An A-Door-able Wreath

   When I brother asked me to create a wreath for the door of our apartment, I'll admit, I sort of panicked. Not because it was such an extreme request, but because I realized that Christmas is real and truly on it's way and I have gotten almost no shopping done for family and friends. So instead of solving that problem, I took my brother up on his challenge and decided to make a wreath for our door (yes, the old standby of productive procrastination).

    For some reason, I felt the need to use ribbon in this project. After buying the ribbon, I had no real idea of how to attach it or how to make a ribbon wreath. So, while walking around the store, I bought a set of fancy pearled topped pins, figuring I might be able to wrap the ribbon around itself and pin it to keep it together.

    When I got home, I checked pinterest to see if I could find any good ideas, but none of them really spoke to me (they were either too girly or not fancy enough.) So I thought about my original plan, and came up with this easy 2 hr. wreath:

Materials:

• Extruded Styrofoam ring (mine was about 12" across)
• 2 different colors of 2.5" ribbon
• 2 or more different colors  of 1/4" ribbon (I had 4 - yay for 50 cent ribbon spools at Michaels)
• Sewing scissors (believe me, using regular scissors on this project would have been ridiculous)
• Straight pins
• Tape (optional)

 

Picture Hanging Trick

    Our living room walls are incredibly bare; it is sad. To make up for the fact that we have no art that matches the look of our living room, I came up with the idea of hanging 5 monochromatic canvases I spray painted blue. I have 2 canvases of one size and and 3 of the other (odd numbers look better, but 3 wasn't quite enough and 5 of the same size was too big.) For visual interest, 2 are flipped vertical while the others remain horizontal. I worked all this out by laying them out on the living room floor and trying several different configurations until I found this one.

     And I will be honest, I hate hanging pictures.  Especially when I have to do math or use a ruler- two things that aren't hard by themselves, but when combined with my brain making things overly complicated, become impossible to use when hanging frames. But, I still like to have beautifully straight pictures that are exactly as far away from each other as I want. So I came up with an alternative method that my brain understands better.

Quick Tip- Sauce Portioning

Whether it is from homemade sauce or jars of store-bought sauce, I always have leftovers. Since they don't last that long, even in the fridge, I always freeze my sauces. But it can be messy to get sauce into sandwich bags, so I use this trick that I borrowed from my days working at a Bakery and filling bags with icing - shout out to Bobbicakes!

1. Place a sandwich bag inside of a wide-mouth mug or cup. Make sure that the top of the bag folds over to the outside of the cup. 
2. Place a funnel inside the cup and pour in the sauce (if you are super confident about pouring, you can skip the funnel part.) If any lumps stop up the funnel, shake it gently from side to side until the clog clears.
3. Once all the sauce is poured into the bag, zip the bag closed. Then remove the bag from the cup. Mess free sauce portioning!

A Pumpkin Pake

Pumpkin Cuppake with a little bit of whipped cream on the side, sprinkled with a bit of cinnamon

      Well, technically, they are pumpkin cuppakes- cupcakes wrapped in little pieces of pie dough instead of the usual paper wrapper. Fair warning, this recipe makes for one heck of an awesome carb-filled biteful.
    For those of you who remember my first foray into baking a pake- it was a blueberry pie with a sour cream cake, aka a blueberry pake- I did it for the sake of Drop Dead Diva. They now have a recipe on their site for those wishing to make a pake, but all the ingredients are canned or come from a box (lame!) So, I set out to make another wonderful pake, this time with fall flavors in mind. My dad and mom came to visit last weekend, so I made these treats in my dad's honor since he loves pumpkin pie. And as much as I rag on the Lifetime recipe for not being "from scratch." I am not a total glutton for punishment, so I did use store bought pie dough and store bought canned pumpkin (if you want to make your own, feel free- I've done it in the past and it is delicious, if time consuming.)

Make A Card- Halloween Edition

Finished card- pumpkin patch

     Now, obviously, I am a bit early for Halloween, but when you send people things in the mail, you have to be ready earlier than the actual holiday. And when you make them yourself, it is even earlier, so I am actually on schedule this year to send them to people during the correct holiday (versus normal when I send Christmas cards as New Year's cards- whoops.)
     Cards still take me a long time to make, mostly because I am a perfectionist and I like to do as many of the pieces as I can by hand. However, I have shortened my hour per card standard a bit by using repetitive shapes and rifts off the same card style.

A Sour Attempt At Pickling

     Puns aside though, this was a colossal disaster: please in no way follow any of my instructions to make this or your hopes for pickles will turn into salty seas of sadness.
    My brother subscribes to get a farmer's basket every other month with various vegetables (I call it Hippy Harvest); a few weeks ago we got a few pickling cucumbers from the farmer's basket. Now, I love pickles. LOVE THEM. I used to be the kid who would buy a cup of frozen pickle juice for 50 cents while at the skating rink- Or, if I was feeling incredibly wasteful with my allowance, I would get an entire giant pickle. And while I can't quite stomach that much acid at a time any more, there is nothing I like better than sneaking a little crunchy pickle snack into my day.
    So, I thought, I should make my own pickles! What a grand adventure it will be- battling all the possibly dangerous bacteria floating around in home canned pickles (well, so say the critics). And of course, should I go with the classic kosher pickle recipe, using lacto-fermentation (mostly salt) or the modern stand-by (mostly vinegar.) Since I have had so many vinegar pickles, I decided to go with salted pickles. The theory is that as the brine increases in it's fermenting, the salty cucumbers will excrete salt in the form of a sour, tanginess. Or something more scientific than that. So the longer you leave the good bacteria to do it's thing, the more sour your pickles become. And they continue to ferment until they are eaten and "go bad."
     But for some reason, I didn't actually try to follow the recipe that the video pickle-guys used. Instead, I used a recipe from a random cookbook. And while I am sure the recipe was great, I apparently can't convert a recipe for one large crock into the three jars I ended up using. Instead of splitting the mixture between the three jars adn then adding water (as the directions for the crock recipe said to), I added all the salt mixture to one jar and then made a new batch. the amount of salt I used was a bit extreme (1/3 cup for the big jar and another 1/3 cup split between the smaller jars); this is expesially ridiculous when you look at the measurements from the first video (1 tablespoon per jar.) Yikes! As soon as I tried them, I winced in salt-shock and I was still tasting salt in my mouth hours after I tested them. I should have just put the slices over my eyes and called it quits for the day.

     I found a couple of really good videos explaining the process, which I will post below:

How to Make Dill Pickles with Lacto-Fermentation 

How to Make Fermented Dill Pickles 

Plant Buckets

Finished product- I actually have 7 hanging on the balcony railing, but it was hard to get a shot wide enough to show it

     Ok, for those of you that read my blog (or know me), you know what an avid gardener I am. One of the sadder parts about leaving home was not having access to garden spaces at my parents house. And with how stuffed my car was, I couldn't even fit my miniature pepper plant or my - admittedly large- aloe plant on my trip to Houston.
     Living in a second floor apartment now, I only have access to two tiny balconies (ok, technically one since the other is my brother's.) But I can't live without plants either. So I decided to maximize space by hanging the plants instead of clustering them on the floor of the balcony. This isn't necessarily a novel concept, but I didn't want to spend a bunch of money on a fancy pantsy "do-it-yourself kit" when I know I could do it myself.
      I went to Tuesday Morning and happened to find these little buckets for $1.50 each. They are a great size to start off with for what I needed at the time, but I will probably have to expand as the plants grow. Cooking is really important to my brother and herbs are great plants to start out with as I get used to growing in this new climate (so tropical- I want a citrus tree!)