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

Cooking and Crafting

The holidays are filled with events and food and expectations and schedules, but spreading a bit of cheer as our days dwindle to a mere 10 hours of sunlight feels imperative!

I made these cheesy pull apart bites a couple of times, for William's robotics, my mom's meeting, and for new year's!  They went over pretty well each time, and the peppers helped balance the platter, I thought! 

These cracker penguins were a Kroger magazine recipe.  They were so cute!!! 

Despite all of my other children requesting seasonal things, Alice's big request was for me to make egg fried rice, in the middle of the day, to offer to her history class.  They had been researching cultures, and the teacher said that they could bring in themed food one day, which turned out to be a snow day, so this was a week delayed.  Alice did all of the prep work, so I just had to make it and deliver it, though that was a cold job!

My mom signed up to bring cookies for cookie time, and picked some fancy recipes for her and the girls to make!

As the new year approached, we changed our Christmas star decoration into New Year's star decoration.

I finally remembered to not remove the random sugary items in my cart, so that Alice could make her donut snowmen!

I tired my hand at woodburning, but didn't love either result.  

Grace made molly a tiny handkerchief from some scrap fabric and a sticker.

Billy's exceptionally fancy, interactive birthday card from Juliet.

Billy did the CAD work on some adorable charms to give to Kristy for her birthday!  The goat was a shelf decoration that he was able to resize and make into a charm.  The Olmsted Homestead he had to modify a few times before we got a working product.

Both of them came out so cute, and I was so happy to present them to her when we went out for coffee!

Once we tore down the murder mystery party decorations and Billy opened his birthday cards, I broke out the Valentine's boxes to fill for my dear ones.  Refilling them is cheaper than buying new, and I get to pick the candies!

Since I could smell the artificial fruit flavors coming off of the air heads, I took those out and wrapped them up to keep the chocolate from being tainted.  I did have to put a cardboard placeholder, to keep the chocolates from sliding around.  Having the next holiday ready to go, even though it's a month early, makes me very happy!

Another Kroger magazine recipe was to cut a tortilla into snowflakes and bake it.  We added some cinnamon sugar, which made it tasty, but the addition of honey took it to another level!

My cooler bag handle ripped off one day, when I was just getting out the Aldi returnable!!! I was quite sad, but thought I could probably repair it.  It seems to be pretty sturdy at the moment, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time before the next handle goes. The bags are around $30 on amazon, and while I would wait to find one second hand, I'm happy that I get to keep my Texas bag a little longer!

Sometimes the organizational hacks online are brilliant, and one that I saw for organizing seeds looked awesome!  I found an old photo album for about $1.50 at the thrift store, and while it was bigger than I liked, it did have flowers on the cover!  It absolutely transformed my garden basket in the mud room, and now the seeds will be so much easier to find!!! 10/10 would recommend.

When my mom fell and broke her wrist on New Year's eve, they had to cut her out of her Alaska sweatshirt.  This saddened her enough that she cut the applique off  'to use for something.' So, at my next outing at the thrift shop, I tracked down a sweatshirt in her size whose color would complement the navy blue of the original swatch.

Once I trimmed and applied the cut decoration, it looked like someone had cut out a piece of sweatshirt, and put it on a new sweatshirt.  Which is exactly what I was doing, but in order to make it look more intentional, I cut a piece of handkerchief fabric that I had, to allow it to fray and act as a border.  I was super pleased with how it came out, but only secured it with a single line of stitching, in case my mom doesn't like it, or the sweatshirt is the wrong size.  When the single stitch fails, I can go back around and secure it in place a second time, with a more robust stitch.

I washed it after the application, to start the fraying process, but it's going to be stringy for a few washes.

Since my mom is currently (1-19-26) in Texas and hasn't seen this yet, I'm going to schedule this to post sometime next week. = )  Grace has a whole package planned to surprise her with it!

It's been a nice season of creation, and in this new year, I'm happy to already have some completed projects under our belts!  Here's to a crafty new year!

later days

Crafts and Food Creations

I present a collection of creations from the past few months.

Grace and Juliet's friend brough a Nutella uncrustable to school, so they were making some of their own!

Alice's sandals were looking a little worse for the wear, so she painted them to give them new life.  She used acrylic paint, and didn't use any sort of finishing product, so they've slowly been flaking off.  I felt super lucky that an ebay search found the same size and brand, in white! So she'll have a new, better looking pair, waiting for her on Christmas morning!

The twins decorated some cute little pumpkins at church, so we set them on the stairs next to our garden pumpkin.  When we decorated for Christmas, we gave them to Brenda to bring home for her birds.

Emily's friend Gabby had a birthday party, so I made some wrapped earbuds and and embroidered zipper bag with her favorite character, and gave Emily $5 to buy goodies from the dollar tree to fill it.  I think it turned out to be a pretty decent gift!

Someone found a tiny orange inside their big orange!

Grace learned how to make rice krispie treats using the microwave, so she's made several batches so far!

I broke the bottom part of my apothecary jar that we had candy in.  The box we used as a stop gap measure was too big, and pushed my electronic picture frame out, so I had to find something quickly.  I found this vase (75% off) at the VOA when Kristy and I went out shopping last week, and the lid fits pretty well.  At least now I have time to look for a permanent replacement, without being annoyed, and my frame is in its rightful place.

I think I've incorporated more of our crafts into other posts this round, so this post is shorter than usual!  I've also been spending a decent portion of my 'crafting' time repairing holes in various items of clothing.  Thankfully it's out of desire to continue using things we already have, and not replacing them, and not because we have no choice.

I'll try to take some pictures of repairs for the next round to include!

later days