Teacup Pincushions

A couple of years ago I grabbed some great vintage teacups and my sewing needle and whipped up this idea for pincushions. I was collecting teacups with no real purpose in mind. Here and there I would pot a plant in this one and use that one as a catch-all on my desk. Then I thought: pincushions. Sturdy, classy, and those little saucers would hold all of your odds and ends!

This yellow vintage one was the first of them all (already sold!) : 

And a fun collection of colorful teacups and even more colorful fabrics and I suddenly had a collection of these things. You can find many of these and more still available in my etsy shop:

1) This rad yellow milk pitcher is fitted with a bright purple floral fabric 2) This pastoral scene is complimented with the red floral fabric, no saucer 3) That dahlia fabric is just stunning 4) Gold rimmed with pansy fabric 5) vintage Japanese pottery with floral cushion 6) bright red cushion with black and white checkered saucer.

A gorgeous frosted Pfaltzgraff cup and saucer with the dahlia fabric cushion: 

So fun to create and super colorful to dress up your sewing room!

Visit the pincushion section of my Etsy Shop for more details and other styles.

You can find my entire shop here. 

Recipe Tutorial: Super Simple Pimiento Cheese

Let's chat a second about cheese. It is a delicious creation which, I can only assume, was sent down straight from the heavens. Add in some pimientos and now we're talking about a delight sent down from a heaven full of rock stars. You know, the ones that you wish you could party with. Well, that's how I felt the first time I had pimiento cheese.

I was living in the sunny south in Charleston, South Carolina. I remember going to a little cafe in some small town in the "upstate" and seeing grilled pimento cheese sandwich on the menu. Well, now they had my attention. I ordered it wondering what it would be like and when it arrived I realized that I had made one of the best discoveries of my lifetime. Classically served between two slices of white bread, grilled to perfection, and a sweet tea on the side: Rock Star Heaven.

So I began asking local friends for recipes and did some of my own tweaking and came up with this super simple recipe that anyone can make. Have at it! Try it on a sandwich, with crackers, pretzels, or on top of a burger. And I'll tell ya, this recipe is highly adored by my favorite blogger at 145 Crazy Road!

Ingredients:

2 cups of shredded Sharp Cheddar

4oz jar of Sliced Pimientos

1/4 cup Mayonnaise

Salt & Pepper to taste

Tools:

Small Food Processor

Spatula

Let's talk EASY recipe: Put all of the ingredients into the food process (include the liquid from the pimiento jar) and whip it up until the ingredients are all blended together well. Place in the refrigerator overnight and it will thicken up when it sets.

And there you are! An easy and delicious item that can be used for lunch sandwiches, potluck dip, burger toppings, and so much more. Some other variations include adding garlic, pickles, and other ingredients. I find that this recipe is super simple and always a huge hit! Enjoy!

About the author: Joy Ribisi traded in her sunny summer-all-the-time-beach-cruiser-flip-flopping-Southern-living ways for the quiet farm life of New-England-log-splitting-snow-shoveling-earth-digging-lake-swimming life in Central Maine, some things never change. Like enjoying comfort foods.

Homemade Ricotta Cheese recipe

Homemade Ricotta Cheese!

I am amazed that, in my 33 years of life, I never knew how easy it was to make ricotta cheese.  A cheese I love so much I never bothered to learn the right way to pronounce it.  Who cares?  There's no telling what I'm saying with a mouthful of ricotta, anyway.

So I was flipping through a magazine and BAM, there it was.  A little chunk of Heaven on a page...how to make ricotta at home.  And it's super simple!  So being the benevolent person I am, I demanded that Joy grant me author access to her blog so that I could share it with her fine readers.  By the way, this is Jamie, Joy's twin sister.  Most people mistake us for each other anyway so call me whichever you'd like.  I'll just secretely hold a grudge.

Ingredients

• Half gallon whole milk
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt (I really like things salty and added a bit extra)
• 3 Tablespoons lemon juice

That's it for ingredients, I swear!  

Then for supplies you'll need:

• Cheese cloth
• Large pot
• Strainer
• Large bowl
• Slotted spoon

hot milk

First thing's first, put all of the milk and kosher salt in the largest pot that you have and get it boiling. Don't do as I did and think your second largest pot is big enough. It's not. Get the bigger one. Milk likes to boil over and burnt milk does not smell good.

if you crisscross the cloth it'll look more beautiful

While that's boiling, line your strainer with 4 layers of cheese cloth. Then put the strainer on top of a large bowl, like so:

Put this over that and then this thing inside of this one.

lumpy milk

Once the milk has boiled, turn it down to a simmer and add the lemon juice.  Stir until lumps form, about 3-5 minutes.  Those lumps are golden bits of ricotta cheese that you are going to stuff into your mouth soon! 

don't make fun of my slotted spoon, I know I need an upgrade

Take a slotted spoon and scoop out all of those lumps and put onto the cheese cloth.  Let drain for 5 minutes.

you can eat it now

That's it!! You can eat it with a spoon (my preferred method), add it to a pasta dish, or refrigerate for up to 4 days.  YUM!!!  Did you know it was so easy?! Now you do!

Like the pottery featured? I got it from the peeps at Clay Coyote Pottery.  Like the red kitchen napkin?  So do I, it's mine.  But you can buy one of your own from 5 O'clock Crows.

And BINGO! ... Then there was a journal!

It all started with some seemingly innocent vintage bingo cards from my etsy shop. I'd sold about 80 of these gems by this point and I had one full set left. A nice new customer from California convoed me to ask if I could send these to her pronto-style since she was teaching a workshop the following week and really wanted to make sure she had them in time. I can pop these into a Priority Mail envelope like nobody's business so of course I said that I could accommodate that request. I also offered the couple extra bingo cards that I had that didn't fit the set of 13 I was offering in my shop. She was so excited and we started talking about what this workshop was all about. When she told me the future existence of these bingo cards were going to be some fun journals I was pretty excited. She offered to send me a sample journal after the workshop and I was just about over the moon with excitement. What a treat!

I scavenged these bingo cards about a year before. They belonged to a grange hall and were lovingly used by the ladies of the Wayne, Maine grange (say that ten times fast with a mouth full of Ritz crackers!). I tried to convince myself that I would make journals with them. I dreamed of having a large collection of journals to write my every thought in. To capture moments in scrapbook style. To fill craft fair tables. Something. But no. Nothing. So I decided to sell them all.

And a couple short weeks later here it was. A gorgeous package in the mail addressed to me. Now I also have a HUGE fascination with getting mail. Not like normal people, I'm pretty sure. I mean that I have a little process in going to mailbox. I walk out the back door (which is really our front door but located in the back of the house. The actual front never rarely gets used. I think it's a Maine thing that I'm still getting used to) I gaze at this large tree we have in our yard and check if it's autumn yet, then I check on my garden and see if anything's ripe, then a little stroll across the street to the mailbox, which is constantly broken, and then a hopeful tug on the cover to see if there are any treasures inside (this whole process is shot to hell if it's snowing out, in which case I usually just pull up at the driveway on my way home from work and jet across the street as quickly as possible to grab the mail). 

So this one day it was there. I quickly opened the package to find a gorgeously packed gift:

The tag, the handmade gift wrap. I mean, seriously. This woman was after some sort of prize. And she won it. I almost didn't want to open it so I took pictures of it to enjoy forever:

So I forced myself to open the package and found inside a gem of a journal made with the almost famous vintage bingo cards:

With some gorgeous details to boot, this is going to be a treasure for me always:

It reminds me of my grandmother, who loved to play bingo. We used to play at the kitchen table when she came on a rare visit. The maps reflect my love of travel... This very well may become my travel journal. Or my sister and I have talked about making this our journal of the whacky things that have happened in our house. Or maybe it'll be a bird watching journal. Who knows. I'm just happy to have it.

*Learn this craft and others in Jeannine Stein's books: 

Adventures in Bookbinding: Handcrafting Mixed-Media Books

and  Re-Bound: Creating Handmade Books from Recycled and Repurposed Materials

Visit Jeannine's blog to keep up to date with her great projects: Ink-Stained Book Arts

New things from old things

So it all began about a year or so ago when I started an album on facebook asking my friends to "Mail Me A Letter or Something" -- and did they ever! One of my my intriguing things that I received, other than the coconut with my address taped to it (see below) was this old earring and necklace set sent from my dear old friend Sarah. Sarah and I have known each other since she was skipping around the playground pretending to be a horse and I was selling little handcrafted trinkets below the jungle gym (some things never change). This little collection she mailed me had the most wonderful story:

The original pieces along with Sarah's letter.

So I waited. And waited. Stared at this set. I didn't want to take it apart for fear of cursing the mojo attached to each little iridescent dangle.  Would a pack of flapper ghosts suddenly find me in my faraway Maine farmhouse and force me to do the Charleston? Would I really mind that kind of punishment? Probably not. I'd even film it and show everyone I encountered.

The time finally came. People kept asking me, "What did you make from that flapper set?" or "What the hell are you waiting for?" So one day I stopped waiting and just started taking it apart. I created three pairs of earrings the first night (with another night of crafting yet to come) and created these beauties that I'm quite proud of:

This is the pair that Sarah and her mother selected to love up.

These chalcedony earrings already sold on Etsy!

This floral set is still for sale on Etsy.

And this is the coconut that I found in my mailbox:

Something new I've gotten into

Recently I've started working on a special little project for my boyfriend. Initially it was for a Valentine's Day gift but that holiday's come and gone. Then it was for his birthday (April was a few months ago...). Then I just figured it'd be an on-going project that one day I would present to him.

The project is a digital scrapbook. I'm a computer geek. I love the digital idea -- less mess to clean up, more nerding-on-the-computer time.

This is one of the page that I came up with. My saving grace was finding Oscraps.com - they have a HUGE collection of beautiful digital scrapbooking supplies and tons of free options, too.

For those of you that like to get your fingers covered in glue and your scissors sharpened, I have some delights for you:

This is a collection of ephemera from my own Etsy shop: Constant Galore.

I look forward to my new venture in digital scrapbooking... as well as the good old fashioned paper style! Last year I participated in a scrapbook creation for my friend Carla's wedding. I was so pleased with my design and now I'm faced with the project of doing a new scrapbook page for our friend Brienne's wedding book! I'd better get to that...

New Treasury

Check out my newest Treasury on Etsy: