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To celebrate finishing 100 days of my 365 project, a granny a day, I'll be giving away some of my favorite yarn and my favorite crochet hook!
So head on over to the Granny A Day Blog to enter!
Oh and since today is the last day of April here's a calendar view of the grannies I made this month:
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Like I said in today's previous post, any "what I wore" posts will be few and far between, but I feel the need to occasionally share.
Nail polish: Essie - Cute as a Button (a favorite spring color)
Yellow dots: Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure - Yellow Kitty (a new favorite and I love the play on hello kitty for the name)
Dress: I made it from a sheet using an Amy Butler Pattern.
Cardigan: Old Navy (I've had it since high school haha)
Tights: We Love Colors
Shoes: Jeffrey Campell
Dog: Dewey
There were more photos, but I look really awkward in all of them. I'm sure I'll get better at taking photos of myself. I don't like looking "posed."
Special thanks for Sara from Deluxe for donating the quilt top above for our wedding! My mom made it into a quilt and we took wedding pictures on it. It's a very cherished momento now.
Disclosure: I'm not affiliated with any of the products mentioned.
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A Granny A Day: Week 14
Each granny square image above will lead you to the individual post for more information
This week had some very lovely patterns I'm happy to announce that Saturday is my 100th granny and I will be celebrating with a giveaway! So meet me over there tomorrow for the big party.
Today is Arbor Day so Sheldon and I are celebrating by planting a cherry tree when we get home (we also have two lilac bushes and two azaela bushes to plant on Saturday). I ordered them from Arborday.org. I have been very happy with the cherry tree I bought from there and planted right after I bought my house (It's over 6 feet tall now!). It's a sweet cherry tree so it needed a friend to bear fruit. I knew that but I wasn't sure I could keep any trees alive at the time so I'm excited to plant a second tree and see what happens. It's been fun watching the other one grow up :)
I think I'm going to post a "what I wore" post later today. What do you think? I promise this isn't ever going to turn in to a fashion blog, but sometimes I feel cute and take pictures and think I should share them haha. Otherwise, I'm that weird girl taking pictures of herself in her backyard for no reason (vanity at its finest). And seriously, yesterday when I was taking them neighbors were outside trying to figure out what I was doing. I'll limit any clothing posts to handmade or thrifted wears only... pinky swear.
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Thrifted Thursday
I intended to post this last week because of Easter and all, but I suck at posting things on time lately. So here you go. Weather you agree with the sentiment or not, you have to agree this is a pretty cool plaque. Right? Oh well if you don't, my Southern Baptist raised self thinks it's pretty stinking awesome.
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Happiness is...
1. Letting Anna pick my nail polish colors., 2. Spending Levi's birthday with him. We're old ladies at heart., 3. An awesome vintage play kitchen, 4. A pretty kitty, 5. Levi's shoe collection,
6. Transforming Levi in to Miss Z for his "21st" birthday party., 7. Coffee and pale nails, 8. Homemade red velvet cake, 9. Dyeing eggs with my nieces, 10. Dyeing eggs with my nieces,
11. Dyeing eggs with my nieces, 12. Dyeing eggs with my nieces, 13. A pastel rainbow of icing, 14. The in-laws playing Hello Kitty go-fish with Anna., 15. New travel coffee mug
This video of Smiling Indians shot and edited by Sterlin Harjo and Ryan Red Corn. I watch it like once a week because it always reminds me of Sheldon and his twin when they get in giggling fits and then I have a hearty laugh. I hope it makes you smile :)
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You all probably know that I love baking, but you probably don't know that I absolutely hate making sugar cookies. Sure, I love how they look in the end and I'm a fan of a good sugar cookie, but the time they take... geeesh it's crazy. Sometimes I get a wild hair and decide that I must make some decorated sugar cookies. This happened last week. I couldn't get the thought of pastel Easter egg cookies out of my head and I knew that our niece, Anna would love decorating some when she came over for Easter lunch.
Here's a little rundown of what went into making these cookies: Mainly so I remember how awful the process is and never want to do it again :)
- Saturday morning I made the cookie dough because it has to chill. I use this recipe (I won't use any other recipe, it really is no-fail).
- On our way to family lunch we stopped at Michael's for me to look for Easter egg cookie cutters. They didn't have any of course so I bought a set of metal circles to shape into some eggs. I also bought a big thing of those squeeze bottles so Anna wouldn't have issues with piping bags. (we'll talk about these later)
- After we returned from family time and decorating Easter eggs I rolled all the cookies out and baked them (rolling and cutting sugar cookies is my first frustration with making sugar cookies. It's a process. I'm not good with drawn out processes.
- While the cookies were cooling I started the royal icing. (this recipe) Royal icing is a big pain. Getting the consistency right took me about an hour. Granted if I made the stuff all the time this wouldn't be as big of an ordeal. At this point it was about 8pm.
- Then I had to divide the icing into 6 bowls to make the different colors. I mixed all the colors and then realized the consistency was still a little off. So more water was added to make the flooding consistency right.
- At this point I needed to put the icing in the squeeze bottles I purchased. This was an issue. A funnel wouldn't work because the icing was too thick, so I put all of the icing in ziplock bags clipped the corner and filled the bottles. I normally would have just used my piping bags to keep from wasting ziplocks, but I really did want to make it easier for Anna (and less messy).
- I finally got around to doing the base flooding of icing on the cookies around 11pm. (This is a really good post from Sweetopia about decorating with royal icing.) I put the frosted cookies in my oven (it was on warm then I turned it off before I put the cookies in) to dry faster.
- Around 1:00am I decided I better do the decorating on top of the big cookies so they could be dry and then Anna could decorate the little cookies after lunch. This was the part that I enjoyed the most. All the hours of prep make it almost worth it! I have this same problem with sewing clothes. I love the sewing part but I absolutely hate all the ironing fabric, cutting patterns, cutting fabric, sewing - ironing - sewing - ironing, hemming, etc. I'm a one or two step kind of girl. haha
My flooding icing was somewhat thick enough to decorate the tops with but if I weren't being lazy, I would have made the thicker icing, colored it,separated it out,and thinned down one for flooding but at that point I wanted nothing more to do with cookie making so my decorated tops are a little runny.
Anna had a great time decorating all the little egg cookies.
She put crosses on most of them so everyone could have a cross cookie. I'm so proud of her for knowing and understanding why we celebrate Easter. Good job Anna!
I think she enjoyed eating the cookies more than making them though and I felt the same way!
P.S. I'm somewhat joking about how much I hated making these. It's fun for an every once-in-awhile thing, and it makes me appreciate beautifully decorated sugar cookies a million times more than I already did. Sometimes I just need to tell things like they are. I could have just posted pictures of my finished product and swooned about how fun it was to make them, but that just wasn't the case this time. Honesty is important for me and I know you all appreciate an honest blogger too. Are there any things you absolutely hate to do, even if the payoff is sometimes worth it? I'd love to know that I'm not the only one here that doesn't like multi-step projects.
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A Granny A Day: Week 13
Each granny square image above will lead you to the individual post for more information
Let's all pretend that this posted last Friday like it was supposed to. I didn't realize it was still marked as a draft instead of a timed post so it never went up. ooops. Sometimes having two blogs is a little too much for me. Week 13 was a great one! Especially because I finished the Gran's Garden blanket, but also because I started finding some more challenging squares for myself. If you know of any really difficult ones out there let me know what they are because I'm always looking for a challenge! I'm still getting ready for May to get here so I can start the Square a Day in May squares. I encourage you to join in with the group of people doing this month long challenge. The more the merrier! And a big thanks to Melissa from Hooked on Handmade for putting it together. That's a whole month of squares I don't have to plan!
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Happiness is...
1. Attending my niece's school program "Kindergarten Cafe", 2. Last week's nails, 3. Levi's colorful kitchen,
4. Awesome mugs of tasty drinks, 5. New Hair!, 6. Sunday Gospel Brunch at the Boom,
7. Dewey trying to hide before we leave in the mornings, 8. Springy clothing, 9. My new favorite spring/summer makeup
Music: Check it out!
Katie(@founditmadeitok on twitter) re-tweeted the following this morning "OH MY GOD, I am so nostalgic right now. RT @levarburton: Check it out!!! #bydhttmwfi #ReadingRainbow http://j.mp/f4wVHG" and I had the same reaction to this classic Reading Rainbow clip:
Have a happy (and nostalgic) Tuesday everyone!
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