Cooking, Making and Baking

By late October, I was trying to catch up on my neverending list of projects to do while also taking advantage of sunny weather, although it was starting to cool off pretty fast, and then we had our first Nor'easter.  These are mini bottles with coloured water (with a drop of glycerin), with the corks glued in.  I don't think I'm going to put labels on them cause they are so pretty.

I made the jar with the blobbies in the spring but I had to wait till coloured lights showed back up in the stores.  I put 2 sets of battery operated LED lights inside.  There is a setting to make them just stay on steady, or flashing.  This pic was taken on the flashing setting.

And these are the lights on steady.

One of my friends posted a recipe for tortellini soup. I actually had all the ingredients in the house and was really hungry so whipped it up in about a half hour. I used a bit too much spinach, but it's really, really good. So simple. 

And then this happened:  triple chip drops of deliciousness.  

I totally forgot that I'd purchased a mini Halloween shrine kit last year.  I was digging for something else and unearthed it so of course I had to work on it right away.  I had to assemble the box and it came with the spider web topper, bat and skulls.  I sponged paint on the bat and skulls and added the rhinestone eyes. Then I added the paper in the background with a key that I steampunked a bit.  Finally, I added the larger gears in each corner, cathedral 'doors' and the chains were the last part.

Initially I was gonna go a different way with the inside, but that would've required a trip to the craft store in a terrible rain storm so I made due with what I had and it still came out pretty good.

I also forgot I bought these starfish so I stuck a piece of beach glass in the center and wrapped wire around them.

Some have a combo of copper, silver and gold.

And one just has the wire on the top part of the star.  Mostly cause I got lazy and didn't feel like wrapping another one, as I'd already done about 7.

I also decided to try that thing where you cut out a pattern in black paper and use it over your camera lens.  I really don't know what I'm doing, but the lights didn't come out looking like the witches' hat I cut into the paper, other than creating a filter for the lens in kind of that shape. 

Out of focus, the lights do take on a sort-of hat shape.

Next, I got a bunch of Christmas balls at the dollar store to try this wreath project.  They came in tubes of 15 and 24.  Quite a few years ago, much like Joan Crawford, I banished the wire hangers from our house, but I actually found ONE and only one, buried in the back of the closet.  It was a little hard to bend it into a decent circle shape, but the project went pretty quickly.  I should have taken the time to glue on all the ball caps because they have a tendency to pop off, but this was just a test prototype anyway.  It takes about 80 or more balls, medium and small size.

I also tried growing Borax crystals on a pipe cleaner.  I let it soak in the solution for almost 24 hours.  Came out great!  

I have a feeling that November is going to fly by as fast as the rest of 2014 has!

Temporarily Sidelined

We recently came into a bumper crop of Snocaps candies, which was always my fave movie candy.  But I certainly didn't need 50 or 60 boxes of them so I started doling them out to my friends, esp. after a Triple Choc Chip Cookie recipe showed up on Pinterest, which called for Snocaps.  You can find the recipe HERE.  Let me just add that the raw dough is pretty darn delish too.  I substituted peanut butter chips for the white chox in the recipe.  They should be called 'Triple Chip Drops of Heaven'.  I got about 33 cookies from the recipe.  Oh, the peanut M&Ms are Russell's.

Peepers peepin'

It was my honey's birthday at the end of March.  

I decided to make him a pineapple upside down cake, from scratch no less.  I'd also bought the box mix as a backup plan.  What I liked about the scratch one was that the ingredients seemed much healthier, plus it was going to make a smaller square cake, not the 9x13 pan size, which neither of us needed to be consuming. HERE is the recipe for it, which is from the Betty Crocker website.  It came out pretty good....I only encountered one problem with a pineapple sticking to the dish but it flipped without breaking.  The brown sugar also kinda pooled around the sides and edges more than in the middle.  But hey, he loved it and that's all I care about.  This is, incidentally, the first from-scratch cake I ever made.

All he said he wanted for his bday was a kiss from me, but I got him the M&Ms and a scratch ticket too.

We went to visit his family over the weekend and his sis treated us all to Seafood Sam's take out for his birthday lunch. "Himself" borrowing someone's reading glasses in order to see the menu and sticking his tongue out at me for taking a picture.

One brother and one sister weren't there but I still took a fam photo of his other brother Jimmy, their dad Jim, sister Grace, Russell and Ma.

Carrie and her adorable kids Katie & Abi were there, and my future sister in law Janice (she's married to Jimmy, and we went to high school together too; she was in Russell's class and her sister was in mine).

So anyways, I'm sidelined from doing crafts and anything else that requires the use of my right arm.  We had torrential downpours on Sunday and I slipped on the wooden deck and went down in a crumpled heap on my right side.  I spent that day watching a bunch of Harry Potter movies and weeping off and on.  Finally saw 'Deathly Hallows Part 2' and the floodgates really opened then.  Wow, that was a sad film.  The fall also affected muscles on the left side as well including a slight twist of my left ankle.  Back hurts, neck hurts, every goddamn thing hurts.  That means I can't craft, clean, grocery shop, or do anything else for that matter.  Taking the dogs out is really, really hard because I have to have both leads in my left hand and they are very strong dogs. I still can't go on any day trips yet because it's still icky off and on, and while there are sunny, clear days, everything is in that post-winter drab & yucky mode. Nothing's in bloom.  I have no further blog posts drafted at the mo past 4/3, because I haven't taken any new pics or done anything of import in the craft room.  I'm still working on the butterfly cross stitch and I started a new project, both on hold till my arm stops hurting.  I will be minioning with Tina's Terrific Team for Blogging from A-Z April 2014 but am not participating as a blogger.  I am sure I will get back to a regular posting schedule by next week, hopefully, but I just need to take a little break for a few days till I get better.