A bug-tastic birthday bash

Last weekend we went to Minnesota to celebrate my nieces' birthdays. They were having a nature-themed party, so I wanted to make them a special cake. They requested frogs and ladybugs and drew me a picture of what they wanted the cake to look like.

 My nieces were great helpers and they added a lot of great touches to the cake. They were especially great at cutting out all the circles for the ladybug's spots and the frog faces and making the grass border on the bottoms of the tiers.

As an added unexpected surprise, we added a different food coloring gel to each layer to create a rainbow cake on the inside. 

Overall, I think the finished cake turned out great!

More pickles!

When I was a kid, one wall in the garage was dedicated to my mom's canning jars. She would can all kinds of things - peaches, tomatoes, cherries, applesauce, etc. and we would get to eat the fruit year round. Since I have all this extra produce from my garden, I thought I'd try canning some pickles.

I ordered this handy-dandy canning discovery kit from Amazon.com. (By the way - Amazon Prime is the greatest thing ever. I never have to leave the house!)

The kit includes a canning rack, three jars with bands and lids and an instruction booklet - for about 10 bucks. The booklet outlines three easy steps - boil water, fill jars, put jars in boiling water.  And voila, instant pickles!

Ok, so it's a little more complicated than that - you have to make sure your pot is deep enough to fully submerge the jars. (Thanks to Mary for lending me her pot.) And you need to make sure that you have the right amount of space in the top of your jars before you put them in the water. And you have to boil the jars for the right amount of time. But this is not rocket science.

For the brine, I used the Ball dill pickle mix recipe from the side of the mix container. Super easy. Pour the brine over the sliced cucumbers, add lids and bands and boil for about 15 minutes. I also threw in a little dill from the garden for kicks.

The mix says the pickles will be best in 4-6 weeks, so I'm looking forward to cracking them open. I have a bunch of tomatoes in the garden now, so I'm thinking of canning some salsa, bruschetta or tomato sauce next.

Sew Easy?

When I was little, my mom used to make adorable dresses for me all the time. I wanted to see if I could make something for Eliana, so I started with a pattern that had EASY written all over the front.

I picked this cute little jumper from McCall's (#M6193) and found a fun multicolored polka dot fabric.

The whole process was only 8 steps long. How hard could that be? Well, kinda hard. I'm not going to be winning Project Runway any time soon. But this is certainly doable.


Step 1: Use the pattern pieces to cut out the fabric. Since I think I may want to use this pattern again, I had to figure out a way to cut out the fabric without cutting the pattern size lines. So I used a yellow sharpie to trace the pattern onto the fabric and then cut on the markings. Since the part you cut ends up inside a seam, you won't see it at the end.

Step 2: Stitch up the sides of the main jumper body.

Step 3: Iron the interfacing. I had no idea what interfacing was. It's really just a stiffener that you iron on to the back of a fabric to give it more stability. Iron the bumpy side of the interfacing to the wrong side of the fabric.

Step 4: Stitch the interfaced pieces to the main garment. Stitch with right sides together and then flip it around. This part was a little challenging because I'm only good at sewing straight. Rounded edges are still a bit tough.

Step 5: Topstitch the neck and arm holes. This took me way too long. Probably because I thought it would be fun to use a contrasting thread color. I used pink instead of brown so I had to redo it a bunch of times to get it to look right. Again with the rounded edges.

Step 6: Hem the bottom.

Step 7: Add the buttons and button holes. My sewing machine instruction book had a couple good tips here - by taping the buttons in place and taping a pin to the machine foot to create a shank, it helped make the button process easy. I dropped the feed teeth and used the zigzag setting to get the machine to stitch the buttons in the right spot.

 

Step 8: Add button holes. I used the button hole maker steps on my sewing machine. Again, I had to do this several times to get it right. I am getting quite handy with the seam ripper, however.

There were a couple of extras steps involving adding patch pockets to the front, but I decided to leave them out. I started to make the pockets but got frustrated when I couldn't make them perfectly round.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. There were a few things that were difficult to understand, so I'll probably stick with the "easy" patterns for a while.

The pattern also included an adorable little jacket - we'll see if I can pull it off.

Tis the Season

It's that time of glorious time of year that I look forward to all winter long - blackberry season! A few years ago, Ben's wonderful Grandpa Milt passed away. He was an outstanding person and we all miss him very much. One thing we shared was our love of blackberries. Fresh blackberries are difficult to come by in the Midwest, and Grandpa Milt had a berry bush in his backyard.

After he passed, I wanted to make sure that we could still enjoy those summer berries. So, we transplanted the bush into my backyard. It took a couple years of TLC to get it to produce, but we are now enjoying the fruits of our labor. The berry bush is overflowing with ripe, juicy blackberries.

No holiday in the Walter family is complete without a blackberry pie, and it is a tradition I intend to continue. I didn't have quite enough ripe berries yet for a whole pie, so I used this cobbler recipe from Williams-Sonoma and added in some nectarines and a dash of nutmeg as well. I made one for me, and one for Ben's grandma.

I have to say that every recipe I have ever tried from Williams-Sonoma has been a smashing success. I have about seven of their cookbooks and the food is always delicious and the recipes are easy to follow. It looks like I'm going to have a large amount of berries this year, and they have a few other blackberry recipes that I may try this year. YUM!

The 40 day clutter challenge

I'm embarking on a new challenge. I found the idea on pinterest, and it is brilliant. You write out a list of 40 areas in your home that are full of clutter and need a little organization help. They can be as simple as your underwear drawer or as extraordinarily cluttered as the garage. Each day you tackle a new area and in 40 days you have an organized house.

Today is day three and I'm loving it! I couldn't believe the amount of junk we hauled out after just doing our sock drawers and the master bathroom cabinets. Sometimes it's hard to get rid of stuff - even stuff you didn't know you had - but it's safe to say that sunless tanner wasn't going to give anyone a sun-kissed glow anymore.

I'm working my way through the master closet right now, and *sniffle, sniffle*, 10 pairs of shoes are about to find a new home. I haven't worn any of them in at least a year, and so out the door they go!

I hope we can keep this up for the next 37 days. It feels so good to purge. As you can see from the list, big projects await!

Picklicious

Until a couple years ago, it never occurred to me that you could make pickles at home. I think I just assumed they were another wonder brought about by the industrial revolution. Brilliant, I know.

Then, Ben's uncle Mike brought some fantastic dill pickles to a family gathering. Oh. my. goodness. So yummy. So, I figured if Mike could do it, I could too!

Last year, I decided to grow some cucumbers and dill and give it a go. Well, the cucumbers were a colossal failure. Not a single cuke emerged. I have this horrible habit of planting seeds way too close to each other so the plants strangle each other and nothing survives. How fascinating.

This year, I expanded the garden and spaced things much better. For the most part at least. The mesclun is a thick mess. But that's beside the point. My cucumbers are growing like crazy!

I also grew some tall beautiful dill. Sometimes I think I plant dill and basil just so I can walk to the garden and smell their wonderful fragrances. 

The pickle recipe is really quite simple. You make a hot syrup by boiling vinegar, sugar, salt, mustard seed and celery seed.

It will look something like this.

Pour the syrup over sliced cucumbers.

I sliced the cucumbers using this handy dandy slicer thingy that I found in the kitchen drawer. I have no idea where it came from but it makes the pickles look fancy shmancy.

Throw in a sliced onion or two and a few dill heads.

Put a lid on it and stick it in the fridge for 3 days to let the pickle magic happen. After three days, open up and enjoy! So easy to make and quite tasty.

You Can Try It

Somewhere along the journey from my childhood to being a full-fledged adult, I stopped trying new things. Life became routine. I was eating the same food week after week, wearing the same clothes day after day - seriously, i have about 15 identical v-neck sweaters - watching the same mindless TV in my DVR night after night, and basically doing the same things over and over again. I was in a rut and in desperate need of a hobby.

It was then that I began to wonder - when do we lose that childlike curiosity that leaves us dirty, sticky and loving every minute of it? When do we become so afraid of failure that it cripples our ability to try new things? And why do we become so stubborn in our ways that we think we know it all and others couldn't possibly be as smart or capable as we think we are?

A few months back, I was trying to set up a new printer. I was exasperated beyond measure when I couldn't find the right cable to connect the printer and the laptop. I was sure that the cord provided wouldn't fit and spent hours searching the house for the right cord. I was at my wit's end and angry that the right cord wasn't included.

Then my wonderful husband walked in the door, took one look at my sorry self and asked if he could see if the provided cord would fit. "You can try it," I whined, confident he wouldn't get anywhere. Then he turned the cord around and plugged it in using the other end. 

I was flabbergasted. The answer to my problem was in my hand the whole time. I had wasted so much time and energy because I failed to try.

That frustrating moment was an important lesson for me. In all things, we must try. And if we can't figure it out, we must try harder. Often we will succeed, and add another skill to our repertoire. Even more often, we will fail, and yet there is a lesson to be learned from our mistakes. For me, it is often a lesson in humility.

The last few months, I have been making an effort to try new things - cooking, gardening, painting, sewing, baking. Most projects have been small - others have been a little more epic. This blog is a journal of those successes and failures.

Now it is important to note that I am not an overly crafty person. I don't have a craft table or room with spools of ribbon and jars of sequins. All of my craft supplies can fit in one tub in my basement. Most of my projects originate out of necessity or frugality, not out of creativity. 

I am also not an accomplished cook. I enjoy cooking, but I cling fiercely to recipes. I do love to bake cakes, and love a good fondant adventure.

I am not handy. I've never met a screw I couldn't strip, or a simple project I couldn't complicate. Our home improvement projects drag on forever until we call in help. 

I am not a natural green thumb. I have a vegetable garden in the backyard, but it is certainly a trial and error system. 

So, for the less-than-crafty, less-than-gourmet, or black-thumbed among us, I hope this blog will give you some inspiration and courage to try new things. I will do my best to provide easy to follow directions to guide you on your way. 

Because if I can do it, I am certain that you could too.