Life is Fragile :-)

I heard this quote at church today :-)  I really liked it, and thought I would share it with you all !

DIY Rose Wire Rings

I saw this tutorial at Handmadeology.  And I thought to myself  hmmm..... I can do that!   Or something similar to it anyway :-)   I did not have the right wire on hand, but it was about 9:00 at night (too late to go to the craft store) So  I decided to mess around with some galvanized steel wire that we had on hand in our garage, and this is what I came up with :-)

If you are interested to know how to make one yourself  here is a little tutorial of how I made them.  I feel like I am terrible at explaining  tutorials so hopefully it makes sense :-) 

These are the supplies that I used. Galvanized steel wire we had in our garage,  wire cutter and pliers, and a tube of chap stick.

First I got a piece of wire.  I am not sure how long it is.  I just unraveled two rotations from the this wire spool. maybe it is about a foot long.

I realized right away that the wire was pretty thin so I doubled it up. 

Then I twisted it to give it more stability. And happily I think it gives it a nice look with the twist.  I found that it helps to get a more uniform twist if you use your pliers. it is hard to see in the picture that I am twisting the wire, but if you look really close you can tell :-)

Once I had it all twisted I wrapped it around a chap stick tube. this is the part where it gets confusing to explain.  I placed the chap stick tube directly in the center of my wire piece

 then I wrapped the wire around the tube crossing the two ends across each other. 

Then I wrapped it around again a second time until the two ends met up again.

This time cross the ends and twist them around each other once.

Then start wrapping/spiraling them around the middle twist part.  

Keep wrapping/spiraling them around until you can't wrap them anymore. At this point you need your pliers to help tuck the ends under and I also use the pliers to shape it a little more to my liking.

And this is what you end up with :-)

I have made one for each of my girls even the 3 year old.  They love their rings :-)

I love it when I can make pretty things with ordinary stuff laying around my house!

June bugaboo book club pick

The book I chose for the month of June  is "How Green Is My Valley" by Richard Llewellyn.
  I am choosing this book because It was recommended to me recently, and I just so happened to find it at my local thrift shop for $1.00!
I love it when I find little lucky gems like that :-)  This one also happens to be a 1940 edition so i thought that was kind of neat also.  I love old books that I know have belonged to someone else and have a history! This has written inside "With love from Clarence and Fern Sept. 14th 1944."  I just Love that!

I have not read this book before so I will be discovering it along with you :-)  Here is Amazons  review.

How Green Was My Valley is Richard Llewellyn's best-selling - and timeless - classic, as well as the basis of a beloved film.

As Huw Morgan is about to leave home forever, he reminisces about the golden days of his youth when South Wales still prospered, when coal dust had not yet blackened the valley. Drawn simply and lovingly, with a crisp Welsh humor, Llewellyn's characters fight, love, laugh, and cry, creating an indelible portrait of a people.

Richard Llewellyn (1906-1983), a Welsh novelist, was born in Hendon, England, in the county of Middlesex. Before World War II, he spent periods working in hotels, wrote a play, worked as a coal miner, and produced his best-known novel, How Green Was My Valley, as well as 19 other novels. After the war, he worked as a journalist, covering the Nuremberg Trials, and then as a screenwriter for MGM.


UPDATE:  I loved this book!  It was so well written and had so many life lessons in it!  It has a lot of depth so if you are a shallow reader this book might a little more difficult. For me it was a masterpiece!

LDS Etsy team prize give away!

I am so excited let you all  know about a Esty give away that I am involved in!  I and several other Etsy store owners are donating items from our shops for a 16 prize give away :-)  There will be one winner and 16 prizes! Whoot! Whoot!  Check out all the details at http://babygiveaways.blogspot.com/2012/05/lds-etsy-team-giveaway-1-winner-16.html
 I am giving away a Wood burned, water colored, Decorative set of Russian Dolls.  Check out the rest of the great prizes!

Good Luck!

Mothers day pendant Necklace DIY

Hey all!
So Mothers day is coming up this Sunday and I made a fun and hopefully meaningful gift for all my sisters and sister in law.  I have wanted to do this project for about 2 years now and finally got my act together this year and made it happen :-)
My Mom passed away about 5 years ago from cancer. My sister in laws Mom passed away from cancer about 10 years ago.  So Mothers day is a difficult day for all of us.  I wanted to make something to honor our Mothers, and to keep the memory of their beautiful spirits that have passed onto the other side close to our hearts :-)

I made Pendants with their photo and matching ear rings. I was just going to make the pendants, but felt matching ear rings would be a  nice touch :-)

This is my sister in laws Mother up above.  Her Birth stone is Garnet so I found beads in that color.

This is my Mother :-)  Her Birthday stone is the Amethyst  and also her favorite flowers are lilacs so purple is her color :-) I can't wait to wear this on Sunday!

If you want to make something like this yourself here are the supplies I used.

You will need a....

-pendant blank

-chain

-epoxy squares.

-beads and charms to enhance it.

- a small photo or picture

I got most of my supplies from Buyjust5supply on Etsy.

  I used my digital scrapbook program to make the pictures the size I wanted (after several attempts) to fit in the pendant tray.  

I put the epoxy square on the photo (love those things)

Then I put a drop of diamond glaze in the pendant tray and pressed the photo in.

Add the chain and your done if you would like, but I added beads and charms to mine to add some character and a personal touch.

I also am making this yummy Sugar Lemon Scrub for the other friends and mothers in my life.

You can find the recipe here. So easy!

Instead of  adding 1 cup olive oil I added a half cup coconut oil and a Half a cup of Olive oil, but other than that it is all the same.

Have a Happy Mothers day everyone!  :-)

May 2012 Bugaboo book pick "Edenbrooke"

So after a very long time I am posting another bugaboo book club pick :-)
So the book for this month is "Edenbrooke" by Julianne Donaldson.
I have not read this book yet, but I was told by a very good authority (Paula) that it is fantastic!  Like stay up until 4:00 in the morning reading it good. It also gets 5 stars on Amazon ratings.
So like I said I have never read this book so I will have to give you a review when I read it ;-)
Paula maybe you can give a review without giving too much away.

Happy reading!

Quesadilla Maker Pancakes!

Hi people :-)
I have not posted in awhile..... it seems :-/  
I have been concentrating most of my energy right now on my garden.  I just put my Tomato and pepper plants in the ground and I planted almost all my other stuff about a week and a half ago and it is fun to see all the little baby plants coming up :-)  In my next post I will share with you what I have been doing with my garden this year.
Enough about my gardening fetish and lets move onto Pancakes!

I saw a while back someone somewhere  talk about how they make pancakes in their Quesadilla maker and I thought to myself, Don't I have a quesadilla maker?  So entered my dark cave (garage) where I store all  my rarely used appliances and sure enough there it sat way up high on a tall shelf where it has literally collected dust for about 3 years maybe 4?

 I had forgotten I had it!  I could have used this all this  last year as my 3 year old has begged me for quesadillas for lunch.

I wanted to also try this IHOP pancake recipe I found on pinterest;.  I thought it would be fun to try them both out and have breakfast for dinner.

They were so Yummy!  I doubled the recipe and after a family of 6 people ate this is how much was left pictured above.  I also added blueberries to half the batch.  What I liked about them is they reminded me a little bit of heaviness of German pancakes, but with a lighter texture. I also found these smaller triangles were perfect sized for my 3 year old who cannot normally finish a big pancake.

Some tips:.
1. spray your Quesadilla maker with cooking spray before you pour the pancake batter in.
2.  I poured about a 1/4 cup per triangle section.
3. Cook for about 2 min.  It gets pretty hot so check it at about a min and a half and poke the fattest part.  if batter oozes out you know you need to shut it and cook a little longer. But I found two minutes was pretty perfect except for the batches I made with blueberries had to go a little longer than 2 min.
4. You can pull it out as one big pancake with triangle sections still attached per each persons plate. or break it up in smaller triangles like I did for people to take as much as they wanted.  I did find that people ate 5-6 triangles(besides the 3 year old she had two)  so it came out to about the same.
5. For the pancake recipe I did not have buttermilk so I just added 2 tablespoons of vinegar per 1 and 1/4 cups of milk. since I doubled my recipe It was 4 tablespoons of vinegar and 2 1/2 cups of milk. I still added a little more milk than they said because the batter was still a little heavy and thick


So if you have a Quesadilla Maker that you have not used in awhile, or have debated if it needs to go off to the thrift store.  Try using it for other things besides Quesadillas :-)  Every time I type the word quesadilla I hear the way Napoleon Dynamites grandma says quesadilla :-)