New Blog

The new blog is up and I am cohosting it with my best friend, Chrissy (aka Sparky).

You can find us at:

http://sparkynrougeraven.blogspot.com/

You can look forward to tutorials, new links, giveaways, freebies, and the return of themed etsy posts. Our first week's theme will be birds, feel free to craft around the theme and send us your photos at: sparkynrougeraven@yahoo.com and we will post them on our blog.

Go now and take our poll so we know what you want!

<3 Aly

Saying Goodbye

I have been giving this blogging thing a lot of thought recently as I read my favorite blogs such as Whipup.net, soulemama.com, spiritcloth.typepad.com/spirit_cloth/ and others. I can't help but notice that their blogs are crisp, precise and addictive; I want to strive to create a blog with an equal amount of passion and uniqueness that adequately presents my work to the public.

With that said, I have tentatively decided to shutdown this blog and I will start anew when I have gathered enough ideas and projects. This summer will provide plenty of time for both of these things; I want to be an active member of the craft community outside of my online home, craftster.net so that I can contribute giveaways, tutorials, etc. Who knows, maybe my dream etsy store will come to be within this time! Once she is up and running, I will write a posting a link to the new blog.

Much love,

Aly

Slow Progress

The tree is slowly growing into its full, leafy glory. Very slowly.



There will soon be photos of altered journals and dolls from my most recent craft swaps, but until then, have a pretty flower (complete with resident bee):

Craft Night

Chrissy and Krystal came over for a craft session recently and they saw I had altered a playing card for a mixed media piece I've been planning, so we altered half a deck of cards (so far). We mostly just used paint and glitter, but we later realized stamps work well too as long as they are given a chance to set properly first. This is a great cheap craft that can be made as elaborate or as simple as you like.

Bread

You may recall the pumpkin pie fiasco from a few posts back, so I am here to prove I can bake well. My first attempt at bread went surprisingly smoothly- whole wheat stone ground bread from the Disney Family Cook Book aka. "The World's Simplest Bread Dough." Each batch makes two loaves, and I have already decided I will start making animal shaped bread for the kids' birthdays with wojapi- yum!









A few notes:

The bread is very dense and the loaf is smaller than those bought at the store, but the heaviness makes up for it and you still feel full. (Dave will probably still take two sandwiches, but what can you do?)

The recipe suggested using I think 1/2 cup milk to replace part of the amount of water for a more tender crust, I'll try that next time. I only used water and found the dough was too dry and had to add another 1/2 cup.

I learned I much prefer glass bake wear to metal- the loaves are almost exactly the same size but the loaf in the metal pan cracked and got darker on the bottom.

New Awesome Discovery

I should be working on my bibliography paper, yet I find myself looking at this great website:

www.dollarstorecrafts.com

Just when I start feeling guilty about spending too much on crafts, I find this gem! The first project I am going to attempt in this:



http://dollarstorecrafts.com/2009/02/balloon-luminaries/

You fill up a water balloon and dunk it in wax repeatedly, let it cool, then release the water from the balloon, and tada! instant pretty candle holder. It's suggested you can melt down candles from the dollar store to use as wax; I don't have a double boiler, but I will improvise! I will try this soon!

And by the way, I think I solved the tree wall decal problem. I love contact paper:



http://dollarstorecrafts.com/2009/02/make-wall-decals/

Cheering up Soldier Buddies

Many of the men Dave went to basic with are now in Iraq and Afghanistan, more specifically, the man who pretty much saved Dave's life is in Iraq. Dave's PTSD was triggered in basic and most of the guys said Dave was faking it to get out of there, but his friend Frank stuck with him through it all. Dave had been feeling extremely depressed during that time, and I can honestly say that if it wasn't for Frank, I don't think we'd have Dave with us today. With that said, we owe him a lot and we wanted to send him some care packages.

I do crafts with the kids at work (I promise this is relevant) and the latest craze is perler beads, the beads you stick onto the pointy bases to make shapes and then iron them flat. I mentioned it might be nice to make something to send to the soldiers, so they came up with these for Frank and his buddies:



There's even a Star of David for Passover


These little ovals are supposed to look like Easter eggs, but they also remind me of dog tags


We're moving onto gimp/lanyard next week but I think it's safe to say that the packages from now on will contain stuff from the kids at work.