DIY Fold-down Cutting Board

My hubby recently made an oak fold-down cutting board for his summer (canning) kitchen. Isn't it cool?

He also posted Building a large fold down cutting board on YouTube if you want to see how he did it...

And if you're interested in self-sufficient living, you might enjoy his book, Impossible Beyond This Point, the back story of creating our life in the wilderness.
 

What is Craftsy and Why Should YOU Take a Class Online?

What is Craftsy?
Craftsy offers online classes to a worldwide craft community. Craftsy also provides a marketplace where independent designers (like me!) can sell their patterns; a supplies shop so  you can get deals on yarn, fabric and class kits; and a section where members share pictures of their crafting  successes. Craftsy has over two million members and is growing daily. With classes in quilting, sewing, knitting, painting, photography, cooking, and more, there's something for just about everyone!

Why should YOU take a class online?
Online education is a great alternative to the traditional classroom and is undoubtedly the wave of the future! Craftsy courses give you world-class instructors right in your home, whenever it's convenient for you.

Busy schedule or unable to leave home? No problem - with Craftsy courses, you can learn at your own pace anytime you want. Want to learn a new skill? Online classes allow you to watch and re-watch as many times as you want to perfect a technique - and you can refer back later, if needed.

And Craftsy even has a variety of FREE classes! So...what are you waiting for? Head on over to Craftsy and find or renew your passion for crafts!

Homemade Christmas Cards & June Christmas Prep Report

Homemade Christmas cards & matching envelopes.

Unless you get them on sale after Christmas, buying Christmas cards can be unnecessarily costly. You can save money by making your own at home. Either opt for a simple letter-style greeting on colored paper or get more elaborate with stickers or iron-on fabric motifs.

More homemade Christmas cards.

I used heat-n-bond, a widely-available fusible web, to adhere fabric motifs to folded card stock that I had cut to fit envelopes I bought in bulk at a thrift store. Then I used a permanent marker to create a dashed outline around the shapes. Add a personal greeting inside and you're done - inexpensive, custom Christmas cards! And I decorated the envelopes, as well. How cute and clever (and simple!) is that?

As for the June Christmas Prep Report - besides getting a jump-start on cards, it's basically the same old, same old. I did have a few gift-giving occasions over the past month and it was so nice to be prepared!

Great Crafting Classes Online!

I discovered Craftsy a couple of months ago and I'm hooked! What I like best besides the quality and reasonable price is that my classes NEVER expire. That's right - I can come and go as I please and as my schedule allows. I'm already enrolled in almost a dozen classes but there are so many more I'd love to take - I just have to find the time...

My Craftsy Wish List:

1. Free Motion Fillers with Leah Day (she's my favorite!)
2. Pictures to Pixel Quilts (and this one is a free mini-class!)
3. Artisan Bread Making (who doesn't love bread?)

Check out all of the other great Craftsy Classes by clicking here.

Acorns - Free Nutrition for the Taking

I'm currently polishing Impossible Beyond This Point (due out in 2013), the story of my in-law's move to the wilderness back in the 60s, and I ran across an account of a wild edibles meal my MIL made when her sister came to visit. The mainstay of the meal was acorns.

Did you know that you can eat acorns? That's right - they're not just for squirrels! I haven't done it recently, but we've made acorn meal in years gone by. Properly prepared, you can use chopped acorns in place of nuts or grind them into meal to make acorn mush or add to recipes. So if you have acorns available, gather some up and give them a try!

Preparing acorns

The first thing you have to do to make acorns edible is leach out the tannin. So shell them with a nutcracker or hammer and get the meats out. Then boil them and re-boil them and re-boil them again and again until the water is clear.

Use two pots and transfer the acorns from one to the other every 15 minutes or so. Bring fresh water to a boil in the pot without acorns while they're boiling away in the other pot. Make sure to keep them mostly boiling and DON'T put them in cold water. Keep this up until the cooking water stays clear and then dry them on a cookie sheet in the oven at about 250 degrees. Once they're mostly dry, chop or grind for use in recipes.

Another way to leach tannin

You can also leach out the tannin without boiling but it takes MUCH longer. First, grind up the meats into a fine meal. Put the ground meal in a basket or strainer lined with a clean muslin cloth and set atop a pot.  Slowly pour in water to fill the basket and let it run through the ground acorn meal (same principle as a drip coffee maker). Check it often and add more water and empty the pot, as needed, until the water runs clear.

Alternatively, I suppose you could put the acorn meal in a clean muslin bag and tie it suspended in a stream. I also read that you can leach them in your toilet tank (clean it good first!) but I think I'll just stick to the boiling or drip filtering methods!

Free DIY Book Publishing on CreateSpace

We're about ready to publish our first hardcopy book through Amazon's CreateSpace and are working on getting the illustrations in place and finalizing the format. All I can say is WOW!!! Amazon really makes this easy - and it's FREE if you do it yourself.

The website tells you everything you need to know but you can also choose to pay for professional help, if you want. After working on the formatting, I can see that the cost may be totally worth it to some folks, especially those who only plan to publish one book. But we're planning to do this several more times so are dedicated to learning the ropes.

Do you have a book you'd like to publish? Well, now is the time! Publish your book with CreateSpace: get high royalties, low book prices, and expanded distribution. What are you waiting for?







(FYI - links are affiliate.)

Affordable Self-Publishing Through CreateSpace

From my author buddy, Deanna, I just found out about what may be the coolest thing Amazon has done yet! Well, maybe not quite as cool as free Kindles apps for your computer, phone, etc. coupled with all the free ebooks available every day, but still very cool.

So what cool thing am I talking about? CreateSpace, Amazon's print publishing solution for all us aspiring DIY authors. Through CreateSpace, you can  have your book available in print easily and, are you ready for this? AFFORDABLY! That's right - it's finally affordable to self-publish.

So how affordable is it? Well, how about FREE if you do all your own formatting, etc. Does that sound good to you? As near as I can tell, there are no required upfront costs (unless you opt for expanded distribution). And the royalties you earn from each sale (after a reasonable fixed charge per book) range from 40%-80%, depending on distribution channel. Wow! Have things ever changed!

If you're not fully appreciating the coolness of this, let me give you a real-life example for comparison. While I don't have the hard numbers at my fingertips, my MIL self-published We Walk the Tall Grass back in 1999. I don't remember her exact upfront costs but I think it was around $200. The book currently retails for $25.95, which is WAY too much for a 200 page paperback. And she only gets royalties after three sales per quarter and then it's a pittance (I'm talking around $6 total).

Through CreateSpace, the same size book could retail for under $9 and still generate royalties for her on every single sale, regardless of distribution channel. And if she opted not to have expanded distribution, she could price the book at $6 and still make money on every copy sold.

But there are a couple more reasons I am so jazzed about CreateSpace. Firstly, my hubby is currently combining his mom's story about their adventures moving here to the wilderness with an unpublished manuscript written by his dad. We've been researching publishing options and it looks like CreateSpace is it! Secondly, I've got a few book ideas myself - quilt related, of course - and I could publish a full color, 8.5x11.5, 50-page book that retails for less than $10.

So, are you seeing the coolness of all this now?



PLEASE NOTE: That image of We Walked the Tall Grass is an Amazon affiliate link. If you're just dying to find out all about how these remarkable folks made a life in the wilderness with three small boys and almost no money, go ahead and get the book. But if you can wait, the book my hubby's working on expands the story and will cost considerably less than $25.95. Also, I just signed up as a affiliate for CreateSpace so those two links are affiliate, too.

Grow Herbs and More in a Hanging Shoe Organizer

Tight on gardening space? Want to garden without stooping or kneeling? Well, do I have a cool tip for you! How about planting herbs or strawberries or ??? in the pockets of a hanging shoe organizer? Yes, a shoe organizer! You know, that forgotten over-the-door or closet rod thing holding a few stray craft supplies?

Giving credit where credit is due, no, of course I didn't think of this. In fact, I don't even garden. I saw a post by my cousin, Debra, on facebook and followed the link and ended up at Vertical Vegetables on Instructables. So thanks Debra and thanks Pippa5 (the author) for sharing such a great idea!

I've included an Amazon link (it's the picture) to what I'm talking about. But I'd be looking around the house, asking friends and family or checking the thrift store. Until this idea catches on, there are likely a LOT of these shoe holders waiting to find new homes.

Chocolate on Chocolate DIY Wedding Cake

Chocolate wedding cake - Yum!
Photo: Sunlitway Photography

Well, here it is! The chocolate on chocolate (and another on choclate if you count the curls) wedding cake. I was afraid the Cornelli Lace (the squiggly decoration on the sides) might not show up in brown on brown but it's absolutely beautiful! And oh so yummy, too.

The bottom layer was milk chocolate and the middle layer was Devil's Food. The milk chocolate was a little crumblier than I like so I would go with Devil's Food for both were I to make a chocolate wedding cake again. For the frosting, I modified the recipe on the Hershey's cocoa container. Instead of using all butter, I substituted half Crisco to give it extra stability. Then I mixed in more powdered sugar to get a stiffer consistency for the borders.

As for the curls, all you have to do is warm a Hershey's bar to about 80 degrees and then slowly shave off the curls with a vegetable peeler. I only made a few of the curls myself and it's a little tricky to get the chocolate to the exact right temperature for curling perfection - too warm and it creates mush, too cool and you get chips. So be patient if you're going to try this at home. Just find a warm spot above a heat source and test your chocolate bar with the peeler until you get curls. And if you get the chocolate too warm, just let it cool down a bit before shaving more off. Also, don't try heating your chocolate in the microwave.

The cake stand is the coolest part of all from a wedding-cake-making standpoint. Talk about easy! Beings each layer is on a separate plate, you don't have to insert dowels for support. And you don't have to worry about getting the layers centered on each other. Also, the cake is a LOT easier to move and set up. The only problem we had is that the stand and plates were white. Not acceptable to the bride. So a little floral tape and some duct tape later (really - brown duct tape - how redneck are we, anyway?), the stand and plate edges were appropriately brown!

Me trying all the cakes.
Photo: Sunlitway Photography

To top off the cake eating experience, we made lemon and Pink Champagne side cakes for those who don't like chocolate. Or for those (ME!) who wanted some of each. We used cream cheese icing on both but added a little lemon flavor to the icing for the lemon cake. All in all, the cakes were a huge success. And the wedding was really nice, too.


Oh! And if you're thinking about making a wedding cake, see my other DIY Wedding Cake post, as well. If you have any questions, please leave a comment here or on my other post and I'll be happy to answer if I can.

And if you'd like to learn cake decorating right in your own home, take a cake decorating class online through Craftsy! (affiliate link, fyi)

DIY Wedding Cake

DIY wedding cake.

I'm off to help make a wedding cake. My friend's daughter is getting married next weekend and we're coming out of wedding-cake-making retirement to whip one up! Although we keep swearing that we'll never do another cake, this one should be easy. All the lovely bride wants is chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate. We know that some guests don't like chocolate, however, so we're also making a couple of side cakes - probably pink champagne and maybe lemon?

We've been working together on wedding cakes nearly 30 years, since her husband's niece (a bride on a tight budget) needed one and I had a budding interest and some cake decorating stuff. Over the years, we've done many cakes together, and we've each done a few alone. It's been fun but we decided a few cakes ago that it's past time to move on! Baking, decorating, storing and transporting a multi-tiered wedding cake no longer works for us. But we'll make just one more....

So why are we starting so early? Well, we bake our layers and then freeze them prior to frosting. This serves a dual purpose - first, we can make the cake ahead of time (a huge stress reducer, especially if something goes wrong) and second, cakes are easier to frost when frozen. So we'll bake and freeze this week and then stack, frost and decorate the day before the wedding, which also allows the cake to defrost overnight. Does this actually work? Well, the proof is in the results, and one thing that we hear with every cake we've made is how yummy it is - our cakes are not only pretty, they are delicious!

Update 1/22/13 - If you'd like to take an online cake decorating class, Craftsy has several really good ones. I just discovered Craftsy and sure wish these were available back when I was learning! (links are affiliate, fyi)



And if you want to try your hand at making a wedding cake, here are my must-have recommendations:

DIY 7 Minutes to Whiter Teeth!

You all know that I'm totally into DIY, right? Well, I just found out about the easiest, most inexpensive way to whiten your teeth at home. Are you ready? Plain old hydrogen peroxide. You know - the stuff you can buy at any grocery store or pharmacy for about a dollar? All you do is swish it around your teeth, spit it out, and then rinse your mouth with water. Takes about one minute each morning and I noticed results in one week. Seriously. Noticeable results in just 7 days!


But is it Safe?


I was going to get all complicated and do a ton of research into this very question. But after reading some info from the American Dental Association and a few other websites, I went to check to make sure exactly which product I had. Guess what? Right on the label it recommends using hydrogen peroxide as a mouth rinse. So I guess that pretty much answers the safety question. Also, my dental hygienist told me a couple of years ago that I could swish with hydrogen peroxide daily as needed for gum health - she just didn't tell me it would whiten my teeth, as well, so I did it only a few times.


So how white are my teeth now? Not blindingly white, but I don't want them that bright! I'd just like to keep ahead of the tea stains that build up between my annual cleanings and this is definitely a way to do that. So far, I've had no negatives other than the stuff tastes nasty so I avoid getting it on my tongue as much as possible. Anyway, if you want whiter teeth for mere pennies, give hydrogen peroxide a try.


PS - I was too lazy to go take a picture of my peroxide bottle so the image is an Amazon affiliate link. But seriously, unless you're housebound or just prefer to have items delivered to your door, go to a grocery store or pharmacy. And for REALLY frugal teeth whitening, wait to buy until the hydrogen peroxide comes on sale.

Rentals and Retirement

No doubt about it, owning rentals is a key part of our retirement plan. Not only do they generate a little income now, they can also provide free housing for us when we "outgrow" our ability to manage comfortably in our remote paradise. So owning rentals is a good investment for us in both the short and long term.

We choose to manage all aspects of our rental property, including maintenance. Translated into common terms, this means my husband and I just spent a full month painting and doing a variety of other improvements. And did we finish all five cottages? NO! But two are done and they look really cute.

Here's what happened -

First we set out on our painting adventure with a high level of optimism and slightly rose-colored glasses. We've been down this road before so we know everything takes at least twice as long as you think it will, so we doubled our time estimate. So far, so good.

Then we estimated paint quantity. At a coverage rate of 400 square feet/gallon, I calculated that we'd need about 15 gallons to paint all five cottages (they're small - only 24x28 each). We'd already decided on a very pale yellow (the same color we painted my big house before I sold it) and bought three 5-gallon buckets of paint. Again, so far, so good.

Then we started spraying on the paint. Well, this is where we had a reality check of sorts. You see, the gray siding has grooves and the grooves have edges that were not sealed up when the buildings were sprayed gray several years ago. So when the first wall was finished, we had yellow with gray stripes. Hmm. Not pretty - in fact, awful.

The only thing to do was grab brushes and prime all the grooves to seal them up. So we primed the grooves and repainted the first wall. Then we primed the grooves on the other three sides and sprayed on the paint. Much better! Except one small problem . . . We managed to put about 12 gallons of paint on the first house.

Now for plan B . . .

By this time I was less enamored with all the houses being yellow. I figured if we've got to buy more paint anyway, we should do them all different colors but with white trim and brown porches - kind of like a neighborhood rather than a complex. My next house color choice was sage green and guess what? We happened to have a bunch of leftover exterior green paint that was about the right color but too dark, so we just bought 10 gallons of white and mixed in enough green to get the color we wanted. Sure beat having to choose a color from those little paint chips!

The second house was easier because we already knew we had to prime the grooves. But we decided to prime the whole thing instead. And we used some different left over dark green so got our base coat for free and got rid of unwanted paint at the same time. How clever are we?

So now two of the five are done. When will we get to the others? Good question. It's much easier to paint when they're vacant and the others are not. One we keep unrented for our own use, however, so we could paint that one without disturbing any tenants. But it's not the one I want to see painted next. At this point, we're all painted out anyway so I guess we can decide which house to paint next when we actually have the time and inclination.

Save Money with Homemade Cards

Saving money during retirement is always a good idea and one of my goals this year is to NOT buy a single card. Not for birthdays, Mother’s Day, thank you or anything else that comes along. Not even the 2/$1 cards at the dollar store. I still want to give cards, however, so will have to get creative and make my own.

Without further adieu, my first opportunity has arrived! With two grandsons having January birthdays, I obviously need two cards, right? So I made them today.

I have to admit that I used blank cards I got on sale for $4.99 just after Thanksgiving. In preparation for my 2010 card-making extravaganza, I actually bought a couple of boxes that contain 70 cards and envelopes each. I also have to admit that I already had a couple of boxes in a different set of colors that I bought last year, also on sale. So yes – do the math – I have about 280 cards on hand to embellish. This should get me by don’t you think?

I’ve also been saving all types of already-used cards over the past several years, planning to recycle them – and now I am! Finally! And I’m going to use fabric and ribbons and buttons and whatever else I can find. But for these first two, I played it safe.

The one with the deer combines a fabric square (the deer) with the front of a recycled note card. The other uses cute cutouts from an old birthday card (cheating, I know). As they’re both for boys, I used a sharpie to change the hot pink on the word Celebrate, one balloon and the party hat to red. So that’s two down and many, many more to go. Hopefully I’ll get braver and more imaginative as time goes by!

Make an Easy, Luxurious Tied Quilt for Someone Special

I made this beautiful, luxurious lap quilt for my adult son a couple of years ago and thought I’d share. It’s so easy, just about anyone could make it! You don’t even have to have a sewing machine although finishing the edges will take less time if you do.

I’ve posted a how-to on Quilting and Sewing with Kids (QSK link below) with the materials list and specific instructions. You can seriously complete this project in less than a day so may want to make several as gifts this Christmas. I found the furry fleece on clearance and used a top sheet and yarn that I already had so my cost was minimal.

As you can see, I also made a matching throw pillow to go with the lap quilt. The pillow cover is simply a long rectangle of the furry fleece that overlaps in the back to provide access to insert a pillow form. I turned under the ends of the rectangle to provide a finished edge and then folded it, right sides together, to the correct size with the ends overlapping. Once I’d stitched along the raw edges, it was done! Now how easy is that?

QSK post link: How to Make a Simple, Luxurious Tied Quilt

Here are a couple of photos with additional detail.

Photo credit goes to my delightful SIL, Karen Balvin, owner of Sunlitway Photography.

Homemade Salsa Anyone?

To deal with the abundance produced by our gardens and fruit trees, my husband set up a simple and inexpensive outdoor kitchen. Consisting of a salvaged 10-foot long, one piece stainless steel counter with double sinks and a multipurpose cooker he made from an old propane tank, this outdoor kitchen allows us to efficiently process large quantities of fresh fruits or vegetables.