Tag Archives: Christmas

crafts/diy, home

Musical Crafting

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The other day, I called my bestie with a craft idea. I’d heard of people doing something like this project, but not recently, so I want to give myself a little credit for thinking of it. I wanted to take our favorite Christmas songs from my old hymnal, and  make them look old. Then I wanted to mat/frame them and add them to our Christmas decorations! Lauren and I both have pianos in our homes, and I thought it was a good way to decorate the piano area for the season.

So she came over, we brewed some tea, cut some songs out of the hymnal, and got to work. Here’s our process:

1. Brew the tea. Drink some. Mmm. Doesn’t matter the kind of tea. I just used a cheap black tea we had in the cupboard, and brewed it fairly strong. After some googling, we found out some people use coffee or orange juice for this project also. I like the color that the tea turned out, though.

2. Cut out the songs. We cut out a lot… some Christmas, and some not. We figured once we put the songs into frames, we could put the non-Christmas ones in for the rest of the year, so as to get our money’s worth out of the frames!

3. Put a song or two at a time on a cookie sheet (we used one with sides, to keep the tea in), and pour a little bit of tea at a time onto the corner of the sheet, not actually onto the paper. You want it to go underneath the paper and soak it up that way.

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4. Pour off the excess tea, and bake it for 5-7 minutes on 200 degrees. When the edges of the paper start to curl up, take them out. Sometimes mine were still damp in the middle, but I set them on a rack and let them dry.

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5. Admire your handy work! If you’re like me, and you always have tea and sheet music, this is a pretty much free project! Obviously, you will have to get frames if you don’t have any spares, but they can be inexpensively purchased at Michael’s or A. C. Moore.

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Side note: I found frames at Wal-Mart that I used, but I’m not 100% that I like them yet, so I didn’t post a picture… I’ll add it when I decide for sure!

Have you aged paper like this before? How did you do it?

home, mommyhood

Currently

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New edition of Currently, linking up with Hannah at Joyful Life and other stupendous bloggers that I love. It’s all about sharing life and building community. Check it out and join us!

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T H I N K I N G  A B O U T || My weekend. Hubby was out of town in NYC this past weekend, and I was a temporarily single mom. I survived and thrived a little better than I expected. Honestly, I figured I’d drown in the household chores and baby stuff and only barely keep my kids alive. Hubby and I often have a good cop/bad cop thing going on (if you’re wondering who the bad cop is, you’re looking at her) and I was afraid I would be too much bad cop. But I was alright playing both roles for the weekend!

L O V I N G || Great conversations I’ve been having with friends from church. There are so many inspiring people that I get to be with on a weekly (and more often than that) basis. One of these great times was yesterday… I blogged about it here.

T H A N K F U L  F O R || Sweet friends and family. While Hubby was gone this weekend, we had a couple of friends who helped feed us and in-laws who pitched in to keep the kids while I was at church for my normal Sunday marathon, and it was the biggest help. J is usually napping during church time, and so he’s in a phase of hating the nursery. It’s too loud for him to sleep, but he’s super cranky when he doesn’t get to. Thankfully he sleeps just fine at his grandparents’!

L E A R N I N G || I’m constantly learning this, and I’ve written about it before (here and here, for example), but each day it’s more true… I’m learning patience. It’s one of the hardest lessons I’ve ever learned, which must be why it’s taking so long. Breaking generational curses and trying to be slow to anger, quick to love can sometimes be difficult and exhausting. It can also be extremely rewarding. That must be why I’m still doing it!

H O P I N G || I am truly hoping that the next two months are filled with joy and family and fun, and not stressful and too busy. I like being busy with fun things during the holidays, but I also know that sometimes busy can be a curse, too.  So here’s hoping that we aren’t overly committed, but that we have just the right amount of cooking and shopping and partying and giving.

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food, home

Cherry Shortbread Cookies

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Yesterday, if you saw some of my Currently posts on Instagram, I caught a little Christmas spirit. I got out my tree, untangled some lights, lit a cinnamon and evergreen candle, and even listened to my first few Christmas tunes. For the first time this year, I baked a batch of Christmas cookies! Actually, there isn’t truly anything “Christmasy” about them, except that I (almost only) bake them around Christmas.

There are a few cookie recipes that my mom always made during the holiday season. She made them for us, for family members, for neighbors, for friends, for teachers, you name it. I’ll share the recipes here on the blog throughout the season, so that you can consume more than your fair share of cookies over the next two months, just like my family does!

Here are the ones I made yesterday:

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These are called Cherry Shortbread Cookies. They are from a Better Homes and Gardens Homemade Cookie cookbook from, oh, 1990 or so. My mom’s edition is so well-used that the binding has broken, and I’m using photocopies out of a 3-ring binder. There is a whole section for shortbread, a whole section for holiday cookies, and so on… let me just say, they’re delicious. I’ve tried a LOT of them, and rarely have been disappointed.

The recipe calls for 1/4 cup maraschino cherries, well drained, 1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour, 3 tablespoons sugar, 1/2 cup butter (1 stick), 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, and red food coloring if you’d like your cookie to be vibrantly colored. Mix the flour and sugar, add the butter and mix on low until the mixture looks like fine crumbs, then add the drained cherries until it looks like dough. Make one-inch balls (with your hands of course, and expect them to turn pink), then flatten them on an ungreased cookie sheet (I use parchment paper) about 2 inches apart. Bake for approximately 20 minutes (till they are slightly firm and edges are golden) on 325 degrees. I do it all in my Kitchen-Aid mixer, so I don’t even use a bowl!

I always leave out the nutmeg because I don’t really like it (in anything, not just these cookies). But I typically double, and sometimes triple, the recipe because it doesn’t make too many. So because I was already doubling yesterday, I decided to go out on a limb and try something new… I’ve been baking a lot with almond meal, and I know it’s not a great flour-to-almond-meal substitution. It’s very moist, so typically you need a little less of whatever the liquid is. Because there isn’t a “liquid” in the recipe, I knew I couldn’t straight sub. But I wanted them to be a little healthier, so I used 1/2 cup almond meal, and 3/4 cup (plus one tablespoon to thicken it) flour. That way it was a little less worthless gluten. They actually turned out tasting BETTER! I was truly surprised. In the picture above, you can see the ones on the right have specks… those are the almond meal specks!

So now the fun part… my sister-in-law is hosting a cookie swap in a few weeks, and I want to have a new thing or two that I can bring to the table. What are your favorite cookie recipes? Can you comment with the recipe or a link to it? I can’t wait to see what YOUR holiday cookie favorites are!