Tuesday, May 31, 2011

A very yummy cocktail



After someone at work shared this recipe I knew I had to try it. I made it (a couple times....) over memorial day weekend. The drink is spectacular.

When making the drinks I made a few changes to the recipe and it still turned out great. :-)
  • I used mint instead of basil.
  • I didn't use as much ginger as the recipe called for in the gingery syrup.
  • Since I used less ginger in the syrup, I added more syrup to each drink than the recipe called for.
  • I added tonic water.


Monday, May 30, 2011

Bean Bag toss + Numbers

I just added numbers to our bean bag toss game for easier score keeping.

I couldn't find plain numbers so I bought stickers meant for a mailbox at Home Depot. They had had black numbers on a reflective background so I just cut out the numbers. 


+
 

=

Friday, May 20, 2011

Bean Bag Toss - bean bags!

We have the bean bag board and now we have bean rice bags!

Supplies:
Rice (or beans)
Material
Zip-lock bags (not required)
We wanted to put the rice first in zip-lock bags and then in material so we were sure they wouldn't break. We played a few rounds with just rice in the taped up zip-lock bags and definitely broke a few.  I might have thrown a little overzealous in my need to win. 

N put rice in the bags, cut the zipper off and used packing tape to close the bag and tape it into a square.

Next he cut the material down to size. Since these will be tossed around he doubled the fabric to make them stronger.


he sewed two sides with the sewing machine  and left the top open to put the rice bag in. If you skip the zip-lock bag part you could just leave a small opening and pour the rice into it before hand sewing it shut.

We made five bags in each colour - red, green, blue y yellow.


N hand sewed the open ends....

 ...and we were ready to play!

I won the first round but with only one point so it wasn't very impressive. :-\


After a pathetic first round we moved closer and did much better.





oneprettything

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Bean Bag Toss

Since we have been spending so much time outside (thankfully we're finally having nice weather!) N decided to make a yard game for us to play.

Bean bag toss!

Supplies:
Plywood
Board
Paint
10 plastic bowls or cups

We bought the plywood already this size so we didn't need to get it cut down.  

N cut the board down to make legs...

...and then he nailed them in. 


Then he brought it out to the yard to paint it. We just used extra paint we had in our casa - extra paint from our bedroom.
Now for the containers to catch the bean bags. 

Originally we were going to spray paint yogurt containers but decided to stop by the dollar store instead to see what we could use.
We found bowls in blue, green and yellow that we thought would work perfect.

To add the bowls to the board, N used a washer and a screw and first made a hole in the bottom of each bowl.





Then he screwed each bowl onto the board.


We're trying to come up with a way to add numbers to each one for points. N is thinking about just drawing them on with a sharpie but I'm on the lookout for big vinyl number stickers. 


Now N just needs to finish the beanbags so we can play (and so I can win). :-)

oneprettything

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Cushion covers

When we painted this furniture a long (long) time ago our plan was to quickly find a gray fabric to make cushion covers. Plain gray fabric was harder to find than we thought. I think it took us a year and a half to find fabric we were happy with.


Here is what the chairs look like – you can see on one we found a fabric that we thought we liked but it turned out to be almost identical to the wall colour so we decided not to use it.



Here is the fabric we found. I’m sure we could have found something better but after looking for over a year we decided to just buy it. 



Now we just need to motivate ourselves to sew 8 cushion covers….

Does anyone know of a good tutorial for making cushion covers? We weren't too happy with the sample grey one we made (the one in the photo). We want to avoid zippers and tried using snaps but I'm sure we could do something better... Any advice is much appreciated!

Monday, May 16, 2011

Wall art : You + Me and Robots

I saw this print and loved it but wished it came in different colours. I decided to try to recreate it in colours that would go better in my casa and decided on red a gray with a white background.

I made the heart in photoshop, basing it off of the inspiration print.

Then I thought it would look nice to have two smaller frames next to the big one so I went back to photo shop to create two more images.

I randomly decided that robots would be cute (and easy) so I got to work. I created the robots using basic shapes and added a heart to one and a tie to the other. The tie and bow are the only parts that are hand drawn and not made with basic shapes. 
You can get a PDF of the robots here: Robot Girl y Robot Boy

I got them printed at Sir Speedy, put them in the frames that I bought at Ikea and N helped hang them up.




 


It's nice to finally have wall art up in the basement; now i just need new sofas...:-)

Friday, May 13, 2011

Bird's Nest Necklace

For Mother's Day we made each of our mom's a bird's nest necklace. I'd never made one before but it looked easy enough and the nice woman at Bead Monkey even printed off the directions that they use when they teach a class of making them.

 
Supplies:
Wire (24 g.)
Beads
Metal loop
Necklace chain


First I made a spiral with the wire. After starting the spiral with a needle-nose pliers I held the spiral between my fingers as I kept wrapping the wire around.


After the spiral was large enough to fit the beads on it, I added the beads to the wire. I bent the wire in a loop so the beads lay flat on the spiral.

Then I just kept wrapping the wire around the beads to form the bird's nest. While doing this I looped the wire through the little metal loop so that I could put the finished nest onto a chain.

I had started off with 24 inches of wire but I think that the directions were meant for thicker wire. I ended up adding another 20 inches or so.

As I wrapped the wire around I kind of pushed the wire together to form the nest.

 
I put the charms on the necklaces and they were all ready to mail to our mom's for Mother's Day!



Happy Mother's Day!

Monday, May 9, 2011

Living room wall art

A while ago I posted asking for opinions on some wall decor we were working on for the living room. It’s been done for a while and I’m finally getting around to posting about it.

Recap: We had three ceiling tiles and were trying to figure out a way to hang them on the wall.
 


N decided to build wooden frames for them and then we painted the frames. Making the frames was really easy and the wood cost less than $4. There was no cost for the paint because we just used paint we had at home. 

To make the frames N measured out the size of the tiles and cut the wood. He cut the corner at a 45 degree angle so they would fit together to form a frame.


We were able to enough for one frame out of each strip of wood. 



Then we put them around the ceiling tile to make sure it lined up.



N glued and stapled the corners together.

One frame done!



It took a while to decide on what colour to paint them. We debated between off-white, light gray and dark gray. In the end we decided to paint the frames light gray. We took the same paint we used to paint the living room and added some white paint.



All done!



CraftGossip

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