We may be in over our heads...

Mom called late Friday to say a cousin had a bumper crop of apples and offered as many as we wanted if we'd help pick them. So off we went with some buckets and tubs. I figured we'd come home with a bushel or so but we kept picking...and picking...and picking.
We're going to be making applesauce for weeks!

Chocolate spa goodies

I made up two of these Chocolate Spa Sets to send to friends for Valentine's Day. They each have a large container of Chocolate Lavender Bath Salts, Chocolate Walnut Body Polish, Chocolate Mocha Facial Mask and Chocolate Peppermint Foot Soak Salts. Yum! I think I got as much benefit from smelling all the goodies while I was making them as my friends will when they use them!

Everything was easy to make, especially the body polish, and I had most of the ingredients right in my kitchen cupboard.

I started with this recipe from Herb Companion magazine and modified it slightly because I didn't have walnut oil. Instead, I used:

• ½ cup sugar
• ¼ cup safflower oil*
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped walnuts
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder

*I use safflower oil with vitamin E. It has added benefits for your skin and the vitamin E acts as a preservative for the scrub so you can store it longer.

Just mix all the ingredients together and store it in an airtight jar. To use it, hop in the tub or shower, scoop out about a tablespoon or so of the body polish, and massage into your damp skin, avoiding eye area. Rinse well with warm water. If you let your skin air dry instead of towelling off, you'll leave a nice, light layer of moisturizing oil behind. You can also pat dry very lightly to still leave some of the oil.

One word of caution: This mix makes your feet and tub SLIPPERY! Be very careful in the tub and stepping out onto bare floor. I stand on a washcloth in the tub and put an old towel on the floor in front of the tub for when I step out.

Enjoy!

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Too old for fairy tales

The Little Guy looked around his bedroom recently and informed me, with his hands on his hips and in his most serious voice, "Mom, I am TOO OLD for fairy tales. We need to change this NOW."

This is the wallpaper border in his room, put up just two weeks before he was born. He's 7-3/4 now, so this statement wasn't entirely unexpected. And the rest of his room has been a mishmash for a while, with space posters, a Snoopy nightlight and an odd fleece blanket that he likes because it's soft, but it didn't match anything else in the room. See?

We started browsing catalogs and web sites to come up with a new theme. I had two rules: 1) no licensed characters, and 2) no red walls. He lobbied hard to change my mind on the second rule, but I don't like painting well enough to tackle red!

So, after much debate, he decided on an outer space theme and picked out this border:

Next, we headed to Joann's, 50% off coupons in hand, and he picked out this fleece:

To humor his request for "lots of red" (his favorite color), we picked red binding for the blankets and plain red fabric for window valances.

This week we started stripping off the old border and tested some new paint colors for the walls.

It's going to take at least another week or so to finish, but I'll be back to show off the finished project!

Valentine's Day crafting

The Little Guy saw a Snoopy treat bag kit in a catalog and decided he wanted to make them for his classmates for Valentine's Day. I thought they were cute and they weren't very expensive so we went on the company's web site this weekend to order them...and noticed the shipping time was 10-14 BUSINESS days, unless I wanted to pay another $16.99 for faster service. Um, no.

So, I raided my craft stash and found these little bags:

Then I got on Google and searched for Snoopy images, spent 30 minutes in PhotoShop, and voila! - our own version of Snoopy treat bags. Never underestimate the power of an aggravated, crafty Momma!

I thought I'd share a printable version in case you'd like to make your own. But since Snoopy is copyrighted and I don't want my little blog to go to jail, I made another version with free clip art (found here, in case you want the original artwork).

(Click here to download the PDF from Google Docs.)

These will print out with 4 different tags on a single sheet of 8-1/2 x 11 paper. Just cut them out, fold them in half, write the "to" and "from" names on them, and staple them to the top of your bags. If you use them, please come back and post a comment. I'd love to see them in action!

I'm sharing this on a couple blogs:

I'm so far behind I think I'm first

One corner of my sewing table tends to be a catch-all for things that need to be fixed or completed - hems that need to be raised or lowered, shirts that need buttons replaced, and all manner of unfinished projects. I cleaned it off this afternoon and ran across a placemat I bought at Target before the holidays, intending to make a throw pillow out of it (thanks to the inspiration from Jellybean Junkyard). Rather than leave it in the pile to be forgotten until next January, I took 15 minutes to open up a seam, stuff it with some fluff left over for another project, and finish it off.


And look how nice it looks on the new couch! :o) It's now packed away with the rest of the Christmas decorations, all ready for next year's festivities.

The Prince approves

Sonny seems to like the updated sofa!

In which my sofa gets a makeover

We purchased our living room furniture in 2004 when the Little Guy was not quite a year old. Fast forward through toddlerhood and two dogs, and the sofa is really beginning to show its age. Last fall I started looking longingly at furniture ads but, budget reality being what it is, quickly realized a new sofa was out of the question. I thought slipcovers might be an option but it turns out that we have a somewhat odd sofa and none of the ready-made ones were going to look good. They'd cover the old upholstery, but it wasn't likely the fit would be very neat and I knew that would make me a little nuts.

After estimating yardage to make my own and pricing upholstery fabric (and subsequently picking myself up off the floor when I figured out how much 16 yards of fabric would cost), I found an online coupon for cotton duck at Joann's - it was a great deal IF you bought a full 20 yard bolt. Sign me up!

A few things I failed to take into consideration at the beginning of this project:

• Cotton duck shrinks. A lot. And since washability was a huge part of the whole slipcover deal, the fabric had to be prewashed. 20 yards of canvas is heavy. 20 yards of WET canvas is really heavy. I spent one full afternoon wrestling it around the local laundromat.
• There is no flat surface or floor space in my house big enough to roll out more than a few yards of fabric at a time. So cutting out the pieces meant rolling out a small area, ironing it, drawing out the pattern, cutting it out. And then repeating that process about 17 times.
• Upholstering (which I've done before) is, at least in my book, easier than slipcovering because you don't have to fiddle with the fit as much. Folding and stapling is a lot more forgiving than actually sewing a removable cover.

I started the project the week of Christmas and finally finished today. I LOVE how it turned out, and I'm just proud enough of my work to share the whole ugly process.

1. The before photos. Note the lovely chewed corners on the throw pillows. My dog apparently has a taste for polyester fluff.




2. The first glitch in my plans - there were no inside covers on any of the cushions, so taking the covers off meant completely unstuffing them. I ended up making permanent inside covers for all of them out of assorted fabrics and mismatched sheets. Not pretty, but it worked and it will make it much easier to remove the new covers to wash them.





3. Work in progress. Since making the inside covers had a side benefit of letting me really fine-tune the fit before I tackled the canvas version, I decided to make a test version of the main slipcover the same way. My mom came over for an afternoon and helped with the figuring on this. Thanks, Mom!



4. And finally, after nearly four weeks, a little swearing, two broken needles, multiple spools of thread and three pin-related injuries, it's done!





Still needs throw pillows but I haven't decided whether I'm going to buy them or make them. And now that I see how close the color of the cover is to the color of the walls, I'm thinking of painting the living room...

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This Moment - Friday, August 20, 2010

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. Inspired by SouleMama.

"How to Preserve a Husband" - advice from 1969

I borrowed my Mom's 1969 edition of the Ball Blue Book over the weekend. Among some rather frightening recipes and instructions for home canning (smelt in tomato sauce, anyone?), I found this little bit of advice for "modern" homemakers:

How to Preserve a Husband

Be careful in your selection. Do not choose too young. When selected, give your entire thoughts to preparation for domestic use. Some wives insist upon keeping them in a pickle, while others are constantly getting them into hot water. This may make them sour, hard and sometimes bitter; even poor varieties may be made sweet, tender and good, by garnishing them with patience, well sweetened with love and seasoned with kisses. Wrap them in the mantle of charity. Keep warm with a steady fire of domestic devotion and serve with peaches and cream. Thus prepared, they will keep for years.

Something new from something old

I've been helping my mother clean out her attic and came across a box of odd dishes that belonged to my grandfather and and great-grandparents. I brought home two little custard cups because I liked the colors, but I knew I wouldn't use them for their intended purpose. I didn't want to just pack them back in a box, though, so I decided to make pincushions out of them.

I've seen lots of other pincushions made along the same lines but with teacups or small garden pots. They were really quick and easy to make.


To keep needles from sinking through to the bottom of the cup, I started out by cutting two cardboard circles big enough to fit in the cups about half an inch below the rims.


Next, I cut circles out of some scraps of quilt batting for the stuffing. Since my cups get wider at the top, I cut four the same size as the cardboard circle and four slightly larger for each cup. I just kept stacking them up and squishing them down until they seemed about the right thickness. I wasn't very scientific about it!


Time to pick out fabrics. The blue print is left over from making herbal comfort packs (like the ones here and here). The pink is from a thrifted sheet.


I cut a circle from each of the fabrics about twice as wide as my cardboard bases, then stitched around them by hand with a double thread to make a gathering thread. Next, I laid the fabric on my table right side DOWN and stacked the larger batting circles, then the smaller batting circles, then the cardboard circle on top.


I pulled the gathering thread tight and knotted it to make my cushion. See how the stack of batting squished down? It made a nice, firm cushion but not too dense to stick pins in.


Finally, I added a couple beads of hot glue around the bottom of the cushion (along the edge where the cardboard is) and popped them into the cups.


Aren't they cute? I gave the blue/green one to my sister and kept the pink one for myself. I love having a little bit of family history on my work table!