Christmas Dress from my stash!

Despite it being almost 10pm and it's so dark in the house now I had to snap a couple pictures to show what I just finished! I made a Christmas dress for L completely from my stash down to the buttons and little velvet flower that's sewn on one of the pockets! The only thing I bought was the shirt and leggings to go with it from Old Navy. I'll get some better shots of L in it on Christmas. She absolutely loves it and told me it's the dress she's always wanted!

Christmas Treats: Fudgy Macaroons

Finally, we're doing some more baking! Fudgy Macaroons were a staple Christmas cookie growing up. They are super easy, super fast and no heating up the oven to make these cookies.

In a 2 quart saucepan, mix 1/2 cup evaporated milk, 3/4 cup sugar and 2 Tbsp margarine. Cook and stir over medium heat until mixture boils and is bubbly all over top. Boil and stir over medium heat 2 minutes more. Remove from heat. Stir in 1 tsp vanilla extract and 6oz package chocolate bits. Mix in 2 cups corn flakes (plain or sugar), 1 cup coconut and 1/2 cup chopped nuts(black walnuts). Drop from tablespoon onto waxed paper. Let stand until set. Makes 2 dozen.

And you can't forget the best part... licking the spoon!

Christmas Treats: Chocolate Covered Pretzels

The Christmas gifts are bought, mostly wrapped, all out-of-town packages have been shipped and L is off school. We are going to enjoy the rest of the week baking and cleaning up the house to get ready for Christmas Eve. Our first treat we made is a favorite of mine and L's - Chocolate covered pretzels. I know people usually dip the big pretzel rods like this but I decided to dip the little sticks this year instead of the traditional pretzel shape. It's so much faster and kid friendly! I just melted the chocolate in mugs so even L can help dip the pretzels. 

She's so serious with her sprinkle job!

The Hunt for Round Pretzels

Did anyone else pin the round pretzel, hershey kiss and M&M treat onto their Pinterest boards recently? I was thinking this would be the perfect little quick treat for L to help me make for her preschool teachers. Boy was I wrong. First of all, we couldn't find the round pretzels anywhere! No luck at Aldi's, Walmart, Meijer or our local grocery store. After sending my husband on the hunt for the round pretzels and him calling me from every store and telling me no one had them, I got back online only to find out how hard they are to find and you could use the waffle pretzels instead. And a friend on Facebook told me she had in fact used the waffle pretzels with success too.

Great, we're back on track. Wrong. One website had said not to melt the kisses too long or you would get a crust on the outside and the M&M wouldn't push into them right. But I'm thinking I didn't even melt them long enough because when we went to bag them up for her two preschool teacher, half of the kisses popped right off of the pretzels and weren't even melted into the pretzel.

Don't they look so cute though? We packages up the ones that didn't pop apart and I went and got Starbuck's gift cards... epic fail on my first teacher gift. Being crafty I was hoping for something more crafty, creative and useful, not a gift card. But there is always a mom bring them both coffee to at least I know they will use them.

A happy Polish husband

How do you make a Polish husband happy? Learn to make pierogis!

 I had never even heard of a pierogi until I met my husband. Now it's becoming a Christmas tradition the past few years to make a bunch with my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law makes the dough and the filling, Nick rolls out the dough and him and I fill and seal them up then pass them back to his mom who boils them. Of course in the process of making them she fries some of them up in butter to snack on. She always makes sauerkraut and we bring a mashed potato filling. This year was with onion and roasted garlic. L will not eat mashed potatoes and never has but give her a pierogi filled with mashed potatoes and it disappears!

L usually sits and plays with scraps of dough and then runs off and plays. This year we got her to make a few of them. This is me helping her the right amount of mashed potatoes on.

Grandma said she needed to look messier for the pictures!

 Normally they do all the sealing up by hand which leaves a lot of excess dough that I don't care for but it's their Grandma's way of folding them by hand. Last year I bought the Pampered Chef Cut-n-seal tool hoping it would help get less dough and a nice seal on the edge and it works perfect! L is cutting out her master piece here.

 And now we have a freezer with a stack of potato pierogies (and a few sauerkraut for my husband because L and I don't really like them!)

Rustic Garland

While my daughter REALLY wants to start decorating our Christmas tree with ornaments, I am trying to wait until Daddy can be here. In my eyes, putting the ornaments on the tree is a special family tradition. I have photos from the past 2 years of my husband lifting L up to put the star on top of the tree and I love to see how she's grown and changed.

I've been trying to come up with little projects to keep her mind off of putting ornaments on the tree so I came up with a garland we could make since we don't have any for our tree! We have a lot of country and cowboy ornaments so it needed to be something natural and rustic so we went to Hobby Lobby and picked up a couple bags of wooden beads and a spool of sisal.

All we did was string a bunch of beads onto about 30 feet of sisal and tied a knot on either side of the bead in completely random spaces. Some beads are a few inches apart, some are only half an inch apart. The 30 feet shrunk down to about 15 feet with all the knots and clipping off the end of the sisal would it would unravel too much from putting the beads on. One thing that helps with that is taping the end of the sisal like the end of a shoelace, you get a small hard end that will slide through the bead.

To compliment the bead garland I also cut 2 inch strips of burlap and pulled the same thread on each end of the strip and gathered it until I liked it. Then I tied a knot on each end of the thread that had been pulled so the ruffle would stay.

I alternated the burlap and the beads down the tree and I'm loving the result. The beads are delicate, yet natural and the burlap is rustic, yet has a soft look with the gathering.

Thank you for stopping by on this cold Indiana Friday!

The first glow of Christmas

The living room is starting to glow with the lights of Christmas and my mother-in-law's gift shop Christmas skills came in handy today at our house. She worked for several years at a gift shop that had a Christmas section all year around, but come Christmas time there were soooo many trees all over the huge store! She brought our Christmas tree up from the basement for me, fluffed it, drove us to buy lights and strung the lights on the tree while I fixed dinner, until we ran out of lights! The decorating will have to wait until tomorrow when we can get more lights. I am very happy with this tree though. We bought it new-to-us for $10 and while I have dreams of a big fluffy tree, this is 100 times better than our previous unsteady tree. One whack of our greyhound's tail and I'm afraid the old tree would have been laying on the floor in a mess.

On another note, in preparation to putting our house back on the market we had new carpet installed today! It's a shaggy mix of browns and tans and I wish we would have put it in years ago! L loves the new carpet too! Before the furniture came back in she was rolling from one end of the room to the other.

Christmas is in the air

Are you an early Christmas decorator? Do you wait until after Thanksgiving? I am normally pulling all the decorations out on Friday, Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving but we are getting new carpet put in the living room hopefully this week, or next week at the latest so the tree can't be put up yet. Very sad about that but super happy about new carpet. We put lights up outside and in the living room windows but I really wanted my tree up, so here is my tree... for now! Got this little guy on super clearance after Christmas last year.

A little gift from me!

Is anyone else snowed in today besides me?

If you are snowed today or not and find yourself wrapping Christmas gifts without any tags. Here are some tags I made you can download, print on cardstock and cut them out as they are or use some decorative edged scissors.


Merry Christmas to you from me!

Download Printable Gift Tags

Christmas Time is Here!

The tree is up and decorated! We were really hoping to get a new tree this year but we needed to make due with our current tree. We got this pre-lit one on Black Friday at JoAnn's two years ago for something like $30. It's the perfect size for our small house it's just not the sturdiest. We put a wooden dowel inside of the center of the hollow metal trunk and it helped a little bit.

We have acquired quite a large ornament collection, so many that not all of them will fit on our tree. One of these days we'll be able to have a big enough tree to hold them all. For now, here are a couple of my favorite ornaments.