Oooh, these are beauties.

You can buy this Joanna Laura Constantine Pearl Cluster Necklace for about $340, or you can make your own with this tutorial from Dismount Creative.

Candles and candleholders, they go together like… candles and candleholders, don’t they?

Both of these projects were fairly easy with very few glitches. Although of course I mixed it up a bit from Martha’s original instructions.

Here, she does call for using the spray adhesive, thank goodness. I suppose the candle will have trouble burning with gluey wicks, since the instructions tell you to tape the wicks before spraying. But I also felt like I didn’t want the tops of the candles to be glittered, too; seems like that’s a recipe for burning glitter smell and a mess of puddling wax and glitter. So I covered the entire top of the candle with a piece of contact paper cut to size. Only the sides of my candle got the glitter treatment.

TIME INVESTED

About 10 minutes

DIFFICULTY

Easy Peasy

TOTAL COST

• 3 pack of candles, $8.99
• Martha Stewart fine glitter, $4.99 (1 bottle)
• glittering glue, $3.99

Here’s a case where you could get some candles for cheap and dress them up with glitter. These I bought at Michaels, but I probably should’ve tried Ross. I also used just one bottle of glitter instead of the multiples from the big pack.

Total cost = $17.97

WAS IT WORTH IT?

This is the first glittering project where I’m going to give a half-hearted “yes.” It’s easy, relatively cheap, and you can do it in no time. If you like glitter.

Now, moving onto the candleholders. For this craft, you take two perfectly good brioche pans and glue them together at the bottoms and then glitter the bejesus out of them. I was a little bitter because brioche pans are expensive, yo!

I bought a brand new pack of 6 “made in France” tiny brioche pans at Williams Sonoma for $15. And since I figured I might want to actually use these for, I don’t know, BRIOCHE, I only made one candleholder. That required two pans, so I’m left with four for cooking. (I told you I’m good at math, right?)

I bought the smallest ones since they were the cheapest, but you can really do this craft with any size pan, depending on what kind of candle monstrosity you might be trying to accomodate.

Hot glue those puppies together, THEN paint them with two coats of white acrylic paint (you knew there had to be an extra superfluous step, right?), then glitter.

Ta da. Look, I put one of the pear candles I made way back when in there, since I didn’t have any small enough pillars or anything appropriate.

A few caveats and tips, here.

First, I found it easier to glitter the top and then the bottom. That is, I painted on the glue on the top and added the glitter, and then I painted the bottom and glittered it. It seemed easier than hurrying before the glue dried too much on the whole piece.

Second, I did not glitter the insides of the pans, as Martha did, because again, why? I thought the reflective surface of the metal tin on the inside might actually be more appropriate.

Finally, make sure you really get the glue inside the cracks on these pans. Sometimes you think it’s covered in glue, and then the glitter doesn’t stick in any of the crevices because there’s no glue in there. It’s hard to tell if you’ve gotten it covered.

TIME INVESTED

About 30 minutes active time, plus paint drying time (several hours)

DIFFICULTY

Easy

TOTAL COST

• glittering glue, $3.99
• Martha Stewart craft paint, $2.29
• Martha Stewart fine glitter, $4.99 (1 bottle)
• brioche pans, $15.00 (these will make 3 small holders)

Total cost = $26.27

WAS IT WORTH IT?

I can think of a lot of better things to do with brioche pans. I vote NO.

I’m gathering the last three glittering projects into one final glittering post, and then we can move on to jewelry making.

Don’t worry, they aren’t real birds. But is there anything Martha won’t put glitter on?

Now we’re glittering fake birds. Yay? The good news is this one is, in fact, very straightforward. Instead of putting a bird on it, you put glitter on the bird.

And here are the results you’ve been waiting for!

So there they are, my two little glittered birds. What do you think?

There is nothing exciting to report, here. I followed the directions, and it was easy. Boring.

TIME INVESTED

About 30 minutes for two birds

DIFFICULTY

Easy

TOTAL COST

• glitter pack, $29.99 (or significantly cheaper if you buy it at Michaels with the 40% off coupon)
• glittering glue, $3.99
• birds, $2.99 ea (at Michaels)

Total cost = $39.96

WAS IT WORTH IT?

Well, what am I going to do with two glittered birds now? Not really my aesthetic. So I vote NO.

Am I being too hard on the glitter, people? I want to give it its fair shake, but… glitter?

I came across these cool photos of famous painters’ palettes on The Retronaut via Remodelista the other day. They’re surprisingly muted, I think, but I figured I’d try to create some color palettes from them, you know, just to be meta.

Here’s what I came up with:

This palette belonged to Eugène Delacroix, a French Romantic painter from the early nineteenth century. I liked how neatly he organized all his colors.

This one’s from Georges Seurat, whom you probably know as the pointillist painter.  I liked how nicely his colors blend into one another.

So, that was fun. Even more fun, though, was finding this on The Retronaut. It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen, like, maybe all year. Be warned, though; probably NSFW and NSF-those-who-are-easily-offended.

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 off 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?