The Stampin' Up! Party Recipes

So my Stampin' Up! Party isn't closed yet and I get asked for the recipes for all the treats that were there. Including the one that I didn't plan for, but hubby brought for his mini-LAN party upstairs with the boys.

Spiced Apple Cider

1 gallon fresh pressed apple cider (preferably from New Harmony, UT Apple Festival) (The closest tasting to that fresh cider is Simply Apple brand)

1 orange, sliced

10 whole cloves

1 cinnamon stick

fresh ginger, peeled and cut into 6, 1-inch long pieces

Put all the cider in a 5 qt crock pot. Push cloves into orange slices and float on top. Drop in cinnamon stick and ginger pieces. Heat until warm, on high if you want it warm faster.

Orange Cranberry Bread

That recipe came from here: Sally's Baking Addiction--Orange Glazed Cranberry Bread

Strawberry Bread

That recipe also came from here: Sally's Baking Addiction--Strawberry Bread

Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Bread

Same website for this recipe too: Sally's Baking Addiction--Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Bread

If you can't tell yet, Sally seems to have lots of good quick bread recipes that turn out yummy!

Now for the one that my hubby made...

Bowtie Pasta Salad

1 lb. box of bow tie pasta cooked and drained (save some of the pasta water)

1 large can of cooked chicken, shredded (or 2 small cans)

1 cup frozen peas

about 1 small jar of Kalamata Olive pieces, no pits, drained

about 1/2 cup Parmesan Cheese, shredded, to your liking

about 1/2 cup Romano Cheese, shredded, to your liking

1 bottle Olive Garden Italian salad dressing

pepper to taste

This is really a mix until to your liking recipe, but here's the basic instructions. Mix the chicken, peas, olives and cheeses together in a large bowl. Dump in the warm pasta and mix to melt the cheese. Then start mixing in the salad dressing until everything is coated to your liking. You might not use the entire bottle. Add pepper to your liking. If the salad dressing is too thick, you can stir in some of the reserved pasta water to thin it out.

If you don't like something or want more of it, feel free to change it up. But apparently this was the last variation that everyone liked the most.

Vintage Ceramic Christmas Tree Makeover

So I finally got around to fixing this sad looking thrift store ceramic tree I found for $4.00. I didn't take a before picture but, imagine this medium 8" tree with a string of light bulbs poking out of the holes of this ceramic piece. And the inside is covered with Scotch tape holding the wires against the inside wall so the light bulbs would stay put. Anyone who has ever had one of these trees would think it was laughable and pretty dumb looking.

It took me about an hour to peel all the tape off and pull the broken string of lights out to get it down to just the plain glazed ceramic mold waiting for those pretty peg lights. I found a bag of assorted medium plastic peg lights and shapes for $2.00 at another thrift store, and it had just enough of the white twist lights to use on the tree. (I still have the other assorted lights plus a white star if anyone thinks they need them).

So here's the tree back to its former glory

Doesn't it look much better? Do not use a glue for the lights that is acrylic or solvent based like super glue. Those kinds of glues will eat the plastic and damage the glaze on your ceramic piece. The recommended glue is actually Elmer's white glue or Elmer's Glue-All. So if one of your lights becomes loose, it's easy to get the glue off the finish and glue it back in with Elmer's glue.

This particular tree is a McCoy Ltd ceramic tree, 8 inches high and didn't come with a base or a light cord when I found it. The two I looked up on eBay didn't have bases either and had colored lights in them. I like the all white bulbs myself against the green glaze. I found a light cord that I thought could work with this tree. It's actually a cord that has a spring hinge that fits in a hole for a ceramic house or building, but has a flat side that could stand up on one end. Anything else was meant to screw into a ceramic base, that I didn't have. So I made a cardboard base for the light socket to stabilize it and keep it upright in the tree.

The recommended light bulb wattage for my medium tree was 15 watts tapered bulb. If your tree is about 2 feet tall, then up to a 25 watt bulb is recommended. Don't use a higher wattage bulb or your tree will get very hot and probably cause a fire. It's an enclosed space and you want to keep it as cool as possible. I got a 15 watt LED bulb from Walmart that only uses 3 watts, so it's very cool to use in my tree. Now I'll probably have to put it away and bring it out next Christmas since it didn't get finished this last year.

Christmas 2014 Craft Projects

Well...here they are, the crafts for Christmas 2014. We actually finished the cards before Halloween and had to store them somewhere until it was a better time to mail them.

Hubby suggests getting that Spellbinders All-in-One tool to help with the die cutting. We didn't get one until after he cut out all the trees. And while the imaginince i-rock jewel setter is nice for a few heat set jewels, I might get a better jewel setter later for bigger projects. It went through quite a few batteries heat setting all those jewels. Everything else went together as normal.

The neighborhood gifts were Mint Muddy Buddies in a stylish canning jar with the flower punched lids, colored paper under them and pretty ribbon glued around it. I made the label in Silhouette Studio, and hubby came up with the saying.  Isn't he clever?

Halloween House 2014

So here it is, what the house looked like for Halloween this year. Hubby changed the route to the front door, and directed the trick-or-treaters through the middle of the yard so they can be closer to the spiders.

Then we have my usual big spiders and I added the white one this year.

My favorite part is the pumpkins and spiders corner with my purple LED jeweled spider tree.

We have some trick-or-treaters that stopped by for a picture and some of us in costume.

Even Catnip dressed up as a pumpkin. Surprisingly he wore it all night.

Six Years of Christmas Cards

Hubby and I have been making Christmas cards for a while since we were married. Ok, so the first year we didn't make a Christmas card. We just got married and were paying off a wedding, and I don't know what the cards were that year anyway, probably store bought. So we're going to start with Christmas number two.

This was hubby's idea, to make a computer art card by putting the cats on it. That's why we're still careful about what we put on our Christmas tree. Here's the inside...

Christmas #3, He doesn't want to cut ribbon ever again.

Christmas #4, I don't want to color in little ornaments and wear my colored pencils down to stumps. Bro-in-law helped color these too.

Christmas #5 No tree, but it still had an ornament.

Christmas #6 We used everything for this one. I was afraid I was going to wear out my punches.

Christmas #7 Last year's card. The cat was covered in green glitter.

Not sure I have a particular card making style, but I do have a theme to my Christmas cards. This year's card is going to be just as pretty.

Crocheted Crocodile Stitch Rainbow Baby Blanket

I think it's safe to post this now. Yes, it's for another baby in the family. This time the blanket is for hubby's sister and her second baby, not born yet. Her firstborn really loves the blanket I made her and takes it everywhere. Sorry, no pics of that blanket.

I wanted to try my hand at the crocodile stitch that's been buzzing around Pintrest and looks like crocheted scales. The free pattern I found used only one color, but I wanted it rainbow colored.

The pattern is from Bonita Patterns Blog and her crocodile stitch baby blanket. She used a solid mint green, but I like the rainbow overlapping scales effect. So, when you get to the end of a completed scale row, go ahead and clip it to add another color. There are 12 Caron Simply Soft colors in mine. One dark and one light in the rainbow. I did have to go to a couple craft stores to get the colors I was looking for. They didn't carry all the same colors. So I went to Michael's Crafts and Walmart to fill in the color gaps that the other store didn't have. Or you can order from Caron directly.

You will want to weave in your ends before you add the border, or it'll look bulky and messy. The blanket is about 35 inches square. Not very big, but thick and squishy. So it should be warm and tactile for little fingers to play with.

Careful on the border instructions. I think Bonita is missing some corner repeat stitches in her instructions on border rows 2 and 3. You'll want to repeat the corner stitches 2 more times to finish turning the corner. On my blanket, I only went up to border row 4 . Adding the last row, I thought, would make it look too wide, and use more yarn than I had left. You can also add ribbon to the border holes if you like. I didn't have any that looked good, so I didn't. Bonita has instructions for that with the pattern.

So I finished the blanket and it went down to sis-in-law's house. I'll wait to hear if she likes it, and if big sister approves. 

8/14/14 Yup, sis-in-law loves it. And there is a new baby boy too.

Kusudama Paper Flower Centerpieces

Ok, since finishing the quilt, I've been busy folding paper. These centerpieces are for the Harmonaires annual potluck performance. I added a third color this year; red, white and black.

Yes, I made 15 of them, again. So each cardboard box (from Hobby Lobby) holds 12 paper flowers. Each paper flower has 5 folded pieces of paper. So that would mean hubby and I folded 900 pieces of paper! Yikes!

Since this event is always music themed, we'd need some music flowers. Don't worry, I didn't cut up important music. We used some old Children's hymn books that we cut the pages into 6" squares. Gotta love that the old books were $1.00 each at Deseret Industries. The black and red flowers are real origami paper that I ordered online in bulk. Good luck finding one color packs of usable paper, (which I got from Mulberry Paper).

The flowers are assembled with 1/8" inch Sookwang tape, except for the last piece. You need to leave the last side open to get your wire or pipe cleaner stem in the middle. Then hot glue the stem in and a flat backed jewel in the middle. Hot glue a slice of the green floral foam in the middle of the box and hide it with half a sheet of black tissue paper. Also cut up a piece of red tissue paper into quarters and use 2 per box. The stems will easily poke through the paper into the foam while arranging. As you get to the sides of the arrangement, I just folded the stems in half to get that domed look.

Here's an example of one on a 60" round table with our usual red mesh squares and glass gems holding the edges down. It still curls up 3 years later.

It doesn't look half bad at the party. I tried to get a picture of the room before guests showed up. They were quick right after we just finished getting the tables set.

Bonus project! Remember the Easter candy boxes I made this year? We did it again with smaller pillow boxes and a music notes embossing folder. This time the embossing folder is from Spellbinders.

Oh, and the candy is delicious Chocolate Dutch Mints from Jelly Belly. Yes, you can get them in plain white instead of the pastel colors.

We did give away the centerpieces to the Harmonaires choir members as a present. There is no way I had room to store 15 bulky centerpieces without crunching the paper flowers. Our guests were excited to take them home.