Fall? Already?

It can't seriously be September already...it's still 90 degrees daily here!

Well, with this supposed season change coming, I figured it was time to say goodbye to my summer wreath. *sigh*

My depression over this was quickly squashed when I remembered that I get to make a new one.

My wreaths this year have all consisted of tediously wrapping the form in yarn for what seems like hours. This time, I wanted something different.

Happily, when I was picking up my form at Walmart, I saw a cute fall-colored print and decided it was just the ticket. Half a yard, coupled with two 97 cent bags of glittery faux leaves, and it was on.

I cut the yarn into roughly 1 inch strips (no, I didn't measure. no need for where they're going).

Using the trusty glue gun, I glued one end to the wreath and began to wrap, gluing at the end of each strip.

Rinse and repeat until the wreath is covered:

Then I began layering on the leaves, alternating between the three colors.

The finish product:

Like the gold R? Made it from a shoe box. As much as I like painting wooden or cardboard letters, I've found that driving 25 minutes into the city to get to a craft store and paying roughly $3 a letter isn't much fun. I also love that I can freehand the letter however I want, and can make it 3D with little effort. If you have spare cardboard, I recommend giving your hands a chance to make beautiful lettering. This letter actually wasn't even painted; I just colored with it gold Sharpie and sprayed clearcoat on top.

 

Happy fall, I guess?



Marble Painting

It's almost 1am, so I'm not going to write a long winded post. Kristen and I did some marble painting today, and I decided to do a quick tutorial for those who may not be familar.

Take a piece of printer paper and tape it to an empty box lid. A printer paper box works great, but you could use a shoe box if you wanted. The key is that the box lid has a wide lip. Double sided tape works if you have it, but if not just roll a few pieces of regular Scotch tape and do it the old-fashioned way.

Pick (or let your little one pick) 3-4 different colors of acrylic or finger paint. Kristen chose these:

Drop 1 or 2 marbles in each color, as shown above. Use a plastic spoon to pick up the marbles and drop them in the box lid.

Tilt, shake, and move the box lid to let the marbles roll across the paper. It's best to use one color at a time so you don't have 8 marbles in the box at once.

After your colors have been used and your child is satisfied with their art, put it aside to dry. Once dry, remove from the box lid and frame as you see fit. For a tutorial on how to frame this masterpiece using a cereal box, click here.

Enjoy and admire!

CA: Cookieholics Anonymous

I'm changing my eating lifestyle. I'm not on a diet because diets, quite frankly, do not work. Long term results require long term change. That means finding 20 minutes a day to be active, every day. It means making conscious efforts to avoid foods that leave you feeling hungry in a few hours. It means saying no to temptation.

But then there are cookies.

I love chocolate chip cookies. So much that I purposely never keep the ingredients or pre-made cookies in my house, because I will make them and eat them. The only thing I may like more is ice cream, which I have refrained from eating and instead partake in frozen yogurt or sherbert if the situation arises. But how in the world do I get that delectable cookie taste without kicking myself later?

Today, I solved that problem.

I found a recipe for cookie dough bites here. Now, these look amazing, no doubt, but by my calculations, each little bite is 145 calories!

Breakdown per batch:
800 calories in butter (assuming light butter, 1600 calories if using regular butter)
805 in chocolate chips (assuming Ghiradelli semi-sweets)
800 in flour
1080 calories in sugar

Total: 3,485 per batch, divided by 24 bites is 145 per bite.

I'm absolutely NOT bashing this recipe. If I were a younger and thinner woman, I'd be making and devouring this stuff. Actually, 6 months ago I would have been too. But in the interest of my thighs, I had to find something that fit my needs.

I have recently started using no-cal sweetener (Truvia, Splenda, etc) for my sweetening needs. Because of this little change, I can now enjoy guilt free sweet tea, cheesecake (well, that's never guilt free), and other things that appeal to my tongue. Since sugar is the major contributor to calories in this recipe, I decide to nix it.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure this recipe has a totally different flavor with brown sugar, but I love mine all the same.

Here we go:

1 cup no-cal sweetener of your choice (I used Splenda)
1 3/4 cups AP flour
6 oz Ghiradelli semi-sweet chocolate chips (about half a bag; you can use less if you like)
1 cup light butter, softened (I used Blue Bonnet light butter because I like it's soft texture)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix your butter and sugar until blended. Add your vanilla, then gradually add the flour to the mix. If you are using a standing mixer, you will notice that the dough is separated and crumbly. It's ok; it'll come together in a second. Mix until all flour is combined, then knead your dough by hand and add your chips.

At this point, it is perfectly acceptable to pinch off a bit and taste test your dough. After all, if you don't like the taste, you'll want to fix it or pitch it before you make all those little bites.

Using a teaspoon, scoop your dough into little balls and place on an ungreased cookie sheet. I wrapped mine in foil to prevent sticking; you can also use wax or parchment paper.

This recipe should yield 4 dozen of these tasty little babies! Refrigerate for 1 hour for maximum scrumptiousness (is that a word?)

Best part: These yummy morsels are a mere 48 calories a pop. This means you can eat 4, go on a 20 minute run, and it'll be like you never ate them. :)

What are your no-guilt guilty pleasures? Do you make these in more delicious ways? Share them in the comments!

EDIT: The guy was watching me move the cookie dough bites from the sheet to a tupperware today and said "I wonder what would happen if we tried to bake them". I assumed that with the amount of butter and lack of egg, it would produce a runny, untasty mess. Curiousity got the better of us, and we put half a dozen in a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes. Oh. My. Goodness. They didn't melt or expand, but kept their perfect little ball shape, while being soft and warm on the inside. They literally melted in our mouths.

A half baked idea

Let me start by saying that I love reed diffusers. I love the way they stylishly freshen my home with their sweet aromas. With that being said, I do not love that after a short period of time, it seems like the reeds are not diffusing the oil sufficiently enough to freshen the room. I also do not love spending money on replacement reeds, as I do not love spending money on replacing anything. Today, as I was adding more oil to the base, I decided that I had a choice: buy more reed diffusers, or find a way to make the old ones work. I chose the latter.

First, I gave the reeds a good rinse with warm water, holding the reeds length-wise with the faucet. After the rinse, they got a 10 minute soak in a sink of hot water and a few drops of Dawn soap (if you don't want to occupy the sink, I would just recommend a large bowl. The sink works best for containing spills and allowing the Dawn to foam.)

After a short shake dry, I placed the reeds on a baking sheet and set the oven to 250. When I checked on the reeds after 10 minutes, they were dry and the ends were porous. Now my reeds are working wonderfully. If you want a quick burst of freshness, I definitely recommend placing them back in the oil straight from the oven. The heat makes the oil diffuse even faster.

Happy smelling!

Finally Finished!

This will be the shortest post ever. I just have to share that I finally finished my window panel project. I still need to get pictures to put in three of the windows (the guy suggested I put one photo of each of us individually, which is a great idea, except almost no pictures of me exist).

So this was day one, when I brought it home for $10 at my favorite antique store:

This is around the halfway point, when I first decided that I wanted the bottom of the panel to be a whiteboard:

And this is today, after adding hooks to the bottom for hanging dish towels, keys, dry erase markers, whatever.

Sadly, with the big move happening in about 3 weeks, we decided that hanging it would be counter-productive, as we would be taking it down and patching the holes in a few short weeks. Sigh.

At least it gives me three weeks to find decent pictures for those three empty panes... :)

Half-finished everything

Oh. My. Goodness.

It's approaching the end of May. Everything is in hyperdrive. Here are a few key points.

-We bought our first house. Well, mostly. We are under contract and will close in mid-June. Packing and prepping ensues.
- My job has given me an official closing date of June 30th. After that, I have no idea what I will be doing.
-The guy finished the spring semester and moved into summer semester. His courses are only 6 weeks each, which means he is spending most of his free time hunched in front of the computer.

The one benefit of all of these things piling up like this is that I'm finding that I have extra time and room on the weekends to work on my half-finished projects.

First off, the window panel. I posted a picture of it in my last post, and said I'd have it done by the end of the week. This, of course, didn't happen. A big factor was the fact that I had an impossible time finding something to put in the big open section on the bottom. This week, I finally found something...

I have made a lot more progress since this picture from Thursday, but it's not quite finished yet, mostly due to the fact that the piece of whiteboard is just slightly too long. It WILL be done tomorrow, and I refuse to post a picture of it until it is.

Secondly, the subway sign. This is a new project that I started about two weeks ago and is still unfinished.

I had an old piece of particle board from the back of an old tv stand. I put 1/2 yard of remnant fabric underneath and trimmed around the edges.

I pulled the edges around the board tightly and attached using a hot glue gun.

I've started the words that I want on the front, but I don't know what to do to finish. Thoughts?

Thirdly, there's the numerous canvases that are sitting in my closet and on my floor in the spare bedroom. I'm not sure if I need to hang them, gift them, cover them and start again, or just pitch 'em. I am running out of room for them, but hate the idea of just throwing them out. Any idea of how I can use these in a more effective way?

Any input is appreciated. I will most definitely be putting up pictures of my finished window panel tomorrow.

Happy tax season!

Not...

Anyway, the ides of April bring on a number of things that aren't related to forking over money. Warm weather, longer days, spring projects... the list goes on.

With spring cleaning in mind, I declared that my lamp shades are a hideous shade of cream that shows dust, cat hair, and any other flaw you can imagine. The before:

A few layers of Mod Podge, a 75 cent yard of scrap fabric and an X-Acto knife later:

With Easter passing, my lovely egg wreath is no longer relevant.

I couldn't bring myself to take the eggs and yarn off of the form to make a new one, so I just bought another form and wrapped it in some tan yarn I already had. A few shells and some items from the 97 cent aisle at Walmart, and you have this:

I'm in love with it. It makes me want to put up an umbrella and sit in a cushy chair with a margarita. (I hand painted the little margarita glasses, btw.) Side note, only 384 days until this is actually my last initial. Every day is more exciting than the one before.

Speaking of cushy chair, my soon to be in-laws have a great little teak bistro set in their backyard. My MiL asked me to look at the table and see if I could come up with a way to maybe remove the wood and replace it with a concrete slab, and mosaic the top. I looked at the table and chairs and much to my surprise, the wood was still mostly salvageable. I took the table top off of the legs, took the wood out of the frame, and sanded the pieces down to clean and smooth them. After staining the pieces a pretty redwood, they look like new. I'm mad at myself for not taking a before picture, but once the pieces are back on the hardware, there will be plenty of afters...

Last thing. I made a journey to our local antique shop this week and found this gem for $10. I cannot wait to finish it. The top panels still have the glass intact, but the bottom is sans glass. To me, it screams cork board. I'll post the after hopefully by this weekend.

I must've lost my rear end from working it off this weekend... :)