Weekend crafting

I made my annual trek to St. Louis this weekend to see my BFF for her birthday. It ends up being 2 days of crafty fun. I made 36 bat treat boxes for daycare/preschool parties, an advent calendar, and a book for my December Daily.

I only have a pic of the bat and a sneak peek of the calendar. Why? I got home late Saturday and yesterday was spent making pies, carving pumpkins, and other Halloween preparations. Plus it took me 3 hours to unload my scrap crap.

I will take pictures of the other stuff later this week.

Oh, and the bat boxes? HUGE hit with my little guy. He was flying them around the house.

While I'm away

I've been trying to pack up for my annual birthday trip to STL. Trying being the key word.

It will be 2 crafty filled days and a trip to Archivers to boot.

Keep your eyes peeled for pictures :)

New cards in the shop

I finally got around to making new cards this weekend. This may be it until the holiday crunch is over.

Where can you get these beauties? You can either visit my etsy store or go to the cards page tab at the top of the blog.

As of now I'm still debating whether or not to sell cards on etsy anymore. There are a number of reasons but the biggest is the fees I pay to paypal and etsy. The fees aren't bad for bigger ticket items but for small items it is pretty high. Regardless of what I do I will always sell on my blog. And here's a hint...my cards are usually cheaper on the blog. Ssshhhh....

Say it isn't so

I did it. I used up an entire paper pack. I guess I should clarify. About a year ago I bough a few paper collections from Close To My Heart. Each pack came with 6 sheets of solid cardstock and 6 pages of double-sided patterned paper. 12 pages total per pack.

I finally pulled one out for some layouts last weekend. 3 double layouts and 3 cards later and this is all I have left.

So. Excited.

I'll post pics of the layouts this weekend. For the meantime you can see the cards.

And even more shocking is that I'm throwing the scraps away. I never throw scraps away. I must be realistic and I know I most likely won't use the few slivers I have left.

Apple Goodness

I have a love/hate relationship with our apple tree. Last year we had NO apples. This year we had tons of huge red/green apples. I love the fresh fruit we have from the trees. I hate what I have to do to the apples to "put them up". But the end result is SOOOOO good.

Last Sunday I made apple butter. Apple butter is not butter. It's more of a delicious spread similar to jam. Awesome on pancackes and toast.

I washed and cored about 30ish apples. Leave the skins on. It has something to do with the pectin. Add about 4 cups of apple juice. I ended up with about 6 quarts of apples. Cook on low for 10-18 hours. Mine were in for about 15 hours. Warning: they will start to look all brown and gross. This is OK!

Remove the apples and put them through a food mill to remove the skins. I don't have a food mill (and I curse that fact every time I make apple butter) so I put them through a fine sieve. The goal is to push all of the apple mush through leaving the skins behind. Throw the skins away or compost them.

Measure the remainder of the "sauce". For every 2 cups add 1 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1 teaspoon nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice, 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves. I had 14 cups of sauce so I added 7 cups of sugar. That equals almost an entire 4 lb. bag. Stir well. Cook on high for 6-7 hours stirring every 2 hours. After 3 hours remove the lid in order to let some of the excess liquid to evaporate.

I wish blogger had smell-o-vision. I can't begin to describe how good my house smelled.

Once it was finished I put the butter in sterilized mason jars. Process in a canner for 15 minutes and there you go! Fresh apple butter for at least a year! Mine yielded 3 pints and 9 half-pints.

How to make faux metal embellishments

Yesterday's post showed custom embellishments I made for my 2012 December Daily cover.

The process is really easy and took almost no time at all to do.

First, coat your chipboard in versamark ink. Versamark is a sticky clear ink that leaves a watermark on regular pages and allows embossing powder to stick to the item before embossing.

Yeah, yeah. I know my ink pad is super dirty. I have a clean one I use for clear embossing or to use as a watermark ink. This one is for the "dirty jobs".

Instead of pouring the embossing powder over my letter I just poured a little powder in the lid and dipped my number in it.

At this point I was worried since the powder didn't have very good coverage. The powder melted beautifully over the number once I hit it with the heat gun.

I decided to do the same to my brads. Bad picture, bad lighting. Sorry.

So, there you have it. Custom embellishments!

December Daily Cover

I was ambitious this weekend and pre-cut all of my base papers for the December Daily, or Big D, as I'm beginning to call it. I'm sure I'll change my mind once I have actual pictures to put in it, but whatever. I'm proud to say I "shopped my stash". The papers used were from 2 paper packs from The Paper Studio. The other papers are from an old (maybe 2010) My Minds Eye Christmas paper pack.

I pulled some really old ledger chipboard letters from Heidi Swapp. I inked them up with Festive Berries Distress Ink. It seems like the letters resisted the ink a little so I swiped them about 4 times. I had to put down a strip of temporary adhesive and stick the letters to it. Made inking SO much easier!

I also inked up a bookplate with Festive Berries. I wanted metallic numbers for the year 2012 so I embossed the letters with pewter embossing powder. I had brads that matched the green in my paper but thought that might look odd with the metallic letters so I embossed them as well. Tutorial on that to come later this week.

Here is the completed cover page. I added close-ups to the letters. I was going to put clear crackle on them but thought the distressed look with the ledger underneath was a cool look. I went ahead and inked the edges of the paper with Festive Berries as well.