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!
First I suppose a little back story is in order. Gabe and Jack have been participating in a reading competition at school. When they read for 15 minutes a night for a certain number of nights they received a certain shell or starfish or sand dollar as a prize. Well, with them both enjoying reading, they got all of the prizes available. At the end of the competition (Friday February 27th) they held a prize drawing that included all of the kids’ names. Jack’s name was drawn and called out over the intercom to come get a prize and he was awarded a ukulele. He was very happy to get it so we ‘tuned’ it last night and the kids have all been playing it and singing along.
Fast forward a few hours and the kids (except for Cole) are in bed so that Lizabeth, Cole, and Don can have an online scrabble tournament on Facebook. After three games we notice that it is almost midnight and we still have not prepared for the house showing at 10:30 the next morning. We hastily created a list of things that we needed to accomplish before the showing so that nothing gets missed, set the alarm for 5 a.m. so we can get it all done and head to bed, noticing that now it is after 1 a.m. Somehow we are ‘blessed’ with a wakeup call (wrong number) at 4:30 a.m. We decided that we should get up and moving anyway and began the day by making beds and doing dishes and shoveling the 6 inches of new snow.
Later when we are well into the cleaning routine and the kids are up the hilarity begins. Jack and Ben are standing in the hallway when I hear the following discussion:
Ben: "Is that your bitar?"
Jack: "It’s not a guitar, it’s a ukulele."
Ben: "It’s not a huku-lady, it’s a bitar!"
Jack: "No, it’s a ukulele not a guitar!"
Ben: "It’s not a huku-lady, it’s a bitar!!!"
This continued back and forth for probably ten or twelve times before I totally lost it and began laughing out loud. Then on and off throughout the day the same discussion has ensued. Ben still thinks it is a ‘bitar’ and NOT a ‘huku-lady’ no matter who tells him differently.
After the showing when we were all back home and resting, the kids were watching a Scooby-Doo video Ben was playing with the huku-lady when a scene right out of a Quick-draw McGraw cartoon occurred. (For those of you who are too young, look here: QuickDraw McGraw cartoon at YouTube) Ben climbed up onto the chair where I was dozing and kabonged me right on the forehead. I awoke, grabbed the kabonger and very loudly explained that we do NOT hit people. He cried for a bit until I hugged him and we were all better. Then Cole looked at me and said, “Dad you’re bleeding!” Sure enough, I had a split in my head right above my eyebrow. We debated for a bit whether or not it needed stitches, and finally decided that since no one lost a finger or had a chopstick in their ear, we could skip the emergency room and applied a little tape and I went back to dozing. I really didn’t want to either visit the ER nor pay the $100 deductable for said visit.
Added Monday morning by Lizabeth: I think it’s funny that Don categorized this under “Things to be Thankful For” on my blog. Nice perspective! Or, perhaps…you’re not thinking clearly from being bonged on the head?!?
Great typography and design. UK based artist David Wardle has quite a portfolio. He’s also one of the founders of the website Bold & Noble which I posted about earlier here.
So many people are taking it on themselves to create some of Pottery Barn’s button art. It is beautiful but I say try something different with the same idea – check out these buttonified curtains. Beautiful! Embellish-away. Curtain idea from Better Homes & Gardens online.
Beautiful art with a very scandinavian feel. Check out Louise Elliott’s website here.
From Crafting A Green World, written by Jackie Hernandez. Brilliant. I never remember to take the bags back to Whole Foods, anyway, and this is a great way to use them up and makes adorable recipe cards! Follow the tutorial here.
Wow. A really decked out Janome. Talk about bling! Sewing machine bling – who knew?! There’s a fantastic giveaway going on now at The Crafty Chica. To enter the giveaway, send an email to amalec(at)randomhouse(dot)com with Crafty Chica Sweepstakes in the subject line. Information on this giveaway was from CRAFT Magazine.
I originally posted about the top photo from Cookie here. First spotted on the Cookie website, there was “Keep calm and carry on.” Now there’s “Make do & mend.” Common sense with a visual reminder. Great for the times we are living in. Make do & mend originated with Bold & Noble but spotted on Decor8.
