Thankful Thursday

Well its Thursday and you know what that means...its THANKFUL THURSDAY!  Today I am thankful for Michaels store.  Yes I know this is a silly thing to be thankful for, but they always seem to have what I am looking for.  For my crayon art they had a 64 pack for crayons for $1!!  What a bargin, and they always have 40% off coupons.  I love that store, I just wish Michaels and Hobby Lobby would have a baby and then that store would be the most amazing store in the world!!  If you dont know what Michaels is or you dont have one if your area I am truly sorry to hear that.  You  need to start your own franchise of Michaels and you will be a millionaire, you know how much we ladies love to craft, you would never go out of business...no seriously when have you ever seen a Michaels shut down...NEVER thats when!  Here is a link to Michaels so you can check it out in case you dont know what it is.  http://www.michaels.com/  Now get out there a shop till you drop and come up with some fantastic crafting ideas!!  Until then here is a little inspiration for you.

I wish I had an awesome craft room like this, sadly I dont but we can always dream!  Happy crafting!!

Project Housewife Out!

Experience the Season

I promise this is the last post for the advent calendar!  You saw the calendar, you saw the patterns, and now you will see the cards for the experiences.  I posted what my experiences were, with a christmas song twist and here is the list again.

Holly Jolly Christmas!

Hang the stockings with care

It’s a sugar date to make cookies

Away in a manger…the real  story

Bring good cheer to someone

Yummy holiday treats for Oreo

Mix and mingle to a Jinglin’ beat

Painted candy canes on the tree, a new one each year

Jingle Bell Rock all night at a concert

Visit a Winter Wonderland

Here we come a ’caroling

Baby its cold outside, so let’s go out for a treat!

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer…and popcorn!

Bearing gifts to travelers a ’far…or down the street

Have a cup of cheer…or hot chocolate

Comfy cozy are we at breakfast

Say hello to friends you know down the street

Make a new Christmas decoration

Wrap presents ‘round the tree

Rush home with our treasure

Let it snow with Harry Potter and popcorn

Don’t be a mean one Mr. Grinch.

Do you hear what I hear?  New Christmas music.

Make a House so Sweet

Deck the Halls!

After I made my list, and it took a while to come up with all the cute sayings, I wanted to print them on cardstock and put them in the ornament pockets.  I thought I would find a premade template from avery.com since they have premade labels and such but I couldnt find anything cute so I set out to make my own.  In Microsoft Word (I am a PC, haha) I made a table that was 2inches x 4inches (which I now realize was a little too long so it should have been 2x3, but you can learn from my trial by error) and started plugging in my phrases.  After I had that all done, I went on google to try and find an awesome border, and I found a great holly one, which I share here now for you :)

I am still getting used to Windows 7 so it took a while to get the placement right on this clip art and to make it stay behind the text, but once I got the clip art set as the background for each block of the table I was ready to print.  I printed these on cardstock and then laminated them just to be sure nothing would happen to them and I would have them for years to come.  And here is what they look like now.

Not my finest photography moment, but you get the idea.  So now they are all in the slots of the christmas tree and ready for the first day of December!  I do want to add that when you put your activities make sure you pay attention to the date.  You dont want to put a weekend activity in a weekday slot, for example we have the visit a winter wonderland card, well thats not really something we want to do after we get off work because where we go is an hour and a half away, so that has to go in a saturday or sunday slot.  You get the picture, so happy creating!

Project Housewife Out!

Color Me Happy!

As we all know I am addicted to pinterest, so when I saw this I knew I was in trouble.  I never know what I get my grandmothers for Christmas and thought, why not make them some art.  So I waited for canvases to go on sale at Michaels and set about making my art.  A side note for this project, you are more than welcome to use Crayola brand for your crayons, but a 64 pack was about $7, but a 64 pack no-name was $1...thats right $1 so you can tell which one I chose.  What you will need is:

1. Hair dryer
2. Canvas size of your choice
3. Hot glue gun and extra glue sticks
4. Crayons- I used 2 boxes per 12x12 canvas (to get the colors I needed, I have the equilivant of 1 box left over, but its full of colors I didnt use)
5. Decorations, if you so choose
6. newspaper for easy clean up

Let me start by showing you the finished products to get you motivated to do your own.

Yay!  Lets get started!  I decided to do one like grass with flowers and the other like the sky with butterflies flying around.  I also thought this would be the best way to make the most of all the crayons so I ended up with all red/pinks in the extra box..what to do with those :)  To start off with, pick out all the colors you think you are going to want to use and line them up on the canvas.  I dont remember how many crayons I used but it was each color family from 2 boxes (so all the greens/yellows/brown from 2 boxes).  Once you have them all lined up how you like, start gluing them.

I dont know if you can tell from this picture, but when I glued mine down I made sure all the labels were facing the same way.  Since I didnt love the logo on the crayon I had the address line facing out as it had the least amount of text showing.  I tried to rip off the label but they wouldnt budge, you can try it buy it didnt work for me.  Once you have all the crayons glued down, set out your newspaper to start blow drying.  Warning...there is a fair amount of splatter to the back of the canvas and to the side so make sure you put enough newspaper to cover that.  I had a wine bottle that was pretty tall that I perched my canvases on to make the dripping easier for me, but Im sure you could just lean it up against something and that would be fine too.  Here is what it looks like after about 1 minute.

Since this was such a small canvas the whole thing only took about 15minutes per canvas, so not too bad and the color was pretty thick, needless to say I was happy with the results.  I did have some of the crayons get bunched down the middle and if that happens to you just run the blow drier over the parts that are too thick and they will melt down.  Also, I pointed the dryer down and towards the middle of the crayons that seemed to work best for me.  Remember that not all crayons melt at the same pace so be aware of that, I had one that wouldnt melt even after having the dryer on it for 5 minutes, so watch out for that.

Now that the color is all melted let it dry (about 5minutes, this stuff dries fast) and if you have designs, you can add them with the hot glue now.

Those are my finished projects, I love them and am a little sad to see them go, but that just means its time to make my own for my house!!  If you made some awesome crayon art, share I would love to see what inspiration you got!

Project Housewife Out!

An Organized Mess

A while back my friend Lauren and I decided it would be such a good idea to organize and share our recipes with each other.  Lauren found this cute idea on a blog and I cant remember where she found it from, but the pages were so cute, each section given a scrapbook paper to define them.  We thought that was cute and wanted to do one for ourselves.  Boy did we have a MAJOR project in store for us!  Let me tell you, the putting the binder together was sooo easy compared to typing up each recipe!  I have to say I think someone may have hit me on the head when I agreed that we should do this.  It has taken me...so far...2 weeks to type up the recipes I had in 1 binder...thats right ONE!  I didnt even type them all I copied and pasted them from the originating websites (thank you Betty Crocker/Better Homes and Gardens for making my life easier).  I do admit they look amazing all uniform and pretty with no food on them from previous cookings, but it really is a lot of work.  If you are going to take this project on be warned that it will take a looooong time to get all the recipes together.  What I would suggest is get the binder done first, then you can add the recipes as you go.  From the beginning of the blog I said that the idea came from a lady who did scrapbook paper on each page, yeah well we thought she was crazy because A) thats even more work and B)if you run out of paper and want to add more recipes you are screwed because then it wont be uniform, so we came up with our own twist to the idea.  Below you can see the binder I used (super cute from target!) and the index we made.



So for the index, we picked scrapbook paper that we liked and used Lauren's awesome scrapbooking supplies to make the circles, she had one of those big circle hold punchers so they are all the same size and awesome.  We found that centering the text and using an arrow to point to the corresponding circle worked best for us, but you may have a better idea so of course feel free to make it your own (we did!).  To make the tabs we realized that using sheet protectors hid the dividers and that stunk so what we did was take the 12x12 scrapbook paper and cut it down to 9 1/2 x 11 that way it stuck out enough that we can see it but not too far that it sticks out of the binder (trust me we cut that paper and measured so many times it was getting insane).  So once we had all the paper cut, we realized that it didnt do any good if it could just get wet/ripped/torn so Lauren with her amazing scrapbook supplies had 12x12 laminating sheets.  So we lamanated each sheet, 3-hold punched it and now had awesome dividers.  You can see some of the colors here, but the 2nd picture is a full shot of the divider.

Aside from the horror of typing up all the recipes, this project took all of 2 hours (with all the cutting and laminating and just plain being tired because of the rain) and looks awesome!  Now that this is all done I cant wait to get all my other recipes added to the binder.  If you make one share!  I would love to see what you came up with.

Project Housewife Out!

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Foodies Friday

Yesterday as you know was Thanksgiving.  I decided I was going to make everything myself and 90% of that was from scratch.  I didnt make my pie crust, gravy or stuffing but I did make homemade cresent rolls, pie, cheesecake, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes and of course the fried turkey.  Today I am going to share with you the cheesecake recipe.  My picture doesnt make it look appetizing, but the Betty Crocker picture does.  So here is my picture of the cheesecake.

And before I show you the Betty Crocker picture, let me give you the recipe first (put some space between my picure and theirs lol)

Ingredients

Crust

2cups gingersnap cookie crumbs (about 32)

1/4cup butter or margarine, melted

Cheesecake

4packages (8 oz each) cream cheese, softened

1 1/2cups sugar

4eggs

1cup canned pumpkin (not pumpkin pie mix)

1 1/2teaspoons ground ginger

1teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4teaspoon ground nutmeg 

 

Directions

• 1 Heat oven to 300°F. Grease 9-inch springform pan with shortening or cooking spray. Wrap foil around pan to catch drips. In small bowl, mix cookie crumbs and butter. Press crumb mixture in bottom and 1 inch up side of pan. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until set. Cool 5 minutes.
• 2 Iin large bowl, beat cream cheese with electric mixer on medium speed just until smooth and creamy; do not overbeat. On low speed, gradually beat in sugar. On low speed, beat in eggs, one at a time, just until blended. Spoon 3 cups of the cream cheese mixture into pan; spread evenly.
• 3 Stir pumpkin, ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg into remaining cream cheese mixture; mix with wire whisk until smooth. Spoon over mixture in pan.
• 4 Bake 1 hour 25 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes or until edges are set but center of cheesecake still jiggles slightly when moved.
• 5 Turn oven off; open oven door at least 4 inches. Leave cheesecake in oven 30 minutes longer. Remove from oven; place on cooling rack. Without releasing side of pan, run knife around edge of pan to loosen cheesecake. Cool in pan on cooling rack 30 minutes. Cover loosely; refrigerate at least 6 hours but no longer than 24 hours.
• 6 Run knife around edge of pan to loosen cheesecake again; carefully remove side of pan. Place cheesecake on serving plate. Store cheesecake covered in refrigerator.

Keep in mind that this does have to sit overnight, so that was good for me because I made it the day before and that was one less thing I had to cook Thanksgiving day.  I hope yours turns out great.  I blew out my hand mixer doing mine.  As an important note the cream cheese MUST be at room temperature before you try and mix it otherwise it will get lumpy and burn out your mixer (like I did mine) so dont learn the hard way head my warning!  haha, just kidding break your mixer if you want, mine was only $5 bucks and needed to be upgraded anyway.  So as promised here is the beautiful betty crocker shot of the cheesecake, and if yours turns out like this you must post a picture so I can be jealous of your pastry skills!

Project Housewife Out!

Thankful Thursday

I know this post is a day late but seeings as I was cooking up a storm yesterday I didnt have time.  So today is a 2 post day.  Starting with my thankfulness.  Today I am thankful for my amazing family, through thick and thin I can always count on them no matter what and I dont think everyone can say that about their families so I count myself lucky that I can say that.  I also am thankful that they let me experiment on them with new foods.  Yesterday I attempted my first cheesecake and pecan pie.  I think they turned out ok, but they said it was awesome.  I think my assessment was a little more accurate but I like the compliments so Ill say it was awesome.  I am going to post the recipe for the cheesecake, you can make it and be the judge of weather its good or not!  Here is a picture of the pecan pie to make you hungry.

Project Housewife Out!

Underneath the Miseltoe

You remember a while back I made some super easy Christmas Ornaments?  Well I had some left over christmas picks and decided to make my own "miseltoe".  I know it looks nothing like the real thing, but I thought it would be a nice decoration to add to all my others since I dont really have anything that serves as miseltoe in the house.

Super easy, just get your picks (I used 3) tape them all together and tie a bow around it!  So fast and easy and this ones is so fun I can put it just about anywhere!  Have fun making your super easy "miseltoe" and if you have some amazing pictures of one you have made share!!

Project Houdewife Out!