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Conquering the chaos of my food, one meal at a time: snack 1

Posted on March 23, 2013 by fairyguts Posted in health .

I have won my struggle with a healthy snack that both Robin and I can eat! Yay!

Smoothies. They’re easy, no big deal, all over the internet. But, for me to be successful with this, I have to freeze the yogurt in portions. Using my muffin tin which holds 1/2 cup when filled to the top, I line it with clear wrap, spoon in plain yogurt, and then freeze them.  Once frozen, I take them out of the tin and clear wrap and put them into a freezer bag.

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Each day, when I take out two frozen cookies for breakfast (oops, I didn’t tell you about them yet!), I take a yogurt puck out and put it into my blender. In a few hours, it’s thawed and ready for smoothies!

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My smoothies usually are:

1/2 c 2% fat plain greek yogurt (usually the non-fat version has more carbs and less protein)
1 banana
1 T flaxseed meal
1/2 c 2% milk
1/2 c frozen blueberries

cals 416.3 fat 8.89g  carbs 73.12g  fiber 10g sugar 45.12g protein 19.22

Office supply shelves

Posted on March 20, 2013 by fairyguts Posted in home .

The next step in my office/scrapbooking organization was to deal with the office supplies. There are more than I would have thought!  At the beginning of this quest of order, the office supplies started out in piles in front of and in the bookcase (lower right).

office

The Solution was a totally ineffective bookcase hidden behind my husband’s desk. You can see it peeking out there, but what you don’t see is that the shelves that aren’t visible are relatively empty!

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With a little rearranging in February, we moved the shelves out where we could use them and moved the office supplies – which by this time had migrated to a huge pile on the right side of my desk (not pictured) – haphazardly onto the shelves so I could work on that lamp issue.

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I finally sorted the boxes out and finished organizing them. I also put labels on!

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It would be lovely if I could leave the shelves like this (sans my helper):

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But, we have too much stuff, so I had to use the wasted space over the boxes, but it’s still a HUGE improvement!!  Yay!

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{this moment}

Posted on March 17, 2013 by fairyguts Posted in heart .

DSC04713

{this moment} – A [Sunday] ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. As inspired by Collecting the Moments … One by One and SouleMama

Flash diffuser

Posted on March 14, 2013 by fairyguts Posted in Random .

I saw on Pinterest someone had used Styrofoam bowls as diffusers on their camera. So, after a meal with Styrofoam  take out boxes, I made one for my little Sony.

Drew around the lens onto scrap paper, cut out a hole:

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Testing the scrap on the lens – looks good:

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Transfer hoe to Styrofoam:

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Cut that out and tested on camera:

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Random photo with no diffuser:

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Diffuser cut out and on camera:

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Random photo with diffuser:

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Now, to try it on people!!

Recipe Recycle

Posted on March 14, 2013 by fairyguts Posted in home .

I have to give up my illusions here…

I don’t like to cook.  Sometimes I fantasize that I will become passionate about cooking, so I look at recipes and cookbooks, but I don’t. And so I collect books and recipes on cards and from magazines and I never do anything with them.  I found three recipe card boxes. One had a bunch of Martha Stewart recipe cards that I never used. Another is empty. The third had all the random recipes I DO use crammed in it. Since I am a techy girl, I am abandoning the cards.

I spent the weekend transcribing (or finding online) all of the recipes I would like to someday make and saving them in the recipe app I am using (My Recipes). There are pros and cons to it, of course.  I like that I can tag and sort, make grocery lists, change proportions, but especially that it saves the recipes in my DropBox. It doesn’t let you easily track nutrition information or plan meals and calculate meal nutrition info, but the developer is pretty responsive so it may be a feature someday. Also, it is kind of a pain to add ingredients one at a time – I’d love to be able to just copy/paste from a text file, but that’s pretty unreasonable to expect.

ANYWAY – I am all done! Here’s the stack I recycled:

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There were a few that I wanted to keep because my mom or grandma wrote them, so for now I have put them in plastic sleeves in my Household Notebook in the Meal Planning section.

And here’s the reveal of yet another project: The Family CookBook.  We’ve already made a PDF of the original one (113 pages of recipes, photos, and illustrations), but I’d also like to have them in My Recipes or at least a searchable index available. And then we need a new and updated one! It would be nice to have all the old and new recipes available online when I’m done with it, too.

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But, I will save that for another day!!  O.o

{this moment}

Posted on March 10, 2013 by fairyguts Posted in heart .

Too hard to decide:

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{this moment} – A [Sunday] ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. As inspired by Collecting the Moments … One by One and SouleMama

Revamped Tea Tin of Doom

Posted on March 8, 2013 by fairyguts Posted in home .

Remember this tea tin?

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I didn’t like how things were organized inside:

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It’s pretty haphazard in there and you have to pull things out and cram them back in there.  I also decided it was too big on my counter, so I made a new one.  I painted a Christmas cookie tin and tried to use a stencil and then cut-out tape to paint the word on it, but I had to sand and repaint twice and finally just had to do it by hand. I printed the word “Tea” on some paper, cut it out and then traced around it with pencil on the lid. Then hand painted it.  The paint job is not that great. Don’t look too closely…

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I used a cereal box to make the dividers and covered that with scrapbook paper.

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It even fits on the ledge out of the way! Nice!

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{this moment}

Posted on March 3, 2013 by fairyguts Posted in heart .

IMG_20130228_114253

{this moment} – A [Sunday] ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. As inspired by Collecting the Moments … One by One and SouleMama

Spinning lamp attempt

Posted on January 9, 2013 by fairyguts Posted in Random .

I wanted one of those lamps that spin around and cast light against the wall (like the lantern in Sleepy Hollow), but I didn’t like anything I saw online so I decided to make my own.

Bought a lamp at Goodwill:

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Took it apart:

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Put it back together with the light directly against the base:

2012-08-24 13.51.32Made a top with vents to allow for spinning:

First try-

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Second try, which worked (this photo does not have the vents cut).  I also found that I couldn’t screw it down like one might do with a normal lamp shade. Instead, I taped a thumb tack to the vent and balanced the pin tip on the lampshade post-

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Made a shade out of foamie. I thought paper would be too flammable and any metal would get too hot and burn little fingers-

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This turned out to also be a poor choice – the foamie got hot, soft, and smelly with in seconds of the light being turned on, it was too heavy for the spinning action to happen, and light did not show on the walls in clear shapes (the rocket was too big and the bottom needed to be enclosed).

And, by now I have gotten tired and bored with this project, so it’s going to Goodwill!

 

 

 

 

 

Notebook covers

Posted on January 2, 2013 by fairyguts Posted in Sewing .

I needed to prettify some notebooks so I used some fabric and sewed them up. I did not use a pattern, but I used the notebook to fit it.

1) Tear strips of 45″ wide fabric the height of the note book plus two to three inches.
2) Fold the salvage edge to the wrong side of the fabric and stitch down.

image

3) Use the notebook and wrap the fabric around it how you’d like it to fit, pin. If you’re using a binder withe the rings on the center, wrap your fabric wrong side out so your pins are where they need to be to just sew them together. If your rings are on the back of the binder, wrap with your fabric right side out, pin, and then mark the pins so you can take them out and turn the fabric to wrong sides together and pin again.
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4) Clip the center panel seam allowance nearly to the stitch line.
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5) Sew your seam, folding the center clipped seam allowance to the wrong side.
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6) Clip corners, turn to right side, top stitch as close to seam as possible.
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7) Turn wrong side out and cut the seam allowance as close to seam as possible.
8) Repeat steps 3 – 7 with bottom.

To add a vinyl label pocket:
1) Cut vinyl. Be sure to allow 1/4 inch on three sides for stitching.
2) Measure or use a template and measure up from the bottom to place your vinyl.
3) Use painters tape to tape three sides down on fabric. I taped it down while on the notebook because I thought it was easier and more accurate. Remove the cover from the notebook again.
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4) Tape along the edge of the vinyl the side you are stitching so the presser foot will not stick. Alternatively, tape the bottom of the presser foot! (Hindsight is great!)
5) Stitch, being careful to not sew through both layers of your cover. I used an invisible hem stitch. As you turn each corner, pause to reposition the tape to just the edge of the vinyl (or remove completely if you taped your presser foot).
6) Pull thread ends to back, tie off, and clip.
7) Put your cover on your notebook!

Check out the finished notebooks here!

UPDATE: Only use the vinyl along the spine – it sticks to itself on the bookshelf or in stacks and makes it a pain putting them back on the shelf!

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