Yikes.

So....yeah, I kind of disappeared for a while. My apologies. I think I burned myself out so badly with the holidays that I needed some time to regroup. It was a very hectic time, and I all but ended up in a mental hospital. Okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but really, it was C-R-A-Z-Y. I actually had to learn to say "No"....which if you know me AT ALL, is completely against my nature.

Anyway, I am happy to report that the cookies came out great! Though I will have to practice some self discipline next year and not make so many. Quite a bit went to waste, and they were a big cause of my burn out.

But, on to more current topics! I have (surprise surprise) found yet another new obsession. I'll bore you the nerdy details, but I will tell you it begins with extreme and ends with couponing. Though I do it on a much smaller scale, haha! The bearded man in my life might disagree with that though. He doesn't quite grasp the concept of stocking up on things, but he's being a good sport about it so far! ;)

Speaking of him, he gave me the best Christmas Eve of my life, by asking me to spend the rest of my life with him! With the aid of our beautiful daughter he asked me to marry him, and we are due to be married on August 23rd! Very exciting! You can expect at least a few posts about all the crafts I will be making for our big day!

Don't mind my Old-Lady hands!

I am also pleased to announce that I have booked our second craft event! Hopefully since I've done one, I can be a little better prepared for it this time! I am currently in the "testing" process of preparation, trying to come up with some great new summer products...or at least products that aren't so focused on cold weather like pretty much everything we make is so far. Tonight I am starting on my first venture, which also happens to be another great repurposing of jeans, and uses the part of the pants that my Repurposed Denim Coasters don't use! I am attempting to weave baskets and bowls using strips of denim. If these turn out, I will finally be able to shrink the supply of denim I have stored in just about every room of my house! My next post will show the process and either the success or failure that I experience. Worst case scenario, I end up with a not-so-pretty container to store some of my smaller, hard-to-organize items in my couponing stockpile. ;) So while I painfully await the drying of my fabric glue, I wish you all a nice and peaceful night!

The Year of Freezer Cookies-- An Experiment, and Reviews Pt. 1

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Nevermind that it's 50 degrees outside and all our snow is melting (WooHoo!!!), but it's time to start making cookies!

 Every year I bake ridiculous amounts of cookies and other goodies, and package them as gifts for friends and family that we may not otherwise be able to afford to buy/make gifts for. It is a very busy and stressful time of the year, but the end result always gives me joy. I absolutely LOVE giving gifts to people. It's a great feeling to see someone smile and know you're the reason for that.

Anyway, this year I decided to try something different, in hopes of easing the stress on myself. I am going to make some of the doughs ahead of time, and try freezing them! I have lots of recipes I'm hoping to make, so I'm hoping that only having to bake and decorate them may help ease the last-minute workload. So again, I consulted my best buddy, Pinterest, and pinned some recipes that sounded scrumptious. Later, I went and narrowed them down, as I can't possibly make 30+ varieties. After stocking up on some supplies, I decided to start off by whipping up some dough to shape and freeze. The first one I tried out was a chocolate shortbread recipe that I pinned from Persnickety Plates. I edited it a bit though, as I LOVE chocolate and mint. Instead of the vanilla, I added peppermint extract. I also decided to double the recipe, as it claimed to not make many cookies. I tend to be a little scatterbrained and always have to wait for my butter to soften. I never remember to take it out ahead of time. There should be an app for that....

I will be interested to see how these cookies turn out. After the original poster bragged that the dough was so easy to work with that she didn't even need flour to roll them out, I had high hopes. Too high, I suppose. My dough turned out very sticky, and even after chilling overnight, was extremely hard to work with. Unless these turn out mind-blowing once they're baked, I don't think I'll be making them again. Even after making a double batch, I didn't end up with many cookies.

Next up, was a recipe I was very excited about, and I cannot wait until these are baked so that I can gobble taste-test them. These scrumptious Hot Cocoa Cookies from Mom's Test Kitchen smell exactly like a nice warm mug of hot cocoa. I know, if I wasn't so nervous about the whole raw-egg thing, I may have just eaten the whole bowl of dough right then and there! They sounded so yum that I decided to do a double batch of these too.

 

Now doesn't that just look scrumptious? This was a dough that was extremely easy to work with. So much so, that I ignored my insane desire to run screaming to the sink to wash my hands, because oh-my-gosh-I-have-something-icky-all-over-them!, and balled them by hand....

I have found that with all these recipes, it is easiest to stick them on a tray in the freezer to partially freeze so that I can then transfer them into a freezer bag for storage. Now to resist the urge to bake them for myself.....

Next up was a recipe that I find very cute, as they are itty bitty versions of one of my favorite cookies my Grandma used to make us all the time....

Itty bitty peanut butter cookies! Aren't they cute? Don't ask where those lines came from, I have no idea. Some weird lighting thing I guess...

These little guys are (or will be) Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies from over at Tastes of Lizzy T. Not only are they adorable on their own, they will become itty bitty homemade Nutter Butters!! I bet they'll be even better too! This dough, while being extremely easy to work with, is very time consuming. I only made a single batch, and it took me a few hours, as I could only fit one tray in the freezer at a time. You roll the dough into little 1" balls, and let me tell you, it makes a TON of them. I probably made 8-10 trays of them today from a single batch of dough.

Let me tell you, I am exhausted from all these cookies! I still have one more type I am planning to make and freeze, and then one that I am waiting to just make and bake. Then I have other goodies to make for the baskets, as well as making a bunch of little boxes to package all these cookies in! I will include all these things in Pt. 2 of this "Experiment", where we will reveal how these all turn out after baking!

What do you do to simplify your Christmas preparations? Do you make anything homemade as gifts?

Crafting Burn Out and Granny Square Obsession?

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! I am happy to report I enjoyed lots of time with family, and succeeded in finishing my holiday shopping! I call that a successful weekend! But now that all the traveling and shopping is done, it's time for me to get back to crafting. But I have run into a road block. I call it....

Crafting burn out! I suffer from this condition quite often. I start a project, especially ones that take a good chunk of time to complete, and after spending hours working on it, I get burned out on it. I get sick of working on it and need other things to work on in order to pull me out of my funk. Hence why I usually have a number of projects going all at once. I work on something for a while, until I get bored, then work on another one, and keep rotating. I currently have 3 projects going, and they are all quite time consuming.

So last night, after spending 5 hours in the car, I settled in to work on them. But....I just couldn't do it. I am working on a crochet denim rug ( a future post in the works for that one!) and a couple blankets, and none of them really interested me last night. So, after wandering Pinterest for a while, I decided to explore the Granny Square obsession. I have read many many crocheting bloggers talk about sitting and crocheting piles of granny squares, with no particular plan for them. They talked about how enjoyable they are to make. So, I looked up a basic design that I had pinned a while back. The original poster had used it to make baby blankets, but at this point in time, I am just making them for the fun of it, and they will be transformed into something else when the inspiration strikes. Tamara Kelly, over at Moogly posted this amazing tutorial with many links to stitch and technique video tutorials. So since these seemed extremely simple (they are!) and quick to make, I decided to try them out. I picked a random four colors from my stash, and got to work!

I now see why everyone says they're addictive! Even after having to wrestle with majorly tangled yarn, I completed two squares in an hour. I know that once my yarn situation is "squared" away (lame crochet joke!) I will be able to do at least four an hour. This will be great for those days where i work hours on another project but feel like I'm accomplishing nothing because I don't complete anything! Then at least I will have something to show for my work. I decided to keep things simple and not do her fancy chainless double crochet or seamless join. I just used my usual techniques and I think they turned out just fine. If you have any questions on how to edit the pattern so you don't have to use those harder techniques, don't hesitate to post your questions in the comments. I will respond quickly and do my best to help. What is your favorite quick project to use to bust "crafting burn out"?

Once there was a lady.....

...who always admired women with blogs. She always dreamed of having one that people read, and with which she could share all the crafts she spends all her time doing, as well as the recipes she creates for her family!

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Obviously that woman is me! So I have decided to give it a shot! I spend WAY too much of my time crafting, but it is my source of sanity. We all know how addicting Pinterest is, and the inspiration overflowing from there has me starting 5 different projects all at once on a regular basis, as well as causing my waistline to expand with all it's scrumptious recipes. After browsing Pinterest, I have a tendency to have a strong need to bake something. No, really, it's baaaaad. Before Pinterest, I tended to bake on special occasions, or as a way to surprise The Bearded One (also known as the special man in my life). Now, though, it is a very common thing for us to have some sort of homemade goodness adorning our kitchen counter on a daily basis. 

Since me and my family have an extremely limited budget, the guilt of spending money on craft supplies was building up. Therefore, I wanted to turn my obsessive hobby into more of a career. Enter Etsy. This website is one of the greatest sites ever invented. I have never seen so many amazingly talented people gathered all into one place. My wishlist from there is miles long. Like, to the point where I don't even bother favoriting everything I love. There is just not enough money in the world! The overflowing talent oozing from Etsy is what keeps me going on my quest to be successful in the crafting world. My meager shop has yet to have any sales, but the success I see others having is what pushes me to keep creating and improving my skills.

Welcome to my journey! I hope to give everyone a little insight to my little corner of the world, whether it be my crafting, cooking or parenting. I strive to be true to life, therefore will not be making myself look like a crafting god. You will see my successes, but also my failures. I hope that in showing them to you as well, that you can learn from my mistakes and that we can grow from them together. With that, I leave you with a couple links to some of the women bloggers who inspired me to start this adventure! Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The Dayton Time

The Creative Junkie

The Happy Moneysaver

All About Ami