Brought to you by Apartment Therapy (great site). Inspiring, isn’t it? I love to use the inside doors of my cupboards. I’ve always placed substitution lists, measuring shortcuts, those sorts of hints and tips inside of there. Then you can just shut the cabinet and voila, nobody can see it. I know, I’m so clever (and easily pleased).
In the spirit of the Repair Manifesto that I posted about here, this is a great idea for mending jeans. As it turns out, Craftzine is having March be their Mending Month and I’ve been enjoying all sorts of mending ideas all month long…check out the archives here.
Think you can create a t-shirt design based on the concept of thinking green? Check out this design contest here by Threadless. Good luck!
Very cute idea from A Patchwork World. Instructions can be found here.
It’s finally time for an online giveaway! Your comment could win you Rachael Ray’s 2007 cookbook called “Just In Time” and she includes recipes that cook in 15, 30 or 60 minutes. Looks like a great collection. It doesn’t appear to have ever been used – just stored on a shelf. Some of the 15 minute recipes that I saw as I was leafing through the book looked so yummy and easy to make that I was tempted to keep it! Enter by leaving a comment on this post. The winner will be chosen from all comments (one per person please) by random.org. Comments accepted until April 30, 2009. Good luck!
Forewarning: soapbox ahead. So I bought that older but very nice serger last week from Craigslist. It had been sitting in someone’s home unused and is practically new. I was so excited about it that at church Sunday I wanted to get some ideas from a seamstress acquaintance. I humorously mentioned it took me a whole day to learn to thread the machine and she said, “Well, I have a such-and-such with an air threader so I don’t have to worry about that.” I was immediately disheartened. Instead of helping me with ideas of what to CREATE with my new serger, the biggest, best and newest seemed to be more important. I am so anti-big, anti-best and anti-new lately that it saddened me. Why do we always need to upgrade? Why can’t we appreciate (heaven forbid WORK and LEARN) how to use older things do they don’t end up in landfills? Really threading my old machine isn’t so bad. You just have to – gasp – look at the manual and use it enough to remember how to do it. I realize there are times when we really do need to upgrade (our friends, perhaps? okay, just kidding) but we need to start thinking more about the consequences of our choices – even in sewing machines. Just because you CAN, doesn’t me you SHOULD. That has been my mantra of late and it applies to so much more than sewing machines. I like to think that if I had millions of dollars I still would not indulge in $1,000 per night hotel rooms. There are so many better things to be done with money. Children are starving. People are living in poverty. I just can’t personally justify that kind of excess. I love this Repair Manifesto found on Replayground but originally from Core 77 via Platform 21. It’s all in the little things because those little things add up – if we all were more aware and tried just a tiny bit harder – we really could have a big impact. One of my favorite scriptures is in the Book of Mormon, Alma 37:6 “…by small and simple things are great things brought to pass.” Go small. Go simple. A big hurrah for restraint (if only I had a little restraint on my blog…ah, I’m not perfect, either). Off. Soapbox. For now.
P.S. This little episode regarding sewing machines comes after a couple of times when I heard women at my own church who should know better bragging about the biggest, newest, and best type of stand mixer a person could buy. Viking, Kitchen Aid, Magic Mill….please. Do whatever works for your family – bread is just about as good made by hand.
Don is soooooo sweet. He always lets me pick out my own presents. I think he secretly prefers it that way. My birthday isn’t until April but I saw a serger on Craigslist and have wanted one ever since Becky Wilford serged us a Christmas tree skirt in 1992, so I emailed the guy and gave a lowball offer — and he accepted it! So we met halfway and Don stalled the car by leaving the ignition on so we had to call for a jump from some friends at church (thanks, Brother Jim Barnes) and then we made it home with our new baby….I mean serger. It didn’t come with a manual but I contacted Janome (the maker of MyLock) and they sent me one via email the very next morning. I am so excited. I might miss a few posts just because I’m trying to thread it (threading alone could take days for me – steep learning curve!). Tell me what you make with your sergers. I’ve heard they are to a regular sewing machine what the sewing machine was once to hand sewing. I’m excited to make tablecloths at the very least. Oh, but look at these serging projects at Janome’s website – this fleece blanket is so very cute! Happy sewing!
Yes, the dirty dishes in the background are also mine. They have since disappeared. I promise. I left them to do more important things. Like blogging.
About five or six years and $$$ later, he’s earned it! We are sooo very proud of him.
Photojojo‘s post today is about good business card ideas. I like some of these but I’m not convinced they’re the best I’ve ever seen. Anybody I’ve ever designed business cards for has always been extremely budget conscious – and these days business cards can be had very inexpensively. Custom die cuts and sewing each of 1,000 cards just doesn’t seem worth it to me! I do love seeing other business card ideas, though. The downside is that it always makes me want to redo mine…
We’ve eaten healthy for a solid week. Talk about withdrawal. No sugar, no bread, no refined anything. It’s about time for a breakdown and if we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right: namely, hot fudge brownie. This recipe is originally titled “Down in the Dumps Pudding” in the A Family Raised on Sunshine cookbook by Beverly Nye. We heart Mrs. Nye. She has given us wonderful recipes over the years and this is, hands down, the best hot-fudge-ice-cream-brownie-combo topping ever. Promise. Stake my life on it. Give it a try!
Down-In-The-Dumps Pudding
Beat together:
2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
4 T cocoa
Stir in:
1 cup milk
4 T vegetable oil
2 cups chopped nuts (we omit this usually, even though we love nuts)
Spread mixture in ungreased 9 x 13 inch pan.
Blend in small bowl:
2 cups packed brown sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
Sprinkle over top of batter.
Pour 3 cups hot water over all. Bake at 350° F for 45 minutes. Serves well with ice cream. It comes out like a brownie with hot fudge underneath (it’s magical and divine!). Hope you enjoy it and let me know if you do give it a try.
I have to include this on my site – just so I don’t forget their web addresses! If you’re looking for great wool craft supplies, check out ornamentea and Felt-O-Rama. Pic above is the felted wool eggs (just in time for Easter!) from Felt-O-Rama.
…or doilies…or decor…or a swag. Knit these up and make them whatever you want them to be! Sooo cute. Thanks to Susan B. Anderson’s tutorials for the Easter Bunny and for the eggs. Just in time for spring!
Above: The Eymann Siblings in Nebraska. This is a picture of my mother’s mother and her siblings. Back row, left to right: Ollie, Daisy, Violet, Robert, Rose, Lillie Della. Front row: Lottie Ollie Thornton Eymann and Ernest Gottfried Eymann. Photo courtesy of Darlene May Jackson Bartlett’s personal collection.
Above: Lillie Della Eymann, photo courtesy of Darlene May Jackson Bartlett’s personal collection.
Genealogy. Family history. Whatever you call it – I just love it. My grandmother was Lillie Della and my mother tells me wonderful stories about her. She was a caretaker, friend, hard working individual. She was a medical wonder – she helped deliver babies and was the person everybody ran to if they had any problems. I hope to put up a Bartlett and Eymann genealogy website soon. I have so much information that I want to share in hopes of finding more! It is addicting. They say the Holy Ghost goes to bed at midnight but the Spirit of Elijah is just getting up about then…that’s why genealogy seems to include all-nighters doing research on the computer.
Images from Better Homes & Gardens.
Image from Domino Magazine.
We often have people over for dinner and we either eat in shifts at the table, people take their plate to the family room or we set up the plastic Sam’s Club banquet and/or card table. Summer is nice because then I can set up a kids’ table on the deck. It would be nice to have a huge table to seat family and guests comfortably but that would take an enormous dining “wing” (we can get 20+ people over at once at times). We once had an outdoor 4th of July party with just under 100 people and our home was only 900 square feet at the time but we lived on nearly a half an acre so we put up doors on sawhorses and covered them with tablecloths, borrowed chairs galore, and voila we had seating for nearly 100 people! It was one of the most fun times ever. We served drinks in the kiddie pool full of ice. There were water fights and people brought their own grills and we potlucked like crazy. Sigh.
Dining guests aside, our kitchen table is getting too small for our family on a daily basis. It can seat six people but really fits 4 most comfortably. It’s been fine while the baby is in a high chair but I think we’re outgrowing it. The chairs are old and two have broken so now the last person to the table gets an uncomfortable and ill-fitting stool to sit on. This is going to sound crazy (unlike every other thing that comes out of my mouth, right?) but I am hesitant to even look at new tables because a) I love my table – it has a metal top that is so easy to clean, and b) it’s been our table for so long it has sentimental value, and c) the kids are just going to grow up anyway and leave so why do we need a big table?? There’s the crazy part. That should be 18 years into the future but I’m thinking about it now. Ding! Ding! Ding! Crazy! I think I need something to tide me over until Ben’s out of his high chair and I break down and get a bigger table: a bench. I love the kitchen table and bench idea because I figure kids can squish on a bench, right?
By the way, I saw a new zinc topped dining table recently – was it Pottery Barn? – and it has so got me thinking maybe a new table is the way to go. Eventually. I just have to let go of the one I love first.
Ben likes hootenany pancakes so much that he sang for them and we got it on video. It’s a classic Rolfson recipe and oh-so-easy-and-cheap. It is a staple in our household for breakfast OR dinner. Sometimes we even have to make two pans.
Hootenany Pancakes
1 cup flour
1 cup milk
6 or 7 eggs
pinch salt
1 stick butter
Cut 1 stick of butter into several chunks and put in bottom of 9×12 or 10×13 pan. Place in 400° F oven until melted. While butter is melting, whisk or blend flour, eggs, milk and salt. When butter is melted, pour into pan with swirling motion. Bake for approximately 20 minutes. Pancake will puff up! Best served with elderberry syrup but also great with jelly, powdered sugar, etc. I have been known to serve these in the car in baggies – cold – and the kids eat them just as well. Enjoy!