The Pin Test: Hot Chocolate Bar

I'm borrowing this picture from the original post at The Sweeting Spot, ironically though we have the same exact crockpot so we'll just pretend like I was awesome and took pictures of everything I did. Which I'm not, and I didn't.

We used miniature candy canes (annoyingly hard to find these days) and Werther's Originals because I couldn't find the soft chewy caramels shown here. You can find a crockpot cocoa recipe at The Sweeting Spot but I used regular old Nestle's hot cocoa mix and made a lot of it at once. Even on warm this crockpot stays really hot so I had to unplug it a couple of times, but the cocoa stayed nice and fresh throughout the entire day and seemed to be a big hit. We did this during A's birthday and our annual Christmas party which happened to fall on the same day last year. 

I'll be doing this again for winter get togethers since it's so easy and keeps a big group happy.

The Pin Test: Green Smoothie

I found this great pin but unfortunately the link doesn't work anymore, at least Blogger claims that the blog no longer exists. 

The pin had an attached recipe:

 two handfuls of baby spinach, 1 apple, 1 banana, 1 cup of yogurt, 5 strawberries, 1/2 orange.

 I also throw in ice cubes, otherwise it's more like juice than a smoothie. I love this smoothie and have been making it in the afternoons a few times a week. It's a great pick me up and the boys love it too which is perfect because A refuses to eat anything that's green. The recipe above with some ice makes enough for the three of us to have appropriate sized smoothies, it makes way too much for one person to drink in a sitting. Unfortunately when you add the strawberries it goes from the awesome green you see in the picture to a muddy green brown color.

 If you can get past the color, it's well worth the flavor.

The Pin Test: Homemade Cocoa Mix

Since I'm on the topic of homemade cocoa I figured I'd post about this awesome recipe I found.

It's from Mel's Kitchen Cafe and you can find the recipe there.

All of the ingrediants are common pantry items and can easily be stored so it's on hand whenever you need to make a batch. She was using her batches for gifts, but we selfishly kept all of the yumminess to ourselves.

My spin on the pin:

After we tried out Mel's recipe I swapped the white chocolate chips for Andes mint chips instead. It made a perfect peppermint hot cocoa mix for the holidays. 

Enjoy!

The Pin Test: Nutella Hot Cocoa

We've been going through a crazy amount of cocoa this winter. I've been drinking less coffee and now that I'm home most days of the week I like to bring a big mug of hot cocoa with me when I sit down to work in the afternoons. 

I've been experimenting with different recipes and when I saw this one for nutella hot chocolate I knew I had to try it!

Just heat up some milk in a sauce pan, add Nutella to taste (about 2 tsp./cup milk) and whisk together. SOOOOO good!

Definite keeper.

Reuse Cricut Mats

I finally have my Cricut back up and running after several months of technical difficulties.

I love our Mac, my Cricut does not.

 

So I'll hopefully be sharing lots of Cricut posts soon.

There are a couple of ideas that I've tried recently and wanted to let you know, they really work!

The mats are expensive and I seem to use up all of their stick pretty fast.

 

For at least the past year I've been using this tip to make my mats restick

 She has fantastic Cricut tips so go check it out.

I have a few mats that are so covered with crud it's just gross.

Yesterday I came across this post

 

for cleaning Cricut Mats. It didn't work for me as smoothly as it did for her, but it was definitely worth it. Just an FYI, I left the spray on my mat for at least an hour  and I still had to scrape hard, but it didn't damage my mat at all. I wasn't able to get all of the residue off, and that could have something to do with the Zig I've added to it, but it was 10x better. I used dish soap and hot water to wash my mat off once I was done cleaning it.

This morning after it was dry I could tell that some of the original stick is back, but I will probably go ahead and add some anyway.

Lego Book Organization

I've planned on doing something similar for a while now, but in all fairness I saw this post and it finally got my butt in gear. We don't have a huge collection of Legos yet but the instruction books that come with them are already becoming a problem.

 I took a couple of plain black notebooks and some page protectors (both of which we had) and started filling them up. The books are put together with simple staples so it's easy to take them out and pull the pages apart.

 At first I was only putting one page per sleeve but then The Mister pointed out that I could run one project on the top and one on the bottom. Duh.

Oh....I just got an idea to dress up the notebooks and make them recognizable to the boys. More later.....

Dresser update!

I have this old dresser that's been in our family for, well ever. It belonged to my older sisters at one point and has been painted a bazillion different colors. I actually heard a story about white paint and purple food coloring one time. Esh. 

My mom and I repainted it dark blue and put white handles on it when I was about fourteen. It has since been moved to about four different houses and has been used for a variety of purposes, the most recent as the boys' dresser.

As you can see it was starting to look a little sad.

So....I did this!

 It's a little crazy and it's bright and fun and I love it! I tried to tape off my lines when I added the white stripes and ended up with major bleed through. So I left my test drawer sitting around for a few days and decided I actually like it that way. It reminds me of chalk lines on football fields.

 Micheal's has these really cute sports handles, which is what inspired the entire thing.

 A can of paint and new handles, they have a new dresser for $20.00, love that part.

 Unfortunately it sat outside for three days while I painted and apparently sucked up some summer moisture because the drawers are all sticking horribly.

Seems like I remember that you can rub wood sliders with a bar of soap to make them slide better. Hm....I'll have to give it a try.

4th of July Printables

There are SO many cute printables out there for the 4th of July and summer.
These are the ones I personally picked for my wall. I looked for images I liked and then resized them as needed to fit my frames.

Click on the image for the original post

4th of July Collage Wall

I LOVE my collage wall. It's such an easy and cheap way to decorate for holidays and seasons. I'm slowly adding a few more frames to fill in the area, and at some point I will paint them all the same color, but for now I am just enjoying it.

I'll share the printable links in the next few days, but in the meantime I just want to share some photos.

4th of July stars for my twinified bottles

Here are the bottles I made recently. I like their natural rusticness, but decided to dress them up for the 4th.

 I'm not in love with them. But they'll stick around for a while. Supplies on hand, about fifteen minutes of my time, worth it. I was thinking something a little more dimensional though, I'll have to work on that.

 I cut the stars on my Cricut, precut slits in the center, added the silver star brads and then used glue dots to attach the white ric-rac.

easy peasy.

Pinwheel wreath

So a few days ago I saw this pinwheel wreath


which I loved.

She used the instructions from Neverland Nook which is where I went too. The pinwheels are super easy to make.

I whipped mine up in about an hour. I used everything I had on hand so it was free (plus I think I got the wreath at The Dollar Tree to begin with).

 I've been putting up some 4th of July/Summer stuff but steered away from the traditional navy blue. I like the more summery aquas and brighter blues. I picked these two scrapbooking papers and I had the silver star brads in my stash. I just used the two colors, instead of three, and folded the pinwheels in different directions so some show the white on the inside and some on the outside.

 Assembling them took some concentration. To make it easier to put my brads through, I used a craft knife to cut slits in the corners and center of each pinwheel so I could feed the brads through.

 Once I had all of my pinwheels made I used hot glue to attach them around the wreath. I personally like the woody vine of the wreath peeking through.

 What do you think!?

Twinify something

I finally finally got around to making some twine wrapped bottles. I love them, the texture is fun and it's a great way to recycle something I already have. Glass bottles and twine on hand = free. My kind of project!

There are tutorials all over the place so I'll spare you the details. Two things I did specifically: I used my trusty glue gun, I'm an instant satisfaction kinda girl, and I figured out that wrapping from the bottle neck to the bottom was easier especially on my bottles that widen so much at the base of the neck.

I unfortunately had pretty crummy twine but I went with it. The fibers aren't wound very tight so after I finished each bottle I had to give them haircuts so there weren't so many strings sticking out.
They look less hairy in person.

I went searching around for some other fun twinifying projects and these are a few of my favorites:


From The Country Chic Cottage



Twine wrapped storage cans from Crafty Chic Mommy




Monograms from McChesney Moments

Technology. Blech!

We are having a minor issue at our house called....the Mac does not take an SD card and we can't find the cord to our camera. So....my camera is currently holding my pictures hostage. 

Not to fear! I finally transfered them off and will have projects to share over the next couple of days.

Yeah!

Free Kindle Books for Kids

Over the past few weeks I've found a few free Kindle books to share with my little ones. While I prefer to just sit down with the real thing, my Kindle has been a life saver in the car a few times and on a recent trip to visit family it was great to be able to pull out my Kindle and share a bedtime story with the boys.

I don't see too many freebies for kids though, especially in the well known titles that all little ones seem to love. I have one gem to share with you though.

I'm a long time follower of 1+1+1=1 homeschool blog and Carisa recently started creating easy readers for kids that can be downloaded onto mobile devices, as well as science based books for topics that coincide with her calendar cards. 

 

These are such great resources I wanted to share them with you.

 

They are perfect for when you're sitting in traffic, at the doctors office, or anytime you need to entertain your littles for a few minutes. Toddlers will enjoy looking at the fun images and early readers can practice sounding out simple words. She has made a few books (We Are Skylanders and others) based on characters per her children's requests, and others (On the Farm) that should interest any little one.

Don't worry, she includes links to instructions for downloading her books onto various devices!