Hi all!

I thought I’d pop in to let you know my fun news: I just had LASIK yesterday!

It was more harrowing than I thought it would be, but relatively simple and gazoinks! it’s the day after and I’m seeing 20/20. No joke! The eye doctor confirmed it this morning!

Here’s my pre-op photo:

They put a sticker on my chest with all my info: what surgery I was having, which eyes, yadda yadda.  Then they stuck two round red office stickers (very high tech) above each of my eyes to indicate that both were to be worked on.

Here’s a photo from today, less than 24 hours after my cornea was sliced and flipped open and a laser “resurfaced” my eye:

A few broken blood vessels in that left eye, but other than that, good as new!  The slit in my cornea should heal in about 5 days, so no eye makeup or other activities that could get any bacteria in my eyes for a week.  It’s amazing what they can do, people.

I’ll be back soon with more glittering, buy or diys, you know, all the things.

I’ve been interested in color more and more these days.  I think I’m pretty good at making color matches; I never would’ve said that before I started the barrette biz, but enough people said, “Ooooh, I like those colors together” that I started to maybe think it was something other than a fluke.

I love blue and orange together:

And I like purple and green:

And other stuff.  I had a fun time doing this little color quiz from Curbly and Glidden paint.

It’s the My Life, My Colors quiz, and it asks you questions about your personality and then gives you a range of choices of colors that “match” you.  Then, you can choose one color and it will generate some palettes for you.  I did the quiz twice, since I always find there are several different answers that apply to me.

Here are a few of my palettes from the first go round:

I kind of like the mix of colors, but I’m not wowed.  I do like the orange and teal one.

Hop on over and take the quiz and let me know if you get any better results.  In the meantime, I’m pondering the Pantone Color of the Year for 2012: Tangerine Tango!

You would not guess, looking at this project, that it was the one that almost pushed me over the edge.  For the first time, I actually considered giving up.  Giving up on Martha!

It’s a totally straightforward project.  Cut out snowflakes.  Cover them in glue.  Cover them in glitter.  And… scene.

But the problems start with the cutting.  Step one.  I had a feeling that it was going to be slow going because you have to cut out a detailed image in cardboard.  With a craft knife.  My craft knife skillz are not the best.  But this craft had me considering: “Am I even doing this right?  Do I need a craft knife tutorial?  Isn’t this tool pretty self-explanatory?”

The problem is that cutting out so many details with a craft knife takes a long time, and it’s really hard to be precise.  To outline a few of the main problems:

~ The knife doesn’t cut all the way through the cardboard.  You have to go over the cut several times until you can tell it’s gone through.  But then what happens is the seams between cuts don’t go all the way through.

You can see here that where the edges come together, the cuts haven’t gone all the way through.  That’s annoying, and what I ended up having to do was go over all the cuts from the back.

~ While some of the cuts don’t go through at the connection points, the others get overcut, and that makes the delicate points on the snowflake less stable.

You can see how some of the cuts go past where they should.  GAH!

So, do you want to know how long it took me to cut out this snowflake with a craft knife? It took me 23 minutes. Seriously! Half way through, I started an internal dialogue.

“This is what I’m doing right now.  I have just spent 15 minutes cutting out a snowflake that I will probably never use and that I don’t want.  Should I just quit?  Cut my losses?  I could be doing one hundred other things with my time right now.  What am I doing?”

But I staggered on, with each cut thinking, “this is going to be my last cut.  I’m quitting.”  Until finally, it was done.  PRAISE THE LORD.

So as you can see, this looks like crap. But I was hopeful that the glittering would cover over most of the imperfections.  I pulled of all those little hangy pieces and moved on.

There was another template with a differently-shaped snowflake, and in spite of my hatred for this process, I decided to do an experiment.  I wondered whether cutting with scissors might not be easier.  So I cut the outside of this snowflake with scissors.

Aaaaand that one looks like crap, too. It was highly frustrating (and even a little painful) to cut through the cardboard with scissors, but it was faster. I had to cut the inside with the craft knife, but all told this one took me 18 minutes instead of 23.

Gah!  I’ve already spend 40 minutes on this craft, and I haven’t even gotten to the glitter part!

But when I did, there was more frustration awaiting.  I covered the snowflake with Martha’s own “glittering glue,” and I covered it well.  I let it sit for a while to dry before I shook off the extra glitter.  And then?

BLARGH!  The glitter was very, very spotty.

Now, this was a real disappointment, every step of the way.  So I took matters into my own hands.  I went and got the spray adhesive an sprayed the crap out of these snowflakes, and then coated them in glitter.  And you know what?  It worked like a charm in about 3 seconds.  What the hell, Martha?

There they are.  Mocking me with their preschool art project looks and their epic difficulty.  I’m pretty sure these were one of the labors of Hercules.

To recap: this project blows.

TIME INVESTED

ZOMGZ I spent over an hour on these two snowflakes.

DIFFICULTY

Really, really crazy hard

TOTAL COST

• glitter pack, $29.99 (or significantly cheaper if you buy it at Michaels with the 40% off coupon)*
• glittering glue, $3.99
• cardboard (I keep pieces of cardboard from packaging that I think might be useful, so I didn’t spend any money on this item)

Total cost = $33.98

WAS IT WORTH IT?

It is possible that this is the least desirable craft in the Encyclopedia so far.  No, indeed.

More glittering to come.

If you are crafty, and even if you aren’t, you might enjoy looking at some of the amazing things that show up on my favorite craft sites. These are places I visit every day.

1.  CRAFT

Where else are you going to get your Jello Origami tutorials?!  This site updates many times a day, and they always point you to the coolest crafts on the web.

2.  Geek Crafts

Did I mention I’m also a geek? This site delivers on what it promises. It’s a little heavy on the DIY Tardises, but there are also some really, really fun and creative crafts.

3.  Iron Craft

Iron Craft began last year.  Started by Kathy & Susi at Just Crafty Enough, Iron Craft challenges its “members” with a new project every two weeks (last year it was every week, and everyone got a tad overwhelmed).  I participated last year up until I couldn’t keep up with all the challenges.  I hope to do more of them this year.  It’s super fun to see the round ups of everything other crafters have done, too.

4.  Curbly

Curbly is a self-described “DIY design community.”  Like CRAFT, they show you amazing projects and keep up with what’s new in the crafting world.  As a bonus, there isn’t much overlap with CRAFT.

5.  I Am Momma, Hear Me Roar

If you’ve never been to Cheri’s site, you are missing out.  It’s by far the best one-woman crafting show on the web.  I’ve always wanted to be the next Martha Stewart, but Cheri really comes the closest.  She posts every day, faithfully, and she makes some of the most amazing projects.  I have no idea how she comes up with so many ideas.  And, to boot, she was just on Martha Stewart’s show this week… the show hasn’t aired, but you can see a shot from the taping on Cheri’s site.  She is my blogging and crafting hero.

Do you have a favorite crafty site?  Besides mine, of course.  Let me know in the comments!  I’m always looking for new inspirations.

Are y’all ready for this week’s installment?

I came across this tutorial for making personalized, dyed wood bangle bracelets and I fell in love.  Have you used this Inkodye dealio?  It’s a dye that responds to sunlight, so you paint it on and then let it cure in the sun, and its color develops.  Kind of like photo sensitive paper that you can paint on anything.

You can buy pre-dyed bangles like these at Amazon, or make your own with this amazing tutorial from Lumi.

Happy Thursday!

While there are few things I am proud of as a parent, I am happy that my kids eat vegetables every day. I’ve spent a good deal of my parental meal planning time coming up with ideas for vegetables that my kids will not only eat, but will enjoy.

In general, if your kids will absolutely not eat vegetables, you are probably going to have some work ahead of you. Research shows that it takes many introductions of a particular food before a child will eat it; a nutrionist at Tufts suggests a “rule of 15″—introduce a food 15 times before your child might accept it.

Hopefully, though, these vegetable sides might be a little easier for kids to try.

1.  Cheesy broccoli

(Image: Share My Kitchen)

When my kids were little, I used to put cheese on their broccoli all the time. Not cheese sauce, which in my opinion tastes rather bleh. Real cheese. After steaming it, I’d simply put a small piece of cheese (usually I’d tear off a small piece of a sliced cheese, like muenster or havarti) on top, and then I’d cover the whole batch with the pot I’d just used to steam it. That trapped the heat from the cooked broccoli and melted the cheese. And my kids loved it.

2.  Maple Carrots

It doesn’t get much sweeter and delicious than maple-glazed carrots. You can cook them to whatever texture your kids like and adjust the sweetness, too. For my recipe, see here. You can even add a little brown sugar while cooking to sweeten even further.

3.  Roasted asparagus

(Image: Simply Recipes)

I’ve tried steamed asparagus before, but roasted is so much more delicious, and my kids like it better, too. I simply coat the spears in olive oil, toss a little salt over them, and stick them in the oven for 5 – 10 minutes at 400º (how long you put them in depends on the thickness and how tender your kids will like them). It’s one of my kids’ favorite vegetable dishes.

4.  Zucchini Coins

Pretty much anything breaded tastes good, right? My Zucchini Coins are simply thin slices of zucchini that you bread with healthy stuff and bake. Calling them coins only adds to the mystique and can help get a kid to try something they might be wary of. For my recipe, see here.

5.  Pumpkin Nuggets

Probably the most unusual of the vegetable dishes, Pumpkin Nuggets might seem odd at first. But bear with me. Pumpkin is a super food, and since it’s not an easy vegetable to serve, I came up with this recipe. It’s really quite delicious. Kind of like moist pumpkin cookies. And since it doesn’t resemble a dreaded green vegetable, sometimes kids are willing to try it. My recipe is here.

What’s your go-to vegetable for your kids?

I’m loving houndstooth this season.

You can buy these Houndstooth Ponyskin Pumps from Salvatore Ferragamo for $951 (!), or you can make your own with this tutorial from Love Maegan.

Enjoy!

Yes, folks, we’re starting glittering, and we’re starting with… eggs? What is going on with all the decorative eggs Martha must have?

As I mentioned before, I don’t love glittering. It seems a little low-brow to me, too gaudy. But, true to my Martha Challenge, I bought this sucker:

Twenty four little jars of glitter. How can you have just one?

So, blown out eggs, yadda yadda, cover them with glitter.  Woot!

This is one wooden egg and one blown out egg.

A few notes here.  First, I bought Martha’s “glittering glue,” since I think it was on sale and I figured, why not?  It comes with it’s own brush attached to the lid, which is perfect since then I don’t have to wash a brush after I use it.

D’oh!  Might want to rethink the quality of that brush applicator there.  As you can see, it broke off immediately, was a mess and totally useless.  * Le Sigh*.

Also, the Encyclopedia tells you to put your glitter in a bowl, set the egg in it and then use a spoon to “spoon” the glitter over the egg.  Do you know how much glitter it would require to have a bowl of it big enough to accomplish this?  You’d need at least three of those little vials that I bought.  So I simply sprinkled the glitter over the eggs, which seemed to work fine.

Incidentally, the glitters I used were “Periodot” and “Purple Sapphire.”  Of course they were.

TIME INVESTED

About 15 minutes to blow out one egg, plus about 15 minutes to glitter.

About 30 minutes

DIFFICULTY

Super easy

TOTAL COST

• one egg, $0.33
• wooden egg, $0.99
• glitter pack, $29.99 (or significantly cheaper if you buy it at Michaels with the 40% off coupon)*
• glittering glue, $3.99

Total cost = $44.30

* You can also buy the glitter separately.  Each container (slightly bigger than the vials) is $4.99.  So really, with a coupon, it’s a much better value to get the 24 pack so you can have lots of different colors.  Unless you are planning on glittering something enormous.

WAS IT WORTH IT?

I don’t even know what I’m going to do with my gilded eggs, let alone these glittered monstrosities.  No. WAY.

I recently saw this project over at Martha’s site, and it seemed like just the thing I needed to keep track of posts: a totally customizable and flexible calendar.

It’s a great idea, actually, that uses sticky notes to manage daily tasks.  Here’s Martha’s version:

It’s perfect as an editorial calendar, a place where I can keep track of all the posts I’m writing on different sites, especially since you can move the sticky notes around if you decide to change a post from one day to another.

Will you be surprised if I tell you that Martha’s instructions are kind of off?  No, you will not.

It’s actually super easy to do.  Get a piece of foam core, cut it to the right dimensions (more on this in a second), use washi tape to make a grid, get some pretty Post Its.  Done.

Now, Martha tells you to cut your foam core into a 26 1/2″ square.  Which I did.  And then you divide it up into 7 three-inch squares.  Now, the washi tape is 1/2″ wide, and I was always good at math.  So here’s my calcuation:

3″ squares x 7 = 21″

8 lines of washi tape (including a frame on the outside) x 1/2″ = 4″

21″ + 4″ = 25″

So, Martha, what up with 26 1/2″ square?!?  If she used some other kind of washi tape, then it would have to be 11/16″, which seems like an awfully odd size of tape, no?  I’ve never seen it in that size.  In fact, all the tape I’ve seen is 1/2″.

Unfortunately, I listen to Martha, so then I had the wrong size board.  I had to do some 3 1/8″-type of finagling, but I figured it out.  But if you want to make it right, then use a 25″ square board.

On another note, I bought foam core at Michaels, which is a 20″ x 30″ board.  I bought two and cut off an extra 6 1/2″ from one and hot glued it to the other so I had the width I needed (or rather, the wrong width that Martha told me to use).  I hot glued the edges together, which worked surprisingly well, and then I put some duct tape on the seam on the back for extra stability.  But it works fine.

Some steps along the way:

cut to size and outlined with washi tape

with column lines

My suggestion here is to mark out 3″, 3 1/2″, 6 1/2″, 7″, etc, on both the bottom and the top, so that you have a set of 1/2″ wide marks at the top and bottom that guide you where to put your washi tape.  Attach it at the top, unroll a bunch without sticking it, and then, pulling it tight, line up the bottom guides.  The tape in the middle will fall nicely into place.

complete!

You’ll notice that I used a different pattern tape to divide the month and the year from the days.  You know, just a little more fabulous than Martha.

Here’s a close up:

I’m still going to be tweaking a bit, since now if I move a post it moves the date with it, so I’ll have to figure out how to do separate dates.  Maybe those little round price stickers or something, or something more reusable so I can use them every month.  I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Do you have a calendar system you love?  I have tried many, many, and I still don’t feel like I’ve found a total winner.  This might be fodder for another post, though.

RD out!

Gilding is coming to an end in the Encyclopedia, but not for me!

I spent some time today trolling the home goods shelves at Ross, looking for things to cover with gold or silver foil. I’m hooked, y’all. I found a few things, and then I found some things laying around the house, and long story short, you will see more original gilding in the weeks to come, I fear.

The last project was gilding bowls. Or bowl, in my case. I happened to have this old wooden bowl that we got for our wedding, and it has a tiny crack in it. Enough of a crack that I don’t want to put anything liquid in it, but not enough to throw the bowl out. Perfect for gilding!

This time, I used paper-backed gilding, which is easier to handle because it’s lightly attached to paper. You can pick up the paper and position it, and once you set it down you rub it and the gilding comes off onto your surface. I bought it at Michaels.

I coated my bowl with size and got started.

Here’s how it looked after I had a few sheets on:

The problem with this project is that it’s hard to get the gold leaf to lay well on the curved surface of the bowl, so you end up with a lot of tears. The Encyclopedia acknowledges this, telling you to use the little bits of gold leaf left on the papers to “fill in holes or cracks.” And there were a lot of these. Witness:

And they ended up being rather difficult to patch. Some of them were so thin that there wasn’t enough size peeking through to make more gold leaf stick. So I tried putting more size on the more patchy areas after I’d finished the whole thing, which didn’t work well at all. First, the size didn’t stick very well to the leaf, and then it left a kind of film on the leaf that wasn’t cracked, so I had to cover over everywhere size got painted, whether or not it actually had a crack. And then the patching was more noticeable than it was on the eggs.

Looking at Martha’s photos in the book, I don’t think I did much worse than her people did, because her bowls look less than perfect, too.

The overall result is nice, though.

If you look closely, you can see some of the patching (look in particular at the rim on the lower part of the photo).

As Martha did, I left the outside of the bowl wooden, which makes a nice effect, I think.

Now I’ll have to figure out what to do with this bowl.

TIME INVESTED

About 3 hours

DIFFICULTY

Difficult

TOTAL COST

• round bamboo bowl, Target, $19.79
• imitation gold leaf booklet, $14.00
• Aluminum Basic Gilding Kit, $29.95 (from Gilded Planet)
• gilder’s tip brush, $25.50

Total cost = $89.24

WAS IT WORTH IT?

Hmmm. Well, kind of. It’s an expensive craft, but once you have the supplies, you can do a lot with them. The bowl is definitely more useful than the eggs. But is it much more beautiful than one you could buy in the store?  Or less expensive?  I found these pretty little ceramic bowls online:

(Image: Olive + Cocoa)

Lovely, aren’t they? Now, these are porcelain bowls that are coated with platinum inside, but they are $84 for the set of two. You could probably do something similar for much less. It wouldn’t be platinum (although I’m sure you could find platinum leaf!), but it could make a nice gift.

What do you think?

Next up is glittering. Oy. I find glitter to be a bit unrefined, but I’ve got a lot of it in my future.