Recipes & Crafts – Page 9 – Jo McVey Photography

I Guess I’ll Paint

I woke up a little earlier than normal today because Steve was expecting a delivery that needed to be signed for, and I didn’t want to miss it in case they delivered it in the morning. Well, it’s 5:20pm and it still hasn’t arrived. Since I stayed home from work to wait for the package (one of the nice things about owning your own business), I decided to make myself useful. First I cleaned up the house a little bit, and then I remembered the canvases and paint I had bought the last time I was at Joann Fabrics. What a good day to paint! I was a little nervous at first because I’ve only ever painted at Sips ‘n Strokes, which is a place that you can go by yourself or with friends and they teach you how to paint while sipping on your favorite beverage.

But I found the courage, and decided that if I messed up, I could always just throw it away.

So I got all my supplies ready and squeezed a little acrylic paint into my plastic paint holder thingy. (What’s the correct name for that again?) I only bought the basic primary colors because I figured I could always mix them to make whatever color I needed.

First I painted the blue background, making the edges a dark blue, and the center a light blue.

Then I used pure black paint for the tree trunk and limbs.

Next, I combined green, yellow, and white to make a light green, and painted some leaves.

I added more dark green to the mixture and painted slightly over the light green leaves to add some dimension.

Next I made a light pink by mixing red and alot of white, and painted some large flowers. I went back over the flowers with the same color and just kind of dabbed my paint brush around to make smaller looking flowers. Then I used the same technique with a little white paint.

The last step was to add small black dots to the centers of the large flowers, and then sign my name! I hope you like it! I’ll probably end up hanging this in our bedroom, since it needs a little color.

Books & Tornadoes

Well, today was the closest I’ve ever been to experiencing a tornado first hand. This morning it was raining as we drove to work, and I didn’t think much of it. It was pretty warm outside, which I knew meant that we would probably have some thunderstorms. Boy was I right! Around 2:00pm we started hearing tornado sirens outside our office, but oddly the weather had died down, and there was almost no wind and the rain had let up quite a bit. The calm before the storm.

A couple minutes later, we looked outside and it looked as if evening had suddenly fallen upon us….but it was only 2:00 in the afternoon. The wind started picking up, and as we all stared out the window of our office, my heart started racing. The rain was pounding our cars outside, and the wind was picking up with a speed that I had never seen before. I am from Southern California, where there is a thunderstorm once every 10 years. This was not normal for me! Where was our storm cellar? Oh, that’s right. We’re in our office building, and there IS NO STORM CELLAR!!!

We all raced to my office, which happens to be toward the middle of the building and has no windows. Then the power went out.

More heart racing.

Because my office lacks windows, all we had was the slight illumination our cell phones provided for light. Why don’t we have any flashlights in the office? Pretty sure we’ll be stockpiling them tomorrow.

A couple minutes went by, and Steve and Curtis (one of our employees) went back to the lobby to see if it had died down. It hadn’t. I heard them yell, “OH CRAP!!” and they came running back into my office. They said that the wind was blowing so hard that they couldn’t see anything even 10 feet in front of our office. The wind was carrying with it pelting rain, hail, and debris.

I tried sending texts to my mom and my friend Elizabeth, but of course I didn’t have any cell service. My facebook app worked, though, and I typed out a couple scared status updates asking people to pray for our safety.

While hunkered down in my dark office, Casey (another employee) and I were worried about our chemist, Jeff, who had gone to lunch only a couple minutes before the storm hit. We were finally able to get a hold of him, and he informed us that everyone in the Subway restaurant he was in had taken shelter in the freezer.

Several minutes later (but what seemed like hours) it was finally over. The wind had died down enough that we walked outside to look and see if there was any damage. Luckily the only thing we found was that a tree had fallen on one of the cars in the parking lot (not one of ours, luckily). Since the power was still out, we decided to let everyone go home. Needless to say, while we were driving home we passed countless fallen trees. Many of which were blocking the roadways. We had to take a detour through the mall parking lot since several trees were blocking the road we needed to take, and we saw several trees that had been completely snapped in half at the thickest part of their trunks, and the tops had blown completely across the parking lot!

Thankfully, God protected us and our house, and we didn’t have any damage other than some of my patio curtains being blown down.

On a happier note, the 2 books that I ordered on Amazon a few days ago arrived today!

Cake Pops by Bakerella. If you’ve never visited her blog, do it! She’s got so many cute recipe’s and tutorials for her Cake Pops.

I also got this wonderful book! 1,000 Ideas for Decorating Cupcakes, Cookies & Cakes. It doesn’t have any instructions on how to make these beautiful creations, but it does give some frosting and fondant recipes, as well as tell you what type of frosting or fondant was used. So, if you get this book, you should probably either already have a knowledge on how to do some of these decorating techniques, or get an additional book that has pastry decorating instructions.

Just look at some of these gorgeous ideas! I’m sure I could figure this out (after messing up quite a few times).

Doesn’t that cake look delicious?! I’m loving the chocolate ganache that is dripping down the sides.

Umm, Hello gorgeous! Oh yah, I could totally do that! Hey, I can always dream…..and practice! Anyone need a cake?

Look at these adorable wedding cookies!! I think I’m going to attempt something like this for Elizabeth’s bridal shower that I’m hosting in a couple weeks. That wedding dress is so cute!

I’m planning on making some cake pops as wedding favors for our wedding in July, and wouldn’t these be perfect!? So cute!!!

I’m so glad I had these books to entertain me after almost dying in a tornado…..well not really, but hey, it was my first tornado experience!!! I was traumatized! But I’m all better now, thanks to these lovely baking & decorating books. 🙂

Crochet Hook Case

I’ve been wanting to make a case for my assortment of crochet hooks for the longest time, and I found a pattern online several months ago, bought all the supplies, and then never got around to making it. Until last night! Now I finally have an organized place for all my crochet hooks! I used to have a small plastic case, but since I have so many, they didn’t all fit, and whenever I needed to crochet something, I would inevitably not be able to find the exact crochet hook I was looking for.

Here is the free tutorial I found online. That link will take you to a page with several different styles of cases, but I chose to do the one on the top left. I just thought it was the cutest.

It was my first time using quilt batting, and let me tell you, it’s not that easy to work with that stuff. First of all, it loses it’s shape very easily, getting stretched out if you pull on it too hard. And secondly, it didn’t always want to glide through my sewing machine very well. My bobbin got tangled up a few times as a result. For those of you that are new to sewing or have never sewn with a sewing machine before, a bobbin is a little spool on a sewing machine that holds some of the thread that is used to sew your stitches. Don’t worry, I didn’t know that until I was reading the directions on how to set up my sewing machine for the first time.

I was able to figure out how to sew little pockets for each of my hooks. As you can see, I marked where i THOUGHT I wanted the pockets to be, and then when I started sewing, I realized I had made a few too small, so I had to adjust accordingly. Which meant that I was left with some pen lines on my fabric. Hopefully they’ll fade with age. Or I guess I could always throw it into the washing machine.

Look at the cute ribbon ties and buttons! I think that is my favorite feature. If you are a person that crochets alot and doesn’t have a place to store your hooks, I highly recommend making one of these cute cases. It’ll make your life so much easier.