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 :-)

Easter Eggs with Words of Affirmation

I Just thought I would show you all some of what I have been up to lately.  I made a custom order of eggs this week for one of my Etsy customers :-)  She got a set for each of her daughters and herself.  I wood burned the words of affirmation and designs and then painted and polished the eggs to a smooth shine :-)

Here are some pics closer up.  

I love how they look so simple and cute!  

                     

Wooden Easter eggs!

I have a new batch of eggs I wood burned yesterday to add to my Etsy store :-) I will be painting them today and hopefully have them ready for my store tomorrow!

This is one I am still working on.  I need to wood burn the flower petals.(which takes a lot of time and concentration!)

I also picked up these wood boxes at the dollar store and thought it would be fun to wood burn designs on them.  The design on this one is All about my Mom :-)  She loved Lilacs and nature.  I do too :-)  

I can't wait to paint all this stuff !

New baby chicks!

We lost a couple of our older Hens over the Winter.  I went to Cal Ranch to pick up 3 new ones and ended up coming home with 7!  I now have 12 chickens!  What I was thinking I do not know.  I just could not make up my mind on what kind I wanted ;-/  Luckily they wont be laying eggs for a few months, but when they do we will be getting a dozen eggs a day.  I suppose we will have to start selling fresh eggs :-)

If you are thinking of getting new baby chicks this year for the first time here are a few tips that I have learned.

1. Make sure you have a heat lamp.  It was so cute yesterday after we brought the new chicks home and put them in the bin when we added the heat lamp and turned it on they feel asleep almost immidately!
2. Make sure you have a special chick feed.
3. They also need plenty of water
4. It is best to get feeders and water containers especially for chicks.
5. get a bail of straw (not hay) for bedding.
6. Make sure you have a suitable coop to transfer them in when they are old enough.  You can buy a coop, but it is much cheaper to make your own.  If you are turning a rabbit hutch or something like that into a chicken coop make sure you have a a roosting pole for them to sit on.  At dusk every night they love to go in their coop and hop onto their roosting pole and fall asleep.
7. Also make sure you have a chicken run attached to your coop.  Chickens do not enjoy just sitting in their coop all the time.  they like to get out and walk and scratch around. We turned an old dog run we were not using into a chicken run.
8. The more you handle your chicks the more they get to know you and become tame and social.  But when they are new babies you don't want to handle them too much.  picking them up and petting their little heads a couple of times a day should be enough.
Once they are old enough you will want to get them feed that is more suitable for an older chicken.  In the summer they eat  bugs and stuff so you want a summer feed that has less protein in it, but in the winter when they have less opportunity for protein you will need a winter feed that had protein added.
9.  Make sure you clean out old straw and replace with fresh straw every few days.  the old straw is great in compost.  Chicken poop is a great fertilizer, but it can burn your plants if it is to fresh.  I just had mine to my compost bin and let it cook and breakdown with every thing else.
10.  Have fun with your chickens they really are social animals and they have personalities too :-) We like to pick ours up once in awhile even after they are big and just pet them. they love it!
11. Let them out a couple of times a day to grass feed and find bugs and stuff.  I let mine out first thing in the morning and let them peck around for a while and then I feed them their feed and water which gets them all to come back running to their coop with no trouble because they want their food.  then I let them out again in the evening and they go back in their coop on their own to roost.

If you have any other questions that I did not cover just contact me :-)