Getting Myself Organised

I love my in-laws, I really feel as though I have gained a whole family with my marriage to my husband but I am dreading their visit next week. Why? Well, I have trouble getting up in the mornings (as in I often don’t rise until midday unless I have somewhere to be or something I HAVE to do) then I have work then I need to feed my husband then I just feel like winding down for the evening. What this means is that my housework tends to fall to the wayside. Don’t get me wrong, my home is not a disgusting hovel but it certainly not of a state where I am happy to have visitors.

Being the person that I am, I have a Pinterest board with the express purpose of keeping track of cleaning and organisational “hacks”. At this point, I am still looking for that crucial ‘How to clean your whole house very very quickly’ article but I have found a few interesting bits including a suggestion that you set a timer for a small period of time like 15 minutes and just challenge yourself to as much as possible in that time and some ideas about what to with all of the ridiculous amounts of sentimental items that you accrue.

Ultimately, I would like a very minimalist aesthetic to my home and I would like to adopt the principles of a capsule wardrobe but that is something that I am unlikely to achieve.

Watch this space to see how the challenge of sorting our home goes.

Until next time,

Mrs C-T xx

Project #3: Bullet Journal

Ever since I started planning my wedding, I have been totally obsessed with Pinterest and it would seem that things about Bullet Journals are becoming more of a feature on there. Most of the pins that I have seen are ridiculously beautiful which is something that I would love to do but I think it is important to start by trying to create a very simple bullet journal and then flesh it out as I use it more and see what works for me.

I had quite a few pins on Pinterest on the theme of Bullet Journals but there is only so much that one can say about it and some I found more useful than others. A list of the sites I found most useful can be found at the bottom of this entry. After reading through every site that I had pinned, I came up with a list of pages (or collections as they are called) which were necessary to get me started; the beauty of the system is that I can add more whenever and wherever they become necessary.

As I am new to the world of Bullet Journals, I decided that it would be useful to write my key on a post-it note to move from page-to-page until I became familiar with all of the notation. The original method uses dots but it would seem that boxes are used more often and, honestly, they feel as though they work a bit better…. maybe I will decide that boxes are too much and try dots after a while… time will tell.

As I will be starting Bible College as well as continuing my degree, trying to do a class in Sign Language, and doing a qualification through my workplace, an academic diary is going to work better for my needs so the intention is for my journal to run July – June.

Setting up the journal took a little bit longer than I had expected but it should be pretty easy to use effectively now that it is sorted.

To start with, I have the following pages / collections:

• My name with my phone number and email address
• An index page followed by 2 blank pages for more indexing. Thinking about it, my notebook only has 76 pages and there are 40 lines to a page so 3 pages might be a little bit generous but it will be a learning experience…
• A year at a glance calendar
• An important dates page
• A future log
• My first monthly log which is curently blank as I lead a boring life and don’t have anything currently planned for July

That’s all for the moment but I imagine that I will fill the pages quickly and have lots of ideas of things to include.

Until next time,

Mrs C-T xx

 

P.s. Here are the links that I found most useful

Cerries Mooney

Lazy Genius Collective

Hannah Lane

The Original Bullet Journal

Band Aids Don’t Fix Bullet Journals

 

Project #2: Reusing Old Comics?

This is less of a project that I have started and more of an idea that has been forming for a while. In my hallway cupboard I have a stack of old comic books that I just gathering dust. I love all things geeky but they are just a random collection that don’t sit together as a cohesive story so I figure, why not give them a new lease of life by using them to decorate some cheap furniture!

I have a plain bedside unit that sits in the spare bedroom looking unloved so my idea is to sand it down and cover it with pages from the comic books then add a few coats of varnish.

I am looking forward to starting this project but I need to make sure that I have plenty of room to do it and that I have enough comics to cover the surface.

Until next time,

Mrs C-T xx

Project #1: Temperature Blanket Update 1

Hey all,

Just thought I would do a quick update on my Temperature Blanket… it is growing nicely but I was still feeling disappointed with the lack of variety in the colours so I decided to make a second blanket! The second blanket will be based off the lowest temperature for each day and I am hoping to see good variation in colours but this is Scotland where the temperature doesn’t seem to vary very much! I am also using slightly different stitches for this blanket; the whole blanket is single crochet but on the row that represents the first of every month, I am incorporating popcorn stitches into the row.

Both blankets are growing nicely but I am using the same colour key for both so it is a little challenging to do both at the same time, especially as sometimes I needed the same colour for both!

Until next time,

Mrs C-T xx

Edible “Paint”

I help out at a local Girlguiding group with girls aged 5-7 years old; we like to get the girls involved in deciding what we do but sometimes their suggestions can be a bit crazy so we have to get creative. The girls love making things that they can eat, they are also like making butterflies. This sparked the idea of trying to make butterflies with pancakes rather than by folding a piece of paper in half, as much as we all love that!

Whilst browsing through Pinterest, I came across a how to for “Rainbow Bread” on Kids’ Craft Room. The pictures looked awesome and it was EXACTLY what we needed. Having a husband who is addicted to Peanut Butter sandwiches means that we always have bread in our home and I tried-out the recipe straight away. Basically, it is just coloured sugar water but it works surprisingly well on lightly coloured foods and it definitely is edible (I had to repeatedly tell the children in my group not to lick their paint brushes!)

A few observations that I will make on this recipe:

• The recipe just uses three ingredients: sugar, water, and food colouring which makes it very easy to make but its consistency is more like watercolour paint than acrylic paint. I tried varying the ratios but wasn’t able to get anything thicker but still workable
• For obvious reasons, lighter colours don’t work as well as bold or darker colours
• Fresh paint brushes are a must for this craft but you probably won’t be able to use them again as even after a wash is boiling water, the brushes felt sticky and horrible when dried.
• Boiling water works best so be prepared to make in advance but the paint will stay usable for a few days.
• The food colouring in a tube was less effective than colour paste – if you are likely to do this a couple of times, it is probably worth investing in some food colour paste pots.

So, how is this edible paint made?

Well, it is pretty much equal parts granulated sugar to boiling water and a few drops of food colouring. When I was making up multiple pots of colour for my girls, I put 2 tbsps of sugar into several plastic cups whilst the kettle was boiling then added 2 tbsps of boiling water. I was using Wilton Food Colour Paste so I used a cocktail stick to take a small about of colour from my pots and then used them as mixing sticks. That is all it took!

Here are some of the butterflies that we created:

Until next time,

Mrs C-T xx

Tomato Pasta Sauce

This is one of the simplest things that I like but cook but it is really tasty and versatile. I tend to just mix it with some dried pasta and grate some cheese over the top but it works really well as a pizza base sauce as well. I never make this recipe the same way twice but I made a few notes when I was cooking it last week and below is my recipe; it is definitely not a recipe that needs to be followed strictly (assuming anyone wants to follow it!)

Heat 2 tbsp olive oil in a pan

On a low-medium heat cook 2 diced small red onions and 5 roughly chopped cloves of garlic  in (that sounds like a crazy amount but the cloves were quite small and we really like garlic!) for 4 minutes, stirring continuously.

Add a 400g tin of chopped tomatoes

Add 1/4 tsp dried chilli and 1 tbsp oregano

Add 2 tbsp balsalmic vinegar (I could have gotten away with 1 but this just adds such a richness to the flavour, red wine would also work well instead of vinegar but we don’t drink so I am a little wary about alcohol in my cooking)

Cook on a high heat for 3 minutes, stirring occassionally.

Use a hand mixer to blend until the sauce is smooth.

 

That’s it! Like I say, it is really simple recipe but it works really well and, because it uses things that I pretty much always have in my kitchen, I can whip it up without too much thought.

Until next time,

Mrs C-T xx

Project #1 : Temperature Blanket

For those of you that haven’t come across the idea of a temperature blanket, you crochet your blanket using a key so what colour you use depends on what temperature it is. Commonly, the blanket will be representative of 1 year with 1 row equally 1 day.

I decided that I wanted to crochet a blanket for my first year of marriage so I decided that I would use the temperature of whatever city my husband and I were in for each day i.e. when we were on honeymoon, we used the temperature in Rhodes rather than in our home city.

The hardest part was choosing the colours and creating a key. I was lucky to find a guide on Stitching in the Woods for a city not too distant to where I live so I used their temperature ranges. As for choosing the colours, I liked the idea of the blanket being rainbow-coloured so I picked out the colours of the rainbow from my local Hobbycraft store picking-up just one 100g skein of each colour because I am not too bothered about exact dye matches and there is no way of knowing how much of each colour I will need. To compensate for the fact that there are 10 temperature ranges and only 7 colours in the rainbow, I chose several shades of our favourite colour, green.

When I begun, I didn’t consider that even a row of single crochet without much height would create quite a big blanket when there are 365 rows! I have done almost 2 months and the blanket is growing very nicely; I am expecting it to be about 150cm x 200cm when it is completed.

I will post occassional updates on my progress so keep an eye out for that.

Until next time,

Mrs C-T xx

Introductions

Hello and welcome to my blog. 

I plan to mainly focus my posts around the crafty and cooking things that I do but I may occasionally post something that relates more to my life. I like a wide variety of crafts and always love learning new skills but my real passion at the moment is crocheting; it is really relaxing and something that needs just the right amount of my attention after a day’s work. I also love to cook and find that necessity means that I often get creative in the kitchen. I am more than happy to follow a recipe but I will often just use them as a guideline and mould them to my needs. 

I am going to try to post at least once a week, on a Saturday so be sure to check for updates.