Monday monday

Most Mondays people head back to work and are relatively cranky about it, but for me they are almost always a day off from work and a whole day at home with my little guys! I simply adore Monday because it gives me a day to clean, run errands or do crazy projects without the Scientist under foot constantly or a million people also trying to grocery shop! Yes!!

Today I am in the process of baking some strawberry leather, it's been in the oven almost 6 hours already and looks like it'll need closer to 8 hours for this batch. ETA: That leather never did set right, wondering if my pan wasn't big enough and that made the leather to thick. Some areas turned out quite tasty, but after 10 hours those areas were burning and others were still a warm puree!

I made my second batch ever of bread machine bread (just the white bread recipe that came with it, we'll get fancier later). It turned out significantly better than the first batch did. I had some weird flour stuff in the bottom of one corner and the bread fell while cooking - it tastes fab though and for that I'm grateful because I had to do a quick ingredient swap while putting it together and I thought it was probably gonna be an educational flop. You can see that Squirrel and I already sampled a little as an afternoon snack.

Tasty homemade bread

Also today, I busted out some scrap fabric and made this little iPad display for road trips. I saw one posted on Pinterest and forgot to pin it so I sort of winged this based on my memory of it. Not bad considering I'm about as new to sewing as I am to bread making and I didn't have a pattern! The ribbon helps a lot, because the window was not cut straight. Ooops.

My in-car iPad holder for movie watching

I've also been working on two Christmas presents this weekend. Yes, I realize it's April, but in an effort to not spend so much on "stuff" I decided that I am making most of our Christmas this year and that means starting NOW so that I can enjoy the process. The two projects I picked to start with were kits I bought from Scrapbooksteals.com's archive a while back and having done them each now I'll probably reproduce them with minimal effort for at least one more person. *But* because they are Christmas presents you'll only get sneaky peeks at them.

The first project was My Mind's Eye Decorative Blocks. Decoupage paper to all sides of a cube, sand the edges, ink. Pretty easy and will be super cute sitting on a coffee table. Just need to do a spray acrylic sealer so that they are water resistant!

Nearly completed cube

The second project was a photo frame with decoupaged paper and embellished canvas from Bo Bunny. The kit itself was themed "Noel" and while I really liked the color palette I didn't want it to be a Christmas thing. I tossed some of the holiday themed elements, pulling other components from my scrap stash in instead. Now it is more of a "family" theme. Closer to Christmas I'll take a picture to coordinate with it and seal it one last time.

"Family" corner of canvas - this corner has a lot of MME
Lost and Found Union Square

Time to go squeeze a run out of all this sunshine and then maybe get my MCM knocked out as well!

50 Project Count
Done: 9