A Break From Blogging

Hello friends!

Well, I need a little break again for a couple of reasons: I am trying to move this operation to a shiny new self-hosted site. 

Blogger, you have served me well, I will bid a fond adieu when the time comes. 

While I have been laboring at making the changes I will need, I lost my Google juice, i.e. my higher standing with the search engines, and some of my regular readership dropped off too, so hits are at a low ebb. Plus, this place has been run down ever since my template was lost. Bah. 
I don't know what I am doing building a website, so it is slow and time consuming. I have less time to work on networking or making fabulous things to share with you. With that in mind, it seems like a good moment to take a little hiatus from writing to do some coding and get my feet under me. 

The second reason I need a break is also a huge bonus: I have tried to do several tutorials lately and I just don’t have enough light in this hobbit hole to take good clear pictures most days. The tutorials have flopped hard. Also, I have been using a lot of old, irrelevant photos from other houses, much like I am today, just because I can't seem to get pretty images right now. That is about to change, my friends! 

By the time I am ready to get back to work my family should be installed in a nice, bright, hilltop house overlooking downtown Wilmington, and I will have a studio again. There will be plenty of light for pictures, and inspiration around every corner- or so I imagine. 

We can still keep in touch through Facebook and Pinterest. You can bet that with more time behind the computer and less at the craft table I am going to have more online goodies to share. Just click the links here or in the sidebar to “Like” and add me to your Facebook feed or subscribe to my boards on Pinterest.    

Printable Recipes + In Search of a Truly Paperless Kitchen

Today I am so exceedingly grateful that I am not really a food blogger. I was wanting to share a recipe last night and mid-sentence realized that no one but me probably dares use their laptop in the kitchen. Light bulb. My recipes need to be printable! How hard could it be to make PDFs of 3x5 recipe cards? Not hard, but it turned out to be time consuming even though there were only 6 recipes to do. If there had been more it would have been a lot more daunting!
Without further adieu, here are the newly updated recipes with links to printable PDFs.

The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever. Period.

Granola Goodness

Three-Tomato Spaghetti

Broccoli and Cheese Soup

Southwest Pasta Salad, and non-edible yet still a recipe,

Play Dough

Speaking of using your laptop (or iPad) in the kitchen, A while back I had been wondering about a way to eliminate all the paper scraps, printouts, 3x5 cards, and disintegrating home-made recipe books from my kitchen, so I got really excited while reading the very inspiring One Bite at a Time by Tsh Oxenreider et. all, about the project to "go paperless in the kitchen."Only, it was about eliminating paper towels and napkins which I am too cheap and enviro-conscious to keep around anyway.
In the wake of my disappointment I asked my App Wizard, Daniel to look into it.  Do you know about Sous Chef? It's an app that I use every day now, and I am slowly transferring my recipes onto it. You can copy and paste text into it, and it will construct your recipe in Sous Chef from pretty much any format if you do it right. I didn't for a while, but no harm done. Plus, you can make and save meal plans as well as construct grocery lists based on a recipe or a folder full of recipes. I wish it consolidated list items: For instance, say you need 5 onions, instead of listing them separately by meal. That's really my only complaint though. It also has a cooking view which is in huge font so you can keep your gadget well away from the action.
It's pretty wonderful. I am using it to make my kitchen completely paperless and somewhat clutter free. For real.

Found: The Secret Hiding Place

Don't you just love old books- the sueded pages, the old paper-and glue-scent, the dust jackets crumbling into that which they are supposed to protect the book from?

I found this gem at the Goodwill Outlet. It's a cute story about a little hippo who is deeply doted on, but needs some autonomy: A place to be alone, but not too alone.
Look at the lovely flocks of birds in the above illustration, and Little Hippo's joy as he realizes he has found his place, because the big hippos will never look up!

The line quality is luscious, and look at the peeved look on the older hippos face as he wonders where Little Hippo's been hiding himself. I love the chameleon's smirk, and the the happy, contemplative gaze of Little Hippo.

The true genius is when the ink drawings are layered on top of these loose little rainbow-colored watercolors. They make me think that writer and illustrator Rainey Bennett is full of the kind of gold coin showers that are mixed with sunshine and rainbows aplenty.

A Third Birthday, and a "Berry Cute" Hat

 We celebrated Thacia's third birthday several times this weekend. I am so proud of how hard she is working to become the lovely person she is turning out to be. Blessings on your journey, sweet girl!

I wish I had pictures to show you, but there's this terrible habit I have of working really hard on something and then not documenting it. There are no photos of our craft: iconic conical party hats. There are no photos of the pizzas they made. There are no photos of them trying to feed the wide mouth frog puppet. The very tasty daffodil cupcakes and how they-all-had-candles-and-no-one-was-lit-on-fire went undocumented. The thing I will remember most, though, couldn't have been captured on film. The kids were so courteous to each other without prompting. It's one of those shining parenting moments where you realize you might not be launching a barbarian into the world every time you leave the house. There were so many pleases and thank yous, and eagerness all around to be good to each other.

  
Damaris is a child of many hats. She has been cheerfully borrowing other people's hats all winter, but I finally just finished one for her very own today. She loves fruit hats, so I tried the Berry Cute Hat from Fiber Trends. The toddler size was tight, so I ended up making it adult width, but toddler length. I feel like it's a little awkward, but she is loving it. What do you think?

Free Valentine Printables!

Happy Valentine's Day! 

Enjoy some Valentine's Day art with your loved ones today or any day.

Print PDFs from the links below,
or
Share on Facebook

Download "You Illuminate Me"  

Download "Adorable You"

Download "You Mean the World to Me"