I'm famous! well, not really.

My name was mentioned in a "Celebrity" blog! However, you may not know of this celebrity unless you are an avid scrapbooker and followed Creating Keepsakes in it's glory days. In this post on Becky Higgins blog, she selected her current favorite fonts (half of which I either created or processed into fonts) and in the last paragraph is my name! And a link to a project I made! Of course I made the project purely to feature Becky Higgins who is featuring my fonts but really featuring my company's website.

After perusing more of Becky's posts, I found a lot of her recent spray paint projects. I am looking at some old stuff in my house with a new perspective... I just may go a little spray paint happy soon.

Wallflowers

Shortly after we moved in, I decided I had to make big flowers to add some color to the vast whiteness in the Babe's new room.

I had envisioned just what I wanted, but decided to look online to see if there were some examples of how to do it. I couldn't find any examples of just what I wanted. I found some tiny wire flowers with stretched sheer fabric, but I wanted quilting fabric. So I made it up.

I must say, I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out. They've really cheered up the room. I still want to make a few more smaller ones to trail around the wall, but I probably won't get to them for awhile.

I used 20 gage floral wire to keep the petals stiff and assembled them all together in floral foam. They were easy to hang on the wall--I just poked a hole in the foam and voila! As I was making these I wondered to myself how many hundreds of people had made the very same sort of thing, but any photos just hadn't made it to the top of the google image searches. All the supplies can be found at Walmart. I wonder these sort of things about my crafts often... "how many people are making this very same thing right now..."

You can snicker at this cake

cause it's definitely not winning any beauty contests. But it has the potential for some great cake goodness.

I started with a layer of vanilla ice cream, followed by a layer of homemade caramel topped with peanuts, then a layer of chocolate cake. Repeat. Cover it all with dark chocolate ganache. Take the remaining ganache, whip it up with some more cream and dollop it on the top. Drop snickers candy bar slices on each dollop, and Happy Father's Day!

Things I learned while working on this cake:

1. Spreading warm drippy chocolate ganache over frozen cake and ice cream isn't very pretty. The ganache gets cold quick and/or melts the ice cream and makes a mess.
2. Trying to make a layer cake in an 8.5 inch springform pan with cake layers baked in 8 inch cake pans isn't very pretty. It makes for a lumpy cake. (For the record I thought my springform pan was just 8 inches. I bought it at a garage sale a few weeks ago and never measured it.)
3. No matter how soft and delicious caramel is when you make it by hand, it's hard to cut and eat when frozen in a cake.

My NEW garden

I've always wanted an herb garden in my kitchen window. I finally have a south-facing kitchen window so my dream can become a reality!!! This makes me so happy! You know what else makes me happy? This red pot.

I love it.

Pesto Pain

That's "pain" as in french for bread, not "pain" as in ouch.

One of the first things I did when I unpacked my kitchen was to find my Christmas Cookbook and christen my new kitchen with it's deliciousness. This photo was taken several days after I made the bread. The loaf was HUGE! I used store-bought pesto, but in the future I want to experiment with some homemade pesto. The bread was delicious, but the pesto was a little too tangy on the first day. It mellowed out perfectly by the second day, though.

Grinding wheat? Soaking grains? Sounds like a lot of work...

But I'm starting to think it's worth a try.

It started with my sister. She has had digestion problems for years and has tried everything in the book-elimitating certain foods, recipes galore, vegetarianism, even yoga to see if it helped her digestion. She's visited several doctors and all have said "reduce stress and eat more soluble fiber." She was at a point where if she tried to consume more fiber she would've turned into a tree. And still she had painful and poor digestion.

A couple months ago she came across a book that took food preparation back to the pre-industrial days. It was one of the few things she hadn't tried yet so she thought she'd have a go. It worked. She has never felt better. The benefits have extended beyond just improving digestion. She has more energy, doesn't feel like she's battling depression all the time, she has better memory and focus. She couldn't say enough good things about it when I was talking on the phone with her.

So I thought I'd do some research of my own. You should know that I've always tried to avoid overly processed food. I've never trusted some of those ingredients lists, they just don't seem right. In my research I've discovered there are a lot of conspiracy theorists and fear-mongerers out there. I'm not trying to do that. I'm just trying to find facts to help me take better care of my body and my family. However, In the Doctrine and Covenants there is a chapter referred to as the "Word of Wisdom" that talks about what is and isn't good for our bodies. There is a verse that says "In consequence of evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days, I have warned you, and forewarn you, by giving unto you this word of wisdom by revelation." So even though I am not a conspiracy theorist, the fact is there is a lot of greedy companies out there who are only looking at their bottom line, not at what their product does to your body.

I decided to approach my research as instructed in Matthew 10:16, "be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves," discerning between the fear-mongers and the truth-sayers.

I've found TONS of information out there. I want to use this as a reference for me for some of the more poignant articles I've found, so I'll probably add to this post as time goes on.

1. About Phytic acid and nutrients in grains
2. Be kind to your grains... and your grains will be kind to you
3. The value of soaking your own grains
4. The Ploy of Soy

I haven't changed anything about how I prepare my food yet, but I will, and I will document it here. This may be one of the largest experiments I've tried yet.

Baby puppet

The family is comlete!

This is the baby, my personal favorite of the family. It took longer than I planned because I accidently packed some of my sewing/craft equipment away before I meant to. It feels good to have them done!

Garden update (and finale)

In the weeks before we moved, I kind of left my garden to it's own devices. Apparently the neighborhood cat had plans of his own. I once had 9 cute sprouting strawberry plants. The day we moved I had one partial plant. The rest had been eaten or dug up.

The cosmos had a more successful start, but also looked a little nibbled on. We left before I got to see any flowers.

The Zinnias didn't even come up. I think I noticed 2-3 zinnia plants sprout, but then? rabbits? cat? disease? I never saw them again.

Luckily, the villians of my garden were afraid of the almighty pea plant! I would've had a really big harvest, if only we stayed a few more weeks. Our very first pod made its appearance the night before we left and all the plants were large and lush.

I also said goodbye to my beautiful hydrangea bush. It was exploding with blue blossoms! In general, we felt better about our house and yard than ever during the last few days there. It was sad to say goodbye, but I know there are future garden successes (and probably failures) ahead of me!

Saving tomato seeds

About a month and a half ago I was involved in an emergency preparedness fair for my church. The fair covered everything from first aid to food storage. In the food storage category there was a booth on gardening and I was asked to make a pamphlet about saving garden seeds. I thought it was an interesting topic and was looking forward to doing more research.

I didn't expect to be convinced that one day this is absolutely how I want to do a garden.

Admittedly, there would have to be a really big crisis for the majority of people to resort to living off their own land, but it may not be so hard to imagine. Say we had a major gas crisis and trucking as we know it would cease. That would mean no fresh fruits and vegetables in the grocery store all year round. Say the price of food continued to skyrocket beyond what the average income could support. We've already seen it increase considerably in the past two years.

Ok, back to my garden seeds. One of the first facts that was brought to my attention was the problem of hybrid seed varieties. I know there are a lot of hybrid vegetables out there, and they make some delicious eats, but their seeds are sterile or unpredictable. It's a great way for the seed companies to guarantee an income every year, but not so good if you don't want to buy seeds every year--or if you find yourself in a major crisis and seeds (or vegetables) aren't available.

The second fact that appealed to me was the tradition of heritage seeds. Heritage seeds have been saved from year to year for generations. Gardeners take their healthiest, best fruit at the peak of the season and keep the seeds. If you grow a heritage variety that has grown locally it will be naturally resistant to most local diseases and bugs and appropriately hardy for the climate.

So preserving garden seeds seems like a smart idea to me. I got most of my information from the book "Seed to Seed" by Suzanne Ashworth. It's an awesome book if your interested. For the poster that went with the brochure I decided to take pictures of the steps of saving tomato seeds. My tomato was not from my garden, unfortunately, but from the ever abundant garden of HyVee. The brochure I made is saved on a different computer, so I don't have the nicely worded instructions, but here goes.

Start with the best tomato of your harvest. Cut it in half around the "equator" or horizontally across the middle.
Squeeze the seeds, juices and slime out into an open container. I used a cleaned-out yogurt container.
To get all the seeds, you can also use a spoon to gently scoop out everything.
This is what it looked like in the container.
Now is the fun part. Let your open container sit at room temperature and ferment for at least three days until it grows a nice layer of fungus on it. Tomato seeds have a layer of gel around them that can't be removed safely any way but fermentation. Make sure it's in a location where the stench of fermentation won't bother anyone. I put mine in the garage. Here's what it looked like after 3 days. Oh, and it didn't smell that bad.
After this, you put the whole kit and caboodle in a strainer and rinse, rinse, rinse. I hand-picked out the bigger chunks as I went along.
Finally, after patting off as much moisture as you can, you need to spread the seeds out to dry on a flat hard surface for 7-10 days, stirring them around at least once a day so they don't stick to each other or the surface.
Voila! You have seeds for next season! Store your seeds in an airtight container if possible (to keep out moisture) and in a location without too much variance in temperature, like a basement or cellar.

I know it may seem like a lot of work, but it took only a matter of minutes to do everything (minus the waiting time).

I don't know how to end this post. I wish I could praise the benefits of doing this but since I've never actually done it, that would seem awkward. I had some good quotes in my brochure, but I don't have that, so just imagine some really inspiring quote about saving garden seeds and how it will save the world. The end.