Happy Early Valentine's Day!

Anyone who has eaten my sugar cookies knows I pack them between layers of waxed paper and I always joke that I need to endorse Cut-Rite Wax Paper! I made these yesterday AFTER Deedee left town for the big sale. As much as I love feeding these to people, I WHINE the entire time I'm baking and frosting these wretched things. Dave mentioned that he really liked the Christmas sugar cookies I sent home with him but I didn't need to make them. I joked with him that, "If my baby wants sugar cookies, he will GET sugar cookies!" I needed to make them though to take to work and home to my parents. And of course he got his own personal stash sent home with him!

Field Trip!

Dave and I went to Clear Lake yesterday morning to visit the Larson's Mercantile and a few antique shops. I LOVE Pyrex and bought these 2 pieces! I'd never seen this design before and I LOVE pukey shades of green and they happen to match my oven!!! These are covered in olives! I think olives are pretty but I don't particularly like eating them! I'll eat sliced black olives in salads or on pizzas but I can't abide green olives. One dish is a shallow divided dish and the other is a deeper but smaller serving dish and of course the lids can be used as serving pieces.

I have to be honest and say I am STILL disappointed since that store changed management because they now have only plastic Red Heart acrylic yarn and cotton Sugar and Cream yarn. Gone are the days when they sold Lopi and Collinette. I have been very good on my fabric diet but I cheated and bought 3 yards of stash. The brown background fabric of kitchen items was one of my cuts.

The other two were these lovely 2 cuts: one of zinnia flowers and the other of this scattered vegetable print! LOVE those eggplants! Dave is SO patient with me! :)

Oh the humanity!

My lower element in my antique oven went out just before the big bake sale! Timing! This put a serious kink in my bake sale ambitions as I was without oven or stove for almost a week while I waited on the maintenance man to bring me my new part and repair it. And on that note, there MUST be a name for this shade of green. My mother used to have a matching oven and fridge in the shade of "Harvest Gold" and this hearkens back to that era! I can't complain though because this oven has seen a lot of mileage and has served me very well. In the end I made 2 big batches of Oat Square Cereal snack mix and 12 cups of sugared/spiced mixed nuts and a double batch of those brownie sandwich cookies. I didn't have time to get my kringla ambitions baked and I've now got four pints of sour cream in my fridge to get used up. Today is the big sale and I hope it goes well. I talked myself down by rationalizing that maybe people in Waterloo won't know what kringlas are and it also sounds like there will be home baking as far as the eye can see. I hope it goes well though. Deedee and Melissa promised they would take lots of pictures of the "Spread".

Get Your Craft On!

Melissa and Deedee came over tonight for a High Octane Super Crafty Fun Night to finish up a bunch of projects/items for her upcoming fundraising sale which will be held next weekend at her hometown church in Waterloo. We got A LOT DONE!!! What a productive evening!
We finished 6 Valentine-themed 100% cotton kitchen towels. I didn't take a picture of the final flourishes but we rolled them up and tied them with magenta metallic chenille stems.
We got some assembly line action going and started and finished 9 reusable rice-filled microwaveable heating pads. These are 12" x 12" with 6 compartments stitched in and filled with regular old long grain white rice. You nuke these in the microwave for 1 minute at a time and they are a wonderful source of moist heat for your aches and pains. We used almost 20 pounds of rice when all was said and done. The neon green and Valentine ones were originally scrub tops that went wrong because of incorrect thread tension from my old and retired sewing machine so we did some environmental re-using and re-purposing!
Deedee and Melissa had previously worked on over 20 sets of coasters made from glazed tiles and stickers. They finished them off by applying felt circles to the bottoms and tying them into sets with ribbons.
They had also made SCORES and SCORES of bath bombs and tonight packaged and labeled them. These were my favorite items from the evening! I can't brag enough about bath bombs, especially at this time of year because they make your skin feel and smell SO GOOD! The only warning I'll give about these is that you can't shave your legs in bath bomb water or you'll have a hairy ring around the tub and that you have to take great care when stepping out of the tub with these or you can slip.

And throughout our activities, we sustained ourselves on a pasta and crab meat salad that I was particularly proud of! My lower oven element went out yesterday. I had originally planned on making cheese stuffed pasta shells to feed us but this was a good substitute!

Fun!!!!

Well sort of... I was on call last night and Melissa came over with carry out Chinese food and we worked on felted soap. We started out with some smelly oval Dove soaps which we later learned should have been square or rectangular shaped bars for greater felting ease. We also started out using merino top for the fiber but it was too slippery and smooth and we wound up with floppy hair balls on a bar of soap. We gave up twice and then tried once more with a mohair/wool batt I'd gotten years ago at Austin's Mohair and Gifts and it finally worked! Melissa has an aversion to cotton balls and anything fuzzy/fibery but she was a real sport. We felted 8 bars and our hands were pruny and then we quit. We'll sell these at her fundraising event next week. These were fun...once they finally worked!