacement months ago, and it only took us like 10 minutes once we actually did it.  But I'm happy to have a fully working bannister again!

Once the weather wasn't painful, I attempted to improve my car's aesthetic a bit, by using a uv-repair kit on the older headlamp. 

It was quite an improvement!  I also did der Uebungswagen and it came out awesome! What I failed to do was take a before and after picture.

And a picture of the newer assembly.  So, not perfect, but markedly better!

For the most part, I get grocery delivery, but I still go in person to Aldi occasionally, but always end up spending money on extra things, so delivery is my primary way of acquiring groceries.  Well, I found this dill pasta salad, and it sounded amazing, but my family is kind of picky, so I thought I'd make it for my mom's group!

As I was preparing to cook it, it had two ways to go about it, so I made one box each way!  Both were very good.

I found a sign board at a thrift store, and wanted to make a cute whiskey sign for Kristy & David's rec room.  The surface of this board was awful.  It kept pulling up, and I only had the super grip transfer paper.  It wasn't fun, but it did come out pretty!

Juliet was cracking an egg, but the inside layer didn't rip when she cracked it, and it looked really nifty!

 

Over the weekend, Grace and Juliet helped my mom pick mulberries as one of Sarah's neighbor's houses.  

Then on Sunday, after church, they made mulberry jam!

I'm thinking summer might be a little slower with respect to events, but I'm sure there are still plenty of cooking and crafting opportunities!

later days