February 9th, 2009
A few weeks ago Carina came to visit me. I’d been wanting to paint my new place in San Francisco, and she was all for it, so I took some before pictures of my ugly pink walls (you can see Carina there on the sofa workin’ away):
Choosing the paint wasn’t too hard, I’d been toying with the idea of painting one room a warm golden wheat color and the other a dark taupe color (The Kitchen and hall need to be painted as well, but thats a project for another weekend). We decided the gold would look awesome in the bedroom (yes that is a pantone book — but its one for home decor). We got the paint all mixed and jumped right in!
The painting didn’t take too long, because of all the moldings we didn’t tape off anything, and then we just did it as fast as we could. The two rooms each took two coats of paint and from start to finish it took about 3 hours. Then of course we had to go shopping for a new bedspread. I found this cool one at EQ3!
That’s my cool after shot! The apartment looks so great! And you can see a rare photo of “Mr. Project” though he is trying to hide with that hoodie. It’s still a major work in progress, but it will be fun to post all the decorating projects that I do.
If you’ve been thinking about painting, just do it! It really doesn’t take that long and its a pretty inexpensive way to change the look of a whole room (especially if the walls are ugly pink!)
February 7th, 2009
I am sure there are some of you out there who have a big binder or recipe book full of disorganized recipe cards. I know I have been planning on organizing mine for the past 7 years. I decided a few weeks ago that I would design some cute tabs and cards and just get it done. I was talking to my friend Carina and we decided to design a few different sets and sell them as digital kits in our Two Peas in a Bucket stores.
I designed the cute bird set that you see above as well as as adorable pink and red cherry set. Here you can see all the items:
As you can see, each set has 4 tabed cards (4 with labels and 4 blank for you to customize), 1 3×5 recipe card (one with lines and one without), 1 kitchen note design, 5 large canister labels and a background pattern that you can print on the back of your items.
The first step to make the organized recipe box is to print out the background paper image for as many recipe cards and tabbed dividers as you want. Then flip the paper over in your printed and print out those tabbed dividers and recipe cards. I set all mine up in photoshop on an 8.5×11 canvas size so that I could print out 4 per paper. Once they are printed, go ahead and cut each item out. I used scissors, but a nice paper trimmer would make pretty short work of the job.
Note the background paper is now printed on the backside of my items. So adorable!
If you are pretty computer savvy, you can fill out the blank recipe cards in a photo editing program such as photoshop or photoshop elements, otherwise you can just print out the lined recipe cards and write on them by hand.
Even if you print your cards with the recipes already on them, its probably a good idea to have some extra lined cards for new recipes.
Once you have all your recipes written down, go ahead and place them in your recipe box and organize! See that wasn’t so bad – and it looks so good!
This kit and other “Kitchen 1-2-3″ kits (Carina has 3 other styles for sale as well) will be available for purchase on Tuesday February 10th from Two Peas in a Bucket!
January 31st, 2009
There is this great little grocery store just a few blocks from my apartment. Everytime I go there, I look at their amazing bakery and see these fabulous jam-filled heart cookies. But of course I never buy them, and if I did, they would probably be like 3 dollars a piece. So I decided in honor of valentines day, I would make some myself! They were so easy, and exceptionally good! You should definitely try them.
I just moved and have barely any kitchen stuff, so baking presents quite the challenge. For these cookies you will need:
1. A Rolling Pin
2. 2 nesting heart-shapped cookie cutters (I found mine for $1 a piece)
3. Sugar cookie dough recipe + ingredients – or pre-made sugar cookie dough (I totally cheated!).
3b. Extra flour & powdered sugar
4. Red jam
5. Cookie Sheet
First step is to make the dough – or pretend you made the dough. When I use pre-made dough, I always add just a little bit of flour so it doesn’t stick to everything.
Next you’ll need to roll it out. I recommend 3/16″ (just a little less than a quarter of an inch) because you’ll be putting together two cookies in the end, so it gets a bit bulky. This also depends on how much your dough rises.
Once you’ve rolled out your dough, go ahead and use the cookie cutters to cut the big hearts in the dough. At this point you’ll want to cut little hearts in HALF of the big hearts.
I just made a few cookies because I didn’t want to eat a dozen or so. If you are going to make a lot of these, I would recommend making your own dough, that pre-made stuff is expensive. But if you really need to save time, it only took me about 20 min from start to finish to make these awesome cookies.
Next you’ll want to bake the cookies. Just follow the instructions on your recipe. The hardest part of this whole thing was transferring the dough to the baking sheet without ruining the shape. Here are the cookies after they were baked. I also baked the little inner hearts, but had to do it on a second sheet.
I let the cookies cool for about a minute on the pan, then they are easy to move to a paper towel or cooling rack. The assembly of the final cookies is pretty easy. I had the cut-out hearts on one side and dusted them with powdered sugar. Then the whole hearts I covered with a thin layer of jam – a bit thicker towards the center.
The final assembly consisted of placing the dusted hearts on the jammed hearts. Viola! Beautiful jam filled heart cookies! These were so so yummy, I’m going to make a big batch for Mr. Project to take to work on valentine’s day!
If you are wanting to make the dough from scratch, I found this super easy recipe online:
Raspberry Sandwich Heart Cookies
Happy Valentine Baking!
January 16th, 2009
As I was cutting out squares for my pincushion, I realizes that I would be making a cute stuffed cube. And so I thought it would be really cool to make a “soft ABC baby block”. I wanted to make it slightly smaller and without the raw edges showing. So It was a bit of a different process. Here are the steps I took…
Cut 6 3″x3″ squares. I recommend wool.
Next you’ll want to embroider letters on the pieces. There are a few choices for embroidery. An embroidery machine (which I used), embroidering by hand, and some sort of iron on transfer.
Since I had already cut out my squares, they were too small to fit in the embroidery hoop. So I stretched some thin cotton and pinned them in the center of the hoop
square pinned to cotton in embroidery hoop
Then I just set the embroidery to do one letter, in the middle of the field as big as I could — which was 40 mm. I would have loved to do them bigger, but I only have the stock designs that came with the machine.
embroidering the "A"
After the “A” was all embroidered, I trimmed the cotton backing that it was attached to. I just trimmed fairly close to the letter, It doesnt have to look perfect because it will be hidden.
backside of the now-embroidered square
I followed those same two steps on each of the squares, embroidering A-F. You could also embroider numbers or images. I think embroidering by hand would give you a lot more flexibility… however it would take much much longer!
I went through the same steps as my first project. Sewing 4 squares side-by side, then to each other, followed by attaching the top and bottom:
4 sewn side-by side. This would be extra cute if it spelled baby.
sewn into an "open cube"
Now you’ll notice that I have the wrong side facing out. On this cube, different from the pincushion, I want to hide all the raw edges. So I’m sewing the whole square inside out and then reversing for the final soft block. You could do it with the edges showing like yesterday — it saves a bit of hand stitching in the end.
sewing on the top square
the bottom square is sewn on 3 sides waiting to be turned inside out & stuffed
Once you have sewn the bottom square on three sides, you will need to turn your cube inside out. As you turn it inside out, you will have to push the corners out as much as you can so it does not look sloppy. Then go ahead and stuff it really really full! You’ll need some thread and a needle to finish the cube up nice and clean.
Once you have your needle threaded. You’ll need to fold the raw edges into the cube and start stitching. You can pin them along the way, but this was such a small edge that I just held it in place as I stitched. I used a “baseball” stitch to get a smooth corner. That basically means that I sewed from the outside of one square to the inside of the stitch and then sewed from the outside of the opposite square again to the inside of the stitch. This makes a pattern similar to a baseball stitch.
the completed stitched side
And there you have it! My completed Soft ABC baby block next to my cute pin cushion! I think the baby block would be so cute as a set – you could do one with numbers and one with pictures and give them at a baby shower. Such a sweet handmade gift!
