I have been wanting to try making my own laundry soap for a while now. I looked on pinterest and a million people have a million recipes. I felt a little overwhelmed, but then last month I ran out of fabric softener so I made a small batch of my own. I used what I had on hand, and the recipe itself turned out fine, but I learned some things to do differently next time. Well, this is next time. I buckled down and picked a simple ratio recipe, and I stuck to it!
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Before you get excited thinking you will see pictures of me with food in my hair, let me just pop your bubble and tell you that the food fight I am talking about is an internal one. Okay, that didn't sound good. A mental one, there we go. This is a fight I've had in my mind, and I've been afraid for a while that I was losing the battle. Now I know I have. My heels were dug in and I braced for impact, thinking my entire personality would change the minute I succumbed. Weird, I still feel the same...
My husband is super smart. Sometimes I call him Einstein, which actually works out, since our kid is Einstein Junior here in blog-land. Anyway, my husband has these opinions, and most of his opinions are founded pretty firmly in common sense. Once in a while, though, he gets carried away and I'm reminded of a fellow high school student who would make up important-sounding information, just to see if anyone would believe him (and since it had a lot of big words and he delivered his speech with nary a smile, people believed him a lot, which only encouraged him to dupe people more often, like a never-ending cycle that only slightly resembles the length of this sentence). I fixed and finished the picnic blanket from last week (that I still need to write about), and I wanted to use it! So for a very late lunch, we packed up and went to a nearby park by the airport.
Nine years ago (I can't even believe it's been THAT LONG!!!) I married the smartest, most caring man I'd ever met. He has always been there for me, through thick and thin (which one is the bad times? I never can tell, but I think I got it). He knows my love of my "native country" and enjoys all things Japan with me. He encourages my writing and crafting. I love him, and as you can see, he loves me too! (See the 9 he drew with the Japanese gummies?)
I stumbled across this blog post about strawberry jam in the crockpot. I was going to just cut up my extra strawberries and put sugar with them to make sauce, but this other thing sounded like a nice change from the norm. She found a recipe on the internet that didn't use pectin--instead used lemon juice. That worked for her. Well, I don't have pectin OR lemon juice, so I scoured the comments (most of the time, a gold mine) and found someone said that the lemon juice is what prevented botulism, and citrus fruits do the same thing. Several other people also mentioned using an apple instead of lemon juice, and that DID work for me. So I cut up my ginormously huge strawberries (1 and 1/3 pounds): and cut up an apple and opened a can of pineapples with 100% juice:
To see part one, click here. I talked all about how I made each page. In this post, I will show you how I made the binding and covers. Here it is, 100% finished! (Click on any picture to see it full sized.) The words are pipe cleaners, hand sewn with the ends hot glued for safety.
Summer has officially started for us--today we attended our first library fun day for this year! Today we watched the librarian do some science experiments, and then the kids made their own.
They are all gathered around checking out the way water in a cup makes the quarter at the bottom seem to rise up through the water. I've been wanting to make one of these for forever, and when my sister asked me if I would make one for her daughter, I jumped at the chance. I'd never made a quiet book before, so I really learned a lot here. I knew to sew a quiet book, layers were very important. I also knew if I sewed onto the top of a felt piece, I needed a back to sew onto it so the threads wouldn't show. I cut everything out, then I realized that I couldn't sew a hem around a single piece of felt. I went back through and cut out a second piece to everything I hadn't already. By this time, I had no yellow felt left, so I used orange for the other side of the ice cream and fall leaves.
Here are all the individual pages. The button is the size of a quarter. Click on any picture to see it full sized. |
Who am I, you ask?
In 2006 I had a stroke, and every day my husband encourages me to use my remaining brain cells to the best of my ability. I love to organize, make crafts, and go on adventures (safe ones). I hope that through my blog posts, you will be encouraged to accept and make the best of challenges God throws at your life. Categories
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