A Terrible White Elephant Gift (as I might have expected)

On occasion STITCH likes to do little white elephant gift exchanges during our parties.  Usually the standard is $5 "gifts", which usually equates to smallish sized crocheted things. 

But oftentimes, people get lazy and try to pass off junk as their contributions, such as the thing on the left.  It's a head. With a yarn bow.  I had the misfortune of opening this particular one, so it came home with me.



But, as you can see, I transformed it into something cute! That can be sold!  I carefully snipped off the puffy paint smile and embroidered a bunny nose instead.  A little bunny with fluffy pink tail too!

Cabrillo National Monument

Cabrillo National Monument is one of those things that you do when you say, "Hey, I've lived in San Diego for 4 years, and I haven't really been anywhere historic/landmark/cool/touristy lately."  Mostly, though, we just used this opportunity to get out of the house and scramble around on the rocks/tide pool area.  We did hit the ranger station and read a little about the monument and see an interesting little film on whales, so going to the actual monument wasn't a waste.

It looks like an anatomical heart, complete with aorta!


Loved the pretty blue, green, and purple colors in this anemone.


The cliffs were very layered and square-ish.. I liked the look of this piece of rectangular prism piece of rock jutting out.

Breaking Glass

We did the increasingly popular DIY of cutting wine bottles with acetone on our day off way back on Fourth of July.  I first saw it on Lifehacker before it blew up all over Pinterest and all the other crafting sites.  And here's another tutorial from Lifehacker on cutting up bottles with a cleaner edge (the acetone method leaves it pretty jagged).

Haha, we thought this was really funny.  We thought this looked a little like the wine bottles had weirdly sunk into the patio.

And here's the finished product! We put together 3 of our cut bottles and glued them together using glass and ceramic cement.  Awesome utensil holder!  And it really cleared up the clutter in the cabinet.


(Woops! Would you believe I hit my photo limit in the built in Blogger web album?  I'm going to try and figure out the Flickr thing, hopefully all of the photos will stay visible on my free account.)

Santa Fe Train Depot

I'm actually not sure why this is called the Santa Fe train depot because it's actually in the middle of downtown San Diego..



I was mostly inspired to stop by and see the pretty building because of a pretty photoshoot done there.  A Hunger Games inspired photoshoot.  With handmade Girl on Fire dress by one of my favorite sewing bloggers, Cindy from Cation Designs.  I have to say, I kind of aspire to sew as well (and be as geeky awesome as Cindy :) haha)

And a gratuitous picture of me inside the train station.

Amazing Fluffy Waffles

This has to be the best waffle recipe. Ever! It's amazingly light and they're almost better when they've been toasted after freezing.


And this breakfast wouldn't be complete without a mug of earl grey tea and yogurt.  I have kind of a funny habit when I eat waffles.  I eat waffles with yogurt in the squares, it's really yummy :)

My birthday waffle iron :) Is it weird we gave each other kitchen utensils/appliances as birthday gifts?



Recipe!

Waffles

Servings: 8

Ingredients:

1 ¾ c flour

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

1 Tbsp sugar

3 eggs

7 Tbsp vegetable oil

1 ½ c milk

Preparation:

Preheat the waffle iron. Sift the dry ingredients into a medium sized bowl. Separate the eggs, putting the egg whites in smaller bowl. Beat the egg whites until they are stiff. (If you are using an electric mixer, you can beat the egg whites first, and then beat the batter without having to wash the beaters. The reverse is not true. If you beat the batter first then you have to wash the beaters before beating the egg whites.) Add the egg yolks, oil and milk all at one time to the dry ingredients. Beat until there are no lumps in the batter. Fold the egg whites into the other batter using a spatula or other flat utensil. Put a full ½ c of batter in your waffle iron to make a 9” round waffle.

If this recipe makes too many waffles for one setting, try freezing the waffles you do not eat. After the waffles have been cooked in the waffle iron, put them out on a cooling rack. When they are cool, place them in a plastic bag taking out as much air from the bag as possible. Then freeze the bag of waffles. The next time you want a quick waffle, toast just until crispy.

Badger Pride

My friend and I used to regularly obsess over Harry Potter when we were supposed to be working on our lab reports.  Most notably, she was showing me Pottermore (she got sorted into Hufflepuff!) which has really cool extended back story type of stuff.  So for Christmas (yeah, I know, I'm a little late in doing this), I crocheted this Hufflepuff house scarf for her from this movie still. (This is the only observable shot in the Prisoner of Azkaban movie of a Hufflepuff house scarf.)  The house scarves changed from the first two books to this "trapped-bar" design.

Ta-da!

I made the scarf pretty long so that it would wrap around the neck and still hang down with a good deal of length.  The pattern was mostly just winged from how I thought it should look based on the movie still, so I put in 15 rows of double crochet in a really buttery yellow (Caron Simply Soft) and then two rows in black, two rows in yellow, two rows in black, and then another 15 rows of the yellow.  I ended up with 7 trapped bar patterns.  I really like the buttery yellow since it looks a little less bumblebee than a bright yellow would have.

Anyone else have Harry Potter pride?

As American As Apple Pie

Since 4th of July fell on a Wednesday this year, N and I decided to do a bunch of random things like try out this apple pie recipe borrowed from a friend.  And because I have extremely strange ideas about things, what is more American than an apple pie decorated with an American flag design?

This pie was totally from scratch.  Homemade pie crust and apples grown in the garden!  And I cut those stars by hand because we didn't have any cookie cutters.  When I have ideas, I go to extremes to execute them, haha.

P.S. I taxed my GIMP-ing skills so much by trying to make this simple collage even though I usually collage things in Picasa.

The recipe! (As notated by the friend)
Needs 6-7 cups of cored peeled apples

Put the following into a bowl
2 c flour
1 tsp salt
3/4 c (maybe a little less) shortening

Cut the shortening into the flour with a fork. The goal here is to leave pea sized chunks of shortening (not fully incorporating the shortening leads to a flakier crust)
Mix 5 1/2 tbsp of cold water in 1/4 c flour and add to the above
Form into a ball and wrap in plastic. The less you handle it, the less your body heat melts the shortening, and the flakier the crust is. Chill for half an hour.
To roll  out the dough, place 2/3 or so on a floured surface (the rest will be used for lattice). Roll until larger than the pie tin so that you have some dough hanging over to make fancy edges. Fold in half and then in half again to transfer to the tin.
Put in filling.
Roll out and cut the lattice strips.
Finish by dotting with butter
Cook on 400 for 45 minutes.

Apple pie filling
Combine 1-2 tsp lemon juice, lemon zest (optional), 2/3-3/4 c sugar, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, 1/8 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 2 tbsp little pieces of butter
Peel, core, slice apples
Layer pie with half of the apples with the sharp edges in so they don't poke holes in the crust
Pour on half of mixture
Layer other half of apples
Pour on top rest of mixture