Utility Closet - Check

It's been a busy week here for me. I was on call for work, so it meant that the lines between working and not-working times were a bit blurred. In the meantimes, I was able to just about finish off the utility room closet. I hung most of the shelving. I have to buy one more bracket for the shelf supports to go on the right side of the closet and then cut some shelves to fit the width of the closet. But then it's DONE! I also removed the bulky folding door that took up half the utility room when opened and replaced it with a folding accordion-style door. It's a little cheesy, but it does the job. Since all the shelving is hung from the walls, I'll have some space on the floor to put laundry baskets, which will be nice.

I got a little further on the hounds-tooth bag that I mentioned before. The pattern is just starting to emerge, I can't wait to finish it and get it felted and see how it turns out.

Meanwhile, here's my snow-crazy dog. We got lots of snow this week, and he loved bounding through it. You can see his "tracks" in the snow. When there's fresh snow, he makes a few tracks and then follows those until it all melts.

Caramel

I figured out the recipe for caramel....

1 cup light corn syrup
1 cup which sugar
1 cup brown sugar (am going to try next batch with 1.5 cups)
1 stick butter
1 can evaporated milk
1 1/2 tsp kosher salt
2 tsp vanilla

Combine Corn syrup and sugars in a large heavy bottomed pan. Heat on medium/high until the sugar starts to bubble a little and has become less granular. Add butter and mix until the butter is all melted. Stir in evaporated milk little by little.

Heat this mixture on high until it reaches approx 235 degrees farhenheit. Cook at that temperature for 2 minutes, then remove from heat. Stir in salt and vanilla, pour into prepared (buttered) pan, let cool, cut and wrap.

This is the closest I've come to the taste I like, while still having that great caramel consistency.

Done with the green

I took the utility room closet apart this afternoon. I had picked up some paint from the old house and got half the closet painted and realized that it looks really atrocious. It's a cool color in a room that you can accessorize with curtains and pillows and sundries, but in a closet it just looks like the sad ancient olive green stove left behind by a previous home-owner. So I'll be heading to Home Depot here soon just to get some plain white paint. I'm usually against white, but for the closet maybe it will just look clean and fresh. Yeah, that's it.

We didn't do the casino thing yesterday, insead we went to a yarn store, a tool store, and out to lunch at Willoughby brewing company. We got home and watched a movie, and Dugan and Stanley got comfy. So CUTE!!!

I started a hounds-tooth felted bag, pics coming on that once it has some shape to it.

Mom was over as well, she's a wiz at the tax thing from dad's rental business, so I feel like we have a handle on the craziness that is tax season now. Yay!

Brad's out of town this week :-( But at least that means I have GUITAR HERO all to myself...

Guitar Hero saps your willpower

It's been a busy week, but we've come to the weekend! yay! This week was lots of work, lots of schoolwork, Dad & Eleanor over for dinner, and some running around.



I stopped by Home Depot on my way home from work today and picked up some supplies to finally make something of my utility room closet. It's not bad, it works, but the paint is all nasty yellowed like somebody used it as a smoke room, and the shelving just doesn't work. My nicely ironed clothes touch all the cleaning chemicals, I don't like that... So my plan is a fresh coat of paint (leftover paint from the hold house), some new shelves along one side and a bar for hanging clothes on the other side. Brad's out of town all next week for work, so that means projects for me!




I had planned on getting some things done around the house tonight (maybe even start on the closet), but instead I gave Dugan a bath and then settled into some GUITAR HERO while he chowed down on a soup bone. He really loves those and left me alone for a good hour. I'm totally kicking Brad's @ss at this game. finally, a video game for me! All those years of music school is finally paying off.

I'm trying to talk Brad into heading to a casino in West Virginia for a quick 1-day birthday trip tomorrow, but not sure how that will go, I'll let you know. Roulette table, here I come....maybe.

HOMEWORK

Probably nothing new from me for a few days. I'm behind on my online class. Brad's making dinner and I'm supposed to be studying, so I better get back to it...

Busy Day

Today we just chilled around the house, so I was able to do a lot of little projects (and the dishes, and the laundry...).

I made caramels for Christmas gifts this last December and they turned out pretty well, but they weren't very chewy, at least not until you had sucked on them for awhile. So I tried again with a different recipe. They have the great caramel consistency I was going for, but didn't taste nearly as good as the last batch. But I wrapped some up and put some of them into chocolate. I'll try again with the other recipe but use the temperature directions of this one. Here's my slab o' caramel ready to cut. The recipe that tasted really good is located here: http://readymademag.com/printarchive/index.pl?id=1234



I had been working on a baby blanket and sweater for little Wolfi, but, of course, I ran out of yarn just 4 rows away from being done. So I finally picked up more yarn yesterday and finished it off.


Then I took the matching sweater that looks like a little blanket-gone-wrong and sewed it up into the Wolfi's baby sweater. This pattern is by my favorite knitting pattern maker, Elizabeth Zimmerman. Her patterns are intelligent and avoid the things I don't like to do (like sewing too many seams, or purling...). This amorphous blob shown on the right becomes this very cute sweater which, because it was done in garter stitch, should grow with Wolfi. If you look closely at the top of the picture, there's Dugan's face in there. He always wants to be in the middle of whatever we're doing...

One of my goals for this year was to learn intarsia knitting, the use of multiple colors to make a pattern. When I pulled out the yellow sweater/blanket set, I realized that I had finished it except for tucking in all the ends (which I always put off as long as possible). So perhaps when I'm ready to gift it i'll finally get around to finishing it.

Janel's shower

I love making favors for showers and parties! For Janel's shower, I decided to do two things: Favors and centerpieces. There should be anywhere from 20-30 people at the shower, so I'm planning on 36 just in case there are any equipment malfunctions.

For the favors, I'm making little soaps with rubber duckies "floating" in them. I looked around for appropriate rubber duckies and found some cute baby duckies with little blue rattles. THEN I found the "fairy tale" rubber duckies. I thought it very approprate to have little geeky duckies for the son of Wolfgang! There's a knight, a king, a queen, a noble steed, a dragon, and little red riding hood. Very sweet.



The Centerpieces will be made from Chocolate lolly-pops. I was originally looking for a baby bottle mold, but found a mold for pacifier pops and decided to go with that instead. I've picked up some cute flower pots. When the time comes, I shall arrange the pops into a "boquet" in the pots using some of that green porous foam usually used for flower arrangements. Maybe I'll look for some silk flowers to fill it out, we'll see. Here are how the pops look so far...

Starting out

So many ideas whizzing through my head! So much to do! So much done! So much to show you!