Category : Around home

219 posts

"I like to melt stuff…"

I’m showing my age with that quote. 
Remember the show  
Anyway…I do like to melt stuff. 
We have piles of crayons. I think they are reproducing in the cupboard. 
I’ve recycled crayons many times with varying degrees of success. 

Cheap dollar store variety and the free crayons from restaurants contain too much wax and not enough pigment. 
The best ones are the Crayola.
My technique:
Spray mini muffin pan with olive oil to act as a release agent.
Melt in a 230° oven for about 10 minutes. 
Cool completely.
Color.

(I set the pan in the garage overnight to harden.)

Now we have a fun, chunky set of crayons to spark some renewed interest in coloring…hopefully.

 

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Good clean fun
I successfully made soap!! 
I’ve been nervous to try it on my own but figured with the month of cure time for this cold process soap that I better get over it and do it.
This is a coconut oil and olive oil soap with no added fragrance or color. Figured I better start with the basics and work my way up. 

I have to tell you that I was super worried yesterday.
I never got a good “trace” before pouring it into the mold. 
So maybe I shouldn’t say that it’s a success yet….
I’ll let you know in a month.

 

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Scrappy, scrappy

I’ve been working on loom knitting again. I have an order for 10 dishcloths and am expecting I’ll be getting a few more orders real soon. I decided to use some of my scraps of yarn to give some visual interest to these cloths.  Waste not, want not.

As long as I was thinking scrappy…

 I put together the first in a series of journals. The cover is a print of one of my kaleidoscopes. I believe this one started as a rose.

I love the look of all the different papers. It’s up to the recipient to decide how to use them.

 

 

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Wordless Wednesday #2

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Apples, apples everywhere

On Saturday, a few families on the block got together to help harvest the apples from our neighbor’s trees. 
It’s a big job but the fruits of our labor really pay off.
This year 63 grocery bags of apples were picked.
The apples were all big and beautiful with very few blemishes or worms.
Amazing!

We took home about 6 bags worth. 

I set up shop in the garage so I could make a mess and not worry about it. 
Concrete washes quite nicely. 
 After countless hours of cranking the peeler, I ended up with 23 gallon size freezer bags of peeled and sliced apples ready for the next stage of processing.

So far I’ve dehydrated 10 trays of apples, 4 pans of apple crisp-ready to be thawed then baked and cooked up about 2.5 gallons of applesauce. 
And I still have a freezer full of bagged apples. 
I am going to have to can the rest of the applesauce I make since my freezer can’t hold any more.

 

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Green tomatoes aplenty

When I heard the overnight low forecast for last night, I decided to pick the rest of the tomatoes off my 12 plants. 
Now I have a plethora of green babies that I’m hoping will ripen over time. 
Any hints on helping them along??

 

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Pinterest FAIL!!!!

The boys were gone all day Sunday so Little J and I made plans to do lots of fun “girl stuff” that we like.
We shopped a bit, visited my mom, went out to eat then came home to get to some crafting.

We planned to make some salt dough and “better than salt dough” ornaments, tags, etc.  Little J loves to both cook and paint so I figured “two birds” right?!?

As you can see we had a bit of an issue with the “better than salt dough” recipe.

I saw the recipe on Pinterest under the most beautifully white and perfect ornaments. Yeah…what the recipe gave me was a goopy mess. I tried to salvage it by using metal cookie cutters as forms while they dried at 175°F in the oven.

Lesson learned… people aren’t always careful about what they post.

We did go on to make some salt dough ornaments that actually did turn out.
As you can see they aren’t the pristine white I was going for but then again I use unbleached flour so what can I expect!

 

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