WIP: Letters

I decided I would share with you a work in progress (WIP).  I adore photography and some day wouldn't mind upgrading all my equipment and doing it as a full time career.  In the meantime, back to reality and a current photography project that I am working on.  I have been on the hunt for letters and want to spell out my children's names with them.  But, the trick is, I want my kids to be incorporated with the letters.  A little piece of them in every photograph.  I want it to be more personal and it is super important to me.  I also am not going to settle for anything less.

This is what happened one day, with my youngest Colton, when we were out playing with sidewalk chalk.  In the final project, I imagine finding letters that are completely different, but right now all I have are all letters that I drew with the chalk and a few from playgrounds.  So here is a preliminary look at what I am shooting for.

Apple Stamps

To finish off the gifts for my son's preschool teachers, we (I say we, but in all honesty, if I say anything with enough enthusiasm my older son happily agrees) decided to do up the apple theme just a bit more.  We decided to apple stamp the pencil pouches and tote bags.  So I apple stamped 2 tote bags and 2 pencil pouches.  They turned out great and the first two were well received by Maben's afternoon art teachers.  We get to deliver the other two later this week to his Spanish teachers. 

So, I thought I would show you how to do apple stamping because it is SOOOO easy!  You will need fabric paint or in my case, acrylic paint with textile medium.  I had no fabric paint on hand, but lots of acrylic paint, so I spent less money to buy the textile medium than I would have to get fabric paint.  You will also need a paint brush, an apple, a leaf, a paper plate and your item to stamp.

Slice your apple near the center. You want to pick out the seeds.  You can use half the apple or make a small slice.  I prefer the small slice so I can eat the rest of the apple not being used.  This also helps if you don't cut the apple perfectly flat, so you can press all the paint down because the apple will bend slightly.

When using the textile medium, mix it 50/50 with the acrylic paint to create fabric paint.  Paint the front of the apple generously, then press firmly onto your fabric.  Make sure you don't use too much paint, because it can seep through the fabric.  So to be careful you can place a piece of cardboard in between the layers of fabric. 

Take your leaf and paint the smooth side generously and stamp that the same way you did the apple.  Once the paint dries, you are done!  If you need it to dry a little faster, you can use a hairdryer on a low setting to help speed things along.  Make sure you rinse your paintbrush with cold water, as hot water can actually cause the paint to set in the brush and render it useless.

The first pencil pouch done

Somehow I forgot to take a picture of the second pencil pouch, but it turned out great.

This is the first tote bag.

The second and last tote bag.

I have been baking up a storm

In the past few days, I have baked bread, made pumpkin cheesecake and chocolate chip cookies.  I decided I would share with you one of the easiest recipes in my collection, the baked bread.  Home made bread is usually long and tedious to make, but not this bread.  I guarantee you will make a lot of bread after you learn this recipe.  I have to thank my dear friend Jenni for giving me this recipe (to which I have tweaked it just a hair) and am now sharing with you.

There are only 4 ingredients!  That's right...only 4.  There is no waiting for the bread to rise either.  You will have a loaf of bread in an  hour.  It sounds too good to be true, but it isn't.  This is a dense beer bread and oh so delicious!

Beer Bread

Ingredients:

1 bottle of beer (I prefer an amber or stout beer)

3 cups of self-rising flour

1 cup of sugar

Salted butter

Directions:

Pre-heat oven to 375°F.  

Mix beer, flour and sugar together in a bowl.  It will be very sticky.  Place in a bread pan (I prefer to bake it in a ceramic or glass bread pan).  Bake in the oven for 55 minutes.  Once you pull it out of the oven, rub salted butter over the top and let it cool (Don't rub more than 2 tablespoons on top).  Serve with honey butter or preserves.  (I almost exclusively serve mine with honey butter and it is super yummy and requested often by my family)

ABC Recipe Swap: Casserole Edition

This is the second set of cards that I did.  I got assigned C and Q.  Not difficult letters in my opinion.  I am so happy that I got them finished, it's been a very busy weekend and all around busy month so far and only getting busier. 

The Chicken and Herb recipe started off as a Weigh Watchers recipe and has been adapted to the way I make it.  The Frittata recipe came from allrecipes.com.  I can't tell you how much I love that website!!!  I don't think there are enough words to express how happy I am with All Recipes.  I love being able to read through all the ratings and reviews and you can get a very good idea just how good a recipe is from this. 

So here are the last two recipes that I completed for the recipe swap.

ABC Recipe Swap: Soup Edition

A friend of mine set up an ABC Recipe Swap.  I am sure you might be asking what is that?  Well, there is a group of people that commit to making an entire recipe book A to Z.  We are scrapbooking our pages and a total of 14 of us participating.  There were two categories set up for the swap; soups and casseroles.  We are exchanging these on Monday and so this weekend my time has been filled with finishing up my pages.  For my soups, I was assigned the letters E and S. 

Now, the egg drop soup recipe is one that I have been tweaking for a while and is my own.  The sausage soup is adapted from one that I found on allrecipes.com.  I didn't change much from it, but it was a good recipe to start with.

I hope you enjoy my pages and I hope that you try doing a recipe swap too.  This was my first time doing one and cannot wait to get all my new recipes and hope they are as tasty as the ones I am giving out.  I do 4 recipes in total and will get 48 new ones.  Works for me!

All the scrapbooking cards are sized 6x6 inches to make them cohesive and able to fit into a small scrapbook.