Kick Ass Halloween Idea

By far the most creative Halloween crafting I saw this year.  Click on the picture below to check out much more of this awesomeness.

Bling your TV

So what happens when you are desperate to avoid unpacking boxes after your SEVENTH move in 3 years…you start looking at an old TV you just hauled up three flights of stairs and think to yourself, “Self, you should throw that ugly thing out…OR!…wait for it, new idea…I bet you could waste HOURS making that billion-year-old TV look less boring…Why, yes indeed I could and I will! Thanks for the great suggestion, self. You’re so thoughtful!”

And thus I present to you, in shocking 2-D, the birth of a blinged-out TV:

Take one boring, free, mostly functional TV..

Add some thinned out acrylic paint,


Add a liberal amount of Mod Podge and paper,

And still more layers of acrylic paint and some gold swirly paint,


And you have successfully killed a potentially productive day of work and now have a TV that, while still not nearly as impressive in picture quality as everyone else you know…BUT…way more fun to have in your living room.

Total cost:
Zero
(Free TV + craft stuff just sitting around.) Booyah!

Big Changes Coming!!!

First: I should be able to start posting again!!! Yay!

Second: I now live in Germany!  So this blog will have weekend travel coolness in addition to crafting and cooking new food. Give me a minute to settle into my new place and I will get back to posting.

Talk to you all soon!

Tschüs!

(Bye!)

(Pronounced similar to”Choose,” or “Chews” Hard on the “Ch” sound with a slight “t” in front)

It’s Christmas Eve and I’m Googling artists…

Ahhhhhhhh…..

A blessed day of doing nothing important except marveling at how talented people are. Here’s a very small sample of some fantastic illustrators that I found today.

(ps. I graduated Basic and OCS, but still have another 1/2 year of schooling ahead of me, so no crafting just yet. BUT I did make a baby blanket and a scarf while camping with the Army. Yup, this girl brought yarn and crochet needles to the woods. Making the military crafty one project at a time )

Here are some sketches I made if you’re interested…I think I’m going to try to get back into drawing if I have any free time at school.

Merry Christmas. And God bless us, every one.

Handmade Climbing Chalk Bag…Made just for ME!

I cannot tell you how excited I am about this.  This is the FIRST time anyone other than my mother has made something for me by hand.  AND I HEART IT!

My climbing buddy was offered a job in Alaska and she made this for me before leaving town. Say it with me…”Awwwww…” Now for the amazing part, this is TOTALLY handmade. She did all of the stitching by hand – no sewing machine was used.  Wow.

Seriously, it even has a tiny, lined pocket!

THANK YOU DAX!!!!!!    Best of luck in your job and travels!

Doctor Who Scarf: Progress Report

I promise, PROMISE, promise this will be done one day. I’ve been out and about having adventures so I only knit while watching instant-view Netflix these days. Which isn’t that often. (This winter I took up SCUBA diving, kayaking, rock climbing, running, and I hit the gym a lot getting ready for basic training…oh! and I went skydiving once too…all in all, it’s been a busy outdoor kind of Florida winter.)

However, I fit in a block or two of color every few weeks and, since I last updated you on my progress, I’ve added about four feet to the scarf as well as woven in all the lose ends except for the rows I added last week.

Please note, I'm six feet tall...

Only six more feet to go!

Superwoman posing in my PJs and scarf. That's how I roll.

Irish Car Bomb Brownies: Guinness Brownies with Jameson and Bailey’s Cream Cheese Frosting.

Sorry, we were too excited about this to take pictures BEFORE we dug in

First let me thank my friend Jen for introducing this into my world…You rock!  This is already my new ‘go to” birthday gift for everyone.

Let this sink into your brain for a moment: Guinness, Bailey’s, Jameson, AND chocolate…all in one glorious concoction.

“Sleep Talkin’ Man” is my new HERO!

This link is NOT for the kiddies eyes…but, oh Sweet Jesus, I can hardly breath from laughing so hard.  Here is a sampling of the more PG sleep ramblings his wife posted lately.  I would LOVE to know this dude.

“My bagder’s gonna unleash hell on your ass. Badgertastic!”

“No, not the cats. Don’t trust them. Their eyes. Their eyes. They know too much.”

“Just look at yourself. Yeah, now look at me. You don’t stand a chance. It must suck to be you, I’m sure.”

Baked Plantains. Why has no one told me about these before!!!

I had baked plantains for the first time while eating out with some friends and I cannot wait to make them at home!

I think this recipe is the closest I can find to what I had at the restaurant. I think the ones I had were lightly dusted with some sort of thin batter…the outside was a little bit more crispy and golden than what is seen in this picture.  I’ll let you know how it works.

Best Dang Salad I’ve had in a while!

One day I will upload a picture of this…but since I heard about this I eat it too quick to pause for the camera.  The novelty should wear off soon, maybe, perhaps, well we’ll see…oh dear…Is it possible to OD on salad?

Easy Peezy recipe:

• Dressing – Rice vinegar/Oil/some Sugar (in portions that taste good to you)
• Almond slices
• Crumbled up dry Ramen noodles (for crunch)
• Craisins
• Spinach or Spring Greens
• Shredded chicken

Enjoy the Awesome!

More stuff I am pretty sure I don’t need…But BOY do I want it!

Ooooooooooooohhhhh, Nikki likey, Nikki likey! OK, I have a confession…this is yet another of my dirty little secrets, along with my deep love for Mike Rowe, Jensen Ackles and young Harrison Ford (I repeat only the young version is acceptable)…I also want to marry wool felt.  Just look at these cuties, we would be so happy together.

One Badass Climber

I met a whole bunch of fellow newbies at Vertical Ventures in Tampa and we all tried our hands (and shoulders, and backs, and legs…you get the picture) at indoor rock climbing.  It was awesome!

I totally kicked the wall’s ass.  Booyah!

Oh, and by the way…HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!

Stuff I am sure I don’t need, but…

I have no room to craft right now and I’m broke, sooooo OF COURSE I want these things more than life itself…

Because today is a good day, I’m going to try and make you happy too.

A cappella + Star Wars + John Williams tribute = AWESOME…John Williams is indeed The Man.

Whale Watching on a Rainy Tuesday

A friend from high school came into town for a little while and asked what there was to do in Boston.  I listed of the normal touristy stuff and he became interested when I mentioned whale watching.  This is where several whale species come to feed during the summer.  I encourage anyone to take the tour.  It’s worth it to do this at least once in your life.

I am terrible at taking good pictures of whales.  I didn’t manage to take good ones last time either.  I have lots of great, “this is the water just after they disappear shots,” but here is the best one I got.  This is a mother and few month old calf.

Combine large sail boat festival with intense fog and instantly you’re hundreds of years in the past in a ghost story or Peter Pan.  These ships would just appear out of nowhere.  Awesome.

Safety Thread – Why didn’t I think of this!

I can’t say my knitting skills have improved dramatically since I joined a knitting group, but that is NO reflection on my group.  They are hella-awesome knitters (and infinity more skilled at crochet than I am as well).  Nope, my lack of desire to think very hard whilst recreational knitting is the culprit here.  (Garter stitch all the way baby!  No patterns for Nikki.)

Typical pattern attempt:

“Concentrate, concentrate…think, think, think.”  Knit, purl, knit, knit, purl…Oooh, here it comes… “Ray.  When someone asks you if you’re a God, you say YES!”  Ha, ha! That’s never not funny…wait…knit, purl….purl, knit…? Crap, back up a few steps – pay attention Nikki! (Ten minutes later) Knit, knit, knitty-knit-knit…”CRAP! I remember purling being involved here somewhere. Ugh, time to frog again.”

But hard as I try to remain deaf to the good ideas I hear tossed around at my weekly knitting group, a few inevitably weasel their way into my head in between my bites of Qdoba chips and salsa, and I start to think, “Hey, if I did that maybe this pattern stuff wouldn’t be so bad.”

The first good idea was learning how stitch markers work.  Luckily for my knitting laziness patterns often shift and the stitch markers must shift in accordance to what is going on at the time.  Some thinking still required – Phbisht, I’m out.  You can’t trick me into the harder stuff based on these magic tools alone.

THEN I learned about a Safety Thread.  Dang!  My other big excuse for not working harder is that I often screw up at some unidentified location and I have to frog my project either all the to the beginning or way, way, way back until I reach a point where I know I was doing it right.  Then I have to manage to pick the stitches back up again without hopelessly losing or twisting them. And THEN if I manage to do all that, I have to try to guess correctly what row I am now on… Ugh, kill me.  (Are you starting to see where I might have gotten the notion that a Doctor Who scarf was just my speed.)  A Safety Thread makes that excuse obsolete.

How you Insert/Use a Safety Thread:

At certain intervals (like the end of large sets of repeats) you insert a thread into your work,  along the needle, where you know everything is correct. (Correct pattern, correct number of stitches, correct EVERYTHING.)  Then when you get caught up talking or watching TV and you look down and have a “What the Heck!” moment you don’t have to panic.  You just frog your project to its last perfect point (the yarn will stop the frogging just like you had a needle in there), reset your row counter and use the string as a guide to insert your needles back into the stitches perfectly.  When the project is finished just tug these strings out – there is nothing substantial holding them in.

Big giant Duh here! So simple that I have to say again. Why didn’t I think of this?

Thanks to my friend over at Bareblueskin for telling me about this last Monday at knitting group.

Doctor Who Scarf – Post Four

Here’s the problem with legacy projects and blogging – while I work and work and work, I have very little new to report. 5 1/2 feet into my Doctor Who scarf and all I can say is, “I’m still at it.”

But just look at all of this lovely, never-ending  garter stitch!I am just under half of the way done with the pattern which means that I should really be at about 6 to 6 1/2 feet of length at this point, BUT, I knit tight. Real tight.  Tight like anal-retentive accountants would look at me and go, “Why don’t you chill a little girl?”  I don’t know why I do this, I have tried to knit looser (I knit much looser than I used to…I can now get the needle between the yarn and the other needle without effort…I can slide the yarn freely on the needles as I am working it.  These things used to be an issue.  But, let’s just say I am rarely concerned that my stitches are going to fall off of the end of the needle when I am not paying attention. They stay nice and still until I choose to move them.)

So the bad news is my scarf will most likely be on the shorter side. The good news is it should be nice and wind proof.  I’ll take the trade off.

- You should see how tight I crotchet.  Ca-ra-zy-

An Open Letter to the Drivers of Boston

My fellow Bean Town drivers,

Let me say first of all I empathize with your sleepiness. I too am tired at the butt-crack of the morning and dodging pedestrians darting out into traffic without a look or a care to catch a train running down the middle of the road is difficult. It is not your fault that the city planners were too lazy to plan a city and simply established permanent roads wherever the cow trails happened to be – absolutely cows have the best judgment about how we should reach our final destination, they are never known to wander about aimlessly. I do not begrudge you the confusion the situation brings when you cannot figure out where to turn as the train sneaks in and out, from the center of the road to the side and you must decide do I drive on the service roads or main lanes? Dear God, am I now going the wrong way down a one way street/service road!…all of this is all tricky indeed. So go ahead, slam on your brakes and vacillate in and out of traffic listlessly as you make up your mind. Lord knows I do too when I am on unfamiliar turf.  If I might make a suggestion, when you are new in an area you might watch the flight path of the herd and not shoot up the (temporarily) empty lane you find yourself in.  We are not weaving for our pleasure and we will save your wheel alignment if you follow us.  I (and the others I see each day) have a carefully mapped out series of lanes changes (and shifts within the lane) that I make every day designed to minimized (although by no means eliminate) the chances of my car falling into what I can only assume are portals to hell. You might call them potholes but I swear I once saw flames licking out around the edges of a particularly deep one, I’ll not be testing them.

Nope, I am, in general, well able to forgive the follies of my fellow drivers because we are all human.

That said. STOP BEING DOUCHE BAGS. When approaching an intersection a football field wide with waiting traffic and a train staring down at you do not presume to pull yourself into the intersection after the light has been green for some time KNOWING it will turn red with you stuck out there through the entire next side’s green light. (I am talking to EVERYONE who has ever entered Storrow Drive.)  When then stuck in the intersection and blocking all traffic have the good graces not to respond to resulting honks and/or fingers with a shrug and a “what can I do about it?” look and a geusture to the stalled traffic in front of you. It was just as unmoving before you put your dumb-ass self in the intersection and in our way. This makes everyone want to kill you for being a double moron. Either stoically keep your eyes glued forward or pretend that the oncoming traffic is in fact an emergency vehicle you must make way for and find a way to get your ass out of the intersection. You could do it if you tried, it just wouldn’t be pretty….you might have to *GASP* leave the line.

And Boston, red means stop. I know this can be confusing as the municipal vehicles do not seem to understand it. You might think because you have seen school buses loaded with children running red lights where other vehicles have already managed to stop not to mention the obligatory every-cop-car-out-there going right through them as if they don’t matter, however, this still does not give you permission to do so. In particular, if I have time to slow my car during a yellow light and come to a full stop at the resulting red you should not feel authorized to change lanes, pull around and continue traveling through the light.

And I know this is going to shock some of you, please sit down before reading, when you are driving down a four lane divided road and you find yourself needing to stop and either conduct business or release a passenger you must continue on until you a find parking space or a turn-off. If the street parking is full simply putting on your hazards does not give you legal permission to turn a normal driving lane into a second parking lane. On my last week in town I am going to drive through Boston in the Bat Tank (from the first Christian Bale Bat Man movie) in the right hand lane of all two lane roads in Boston and I am not changing lanes for any reason.

You have been warned Boston,

Nikki

Making Fabric Covered Notebooks and Car Ride Exorcisms

I was going to do a step by step tutorial on these but then I only had one set of hands and, really, I think you guys are bright enough to figure it out.
I have been meaning to get around to this for a long time.  I have a boat load of spiral notebooks (ten years of continuous college for one or both members of the house will do that.) I HATE spiral notebooks. They must be the ugliest office/school supplies to ever grace the planet.  It pains me to write that last sentence as I have a love for all things sold at Staples and I will even horde notebooks despite their ugliness. However a little Mod Podge and a $1.25 fabric squares from JoAnn’s transforms these notebooks from something to be hidden to display worthy.

As long as you take your time with these they are really easy.  The only slightly tricky part is sizing the fabric to the spirals. But even that isn’t hard. Just measure the circumference of the spiral from cover to cover and that becomes the width of the spine, the height of the cover is the height of the spine. (For a five subject notebook it is usually 2×11 in.) Use your measurements to mark where the spine will be in the center of the fabric then cut and fold a flap down (glue into place) on both the top and bottom so that the fabric at the spine is the exact height of the spirals. (You will have at this point a rectangle of fabric with a notch taken out of the center at the top and bottom, this also helps you to make sure everything is centered as you begin gluing the fabric to the front and back covers.) The rest of the excess fabric will be folded over the inside edges of the cover and glued down but you can’t do that in the center spirals so you have to do it before you glue the notebook to the fabric.

Supplies: Pre-cut fabric squares, Mod Podge or Elmer’s Glue, Spiral Notebooks, Cheap Paintbrush to spread glue, scissors

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If you are interested in how the desk was decorated check it out here.

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This has been a busy, busy week and we have a house guest coming tonight. Am I cleaning and getting ready for her as I should be, nope, I’m writing this.  But it’s OK…we should completely have time to find a place for her to sleep amid all of our crap after we get home from the midnight screening of StarTrek tonight, right? Sigh, I should go get cleaning.

But first I have to leave you with this parting story. We were driving and talking a lot these past few days and the topic of my learning Hebrew came up (I started yesterday, super interesting), this naturally lead to a discussion of religion in general and he asked if we still had a bible at the house.  We did at one point but I don’t think we do any more…I think at some point in out eleventy-billion moves it got tossed along with a whole bunch of other books that I didn’t feel like moving up and down stairs any longer. (I have had to do this on my own a few times, books are considered very carefully come moving day.) So any way, after mocking me for tossing out a bible and making it clear that was the last piece in my one way ticket to hell he busted out this gem of a conversation starter.

“So what will I use if I need to perform an exorcism on you?”

(Snort laughter!) “If we ever reach the point where you must expel the forces of darkness from me, please call an expert. Perhaps a priest, a priest who owns a bible…”

“I have an expert, I’ll Wiki it.”

“Do NOT wiki my exorcism!”

“Sure, I’ll wiki-cise you!”

“Oh dear God, you’re not going to exorcise the demon your going to open a larger portal to hell.”

“It’ll be your fault for throwing out the bible I needed.”

You see how it always comes back to me folks…

Refurbishing a Desk on the Cheap

Every house has it, the dreaded ugly piece of furniture. (Sometimes this horrific fiend has an entire family of ugly friends clogging up your space.) And like me you walk past it and sigh. You know you should do something about it…but who has the money to replace it or time to deal with it? Then one day your brain snaps and the ugly must be dealt with, but how you ask? Super Cheap I reply.  Behold the ugly desk.  This dark beast labored under my computer and piles of crap in a darkly painted entryway with no windows, relentlessly sucking out what little light managed to peek into that corner. (Whose bright idea was the dark brown paint anyway?…Oh wait, mine…moving on.) Due to drying times this project will require a weekend to accomplish.Something must be done, so I took stock of what I had – you can see it there sitting on top of the desk. Three pretty pieces of paper and some Mod Podge…I’m totally prepared. My plan was to cover the drawer pulls with the gold paper and use what I could of the tiny amount of cranberry paisley paper that was super pretty and super scarce. Off to the store I go with a sample of these two papers. Turns out no paint matches both so I buy a perfect match for the background color of the paisley paper…Salmon.

Newsflash: Salmon is Benjamin Moore code speak for shocking band aid pink. You have been warned.
I determined very quickly that my new giant, band aid pink desk is not in fact an improvement over the previous incarnation. Think, think, think. New plan. Go under the sink and pull out more of the light brown paint from when we first moved in and I was painting the apartment. Using a giftcard to maintain an equal distance from the edge of the desk I tape off a square with painter’s tape and make a brown square.

Hint: for clean lines paint a quick edge inside the tape with the background color and let dry for a few minutes before moving onto the next color.

While watching TV that night I used scissors and an exacto knife to cut out the swirly flowery pattern on one of the pretty papers that I liked. After letting the paint dry over night I traced the edge of the square with a gold paint pen I had left over from an old project. (You can’t tell much but it’s nice up close.) Then I played with the best arrangements of the design for a while and put a thin layer of Mod Podge under the paper and a thicker layer on top to decoupage it to the desk. Let this dry completely, a few hours should do it. I would hit it with another layer of glue to help protect the image.

I also decided to paint the front of the drawers brown (there was still WAY too much pink going on.) the only thing I left pink was the handles which I Mod Podged little strips of the paisley paper onto. It still looked a bit unfinished so I hot glued some mint green buttons on top of the whole shebang after the top and drawers of the desk got a quick coat of Minwax. (Along with everything else in the house I have been avoiding sealing for the past three years.) The fumes…Oh the fumes…

Here it is, my brand new desk ready to handle all of my crafting needs in style, all for the whopping sum of $15 dollars and I still have a TON of Salmon paint left, you know…should you be dying to paint something in your home the color of band aids.

Full list of supplies for non-crafting, non-packrats. Keep in mind this grew out of what I had on hand.  If you don’t have something improvise. I never would have come up with so many pretty things if the pink hadn’t been so unexpectedly ugly.

• Mod Podge (or Elmers Glue)
• Foam Brush
• Paint
• Paint Brush
• Painter’s tape
• Gold Paint pen
• Decorative Paper
• Exacto knife
• Minwax sealant
• Buttons
• Hotglue Gun