Starbucks City Mugs: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt

Inexplicably, I've gotten a lot of mug trade requests lately, so I will be adding a number of new mugs to my collection in the coming weeks.  Want to see my whole collection?  Click here.  These are the mugs that came in the post from a collector friend in Germany this week.

Starbucks has released a couple different styles of mugs.  Mugs I've posted on here before, with the colored interiors, are from the Icon Series that was first released in 2008.  These mugs are all from the Collector's Series that was first released in 1994.  As you can imagine, this older series isn't available in the stores any longer, so they're hard to come by trading and when the collector I was trading with agreed to send these I was ecstatic.

Okay, so here's the danger in trading mugs in the mail.  Mug handles are fragile.  I live in fear of getting an email from someone I've traded with that a mug arrived broken.  The usual procedure is to either do another trade and add an extra mug to make up for the broken one, or to just mail a replacement.  The problem here is that there are basically no other Egypt mugs from this series to be had, so it's really sad that this rare mug is busted.

What favorite city or country would you want a mug from?

Technique of the Week: Paint Chip Banner

I'm leaving you with one last project before I let the paint chip thing go for a while.  I have been hanging paint chip banners in my windows and from my mantels for a while and just love how it looks. And it's so easy to match your decor or the holiday by picking different colors.  I actually keep different sets in envelopes labeled with the holiday or occasion and still on the string, so I can pull them out and hang in just minutes.

I leave Command Adhesive hooks up all the time on windows and mantels, which works great for me because the hooks are all white or clear and my trim is all white.  You need wide rectangular swatches for this project to work the best.  In addition, you need a hole punch, paper trimmer or scissors, and string or baker's twine.  I'm pretty sure you don't need a tutorial, but there are a couple tips and tricks here.  I'll warn you, this was one of my first posts and I'm not going to say I'm not proud of it, but I will say that I've come a long way.

What is your go-to decorating item that you always have around?

Layered Paint Chip Art

When I was getting paint chips for the notebooks I showed you a couple days ago, I wasn't sure which size I wanted to use, so I grabbed a variety and ended-up with some leftovers.  It seems like a total waste to just toss the extras, so I spent some time playing around with different ideas.  There are tons of ideas out there for using paint chips, but I don't ever see ideas using the paint chips that have the cute little squares cut out of them.  So I give you this: swatches cut, taped, and taped some more into art.

Find these paint chips with the square holes cut out--handy for matching and contrasting colors, even more handy for crafting.

Cut the swatches into strips, removing the white strip between each color.

Working with the strips upside down, lay one strip down, then lay another on top with the solid end of the top strip over the square cut-out of the bottom strip.

Lay another strip on the stack, solid end over the exposed square cut-out.

Add the final strip with the solid end over the exposed square cut-out and with the square cut-out of the new strip under the solid end of the first strip.

You end up with a woven square that looks like how you fold in the side flaps to close a cardboard box.

Secure the woven square with a square of packing (or other) tape.

Voila!  And because it's only taped on the back, the top pops up a little and adds some dimension.

I made a bunch and arranged in rainbow pattern.  To get the right colors in the right places, you can see that I had to cut some of the squares in half and quarters and those needed to be taped in a few spots to make sure they stayed together.  Once you get going, you'll get the hang of where the tape needs to go.

I picked up this square frame in the "as-is" section at IKEA for $10 with no problems that I could see and with picture hanging wire already attached!  The white seemed like a great background to make the colors pop, so I blue-taped everything down so I could make changes once it was all in place.

And there you go.  Paint chips and tape = easy art and adds a huge splash of color.  I think these would look amazing with a couple frames in a row with all one color in each, like greens, lighter yellows and corals/pinks in three different frames to make kind of a watermelon-y, summer display.

What's your favorite think you've made with something you didn't want to throw away?

Paint Chip Matchbook Notepads

In case you missed the my guest post last week for Caitlin at Hardly Housewives, here it is.

I met Caitlin when she won my very first blog giveaway for a box of Penzey's Spices.  In the package I mailed Caitlin, along with a sample box of Penzey's Spices, I threw in some of my business cards, which happen to also be paint chip matchbook notepads.  Caitlin really liked the notepads and asked if I would show you all how to make them, too.

This project started out as something I pinned and just couldn't get out of my head.  I really, really like paint chips and was looking for a clever business card idea, so figured that combining the two could only result in greatness.  Right?  Absolutely.

Before I get started, take a look at the project I originally pinned here.  Sky at the Capital B blog does an awesome job and I just love the pictures she took.  I do mine a little differently, but the idea is the same: get some paint chips, cut little pieces of paper, sew it all together.

Supplies you definitely need:

plain white paper
paper cutter
ruler
paint chips, the long rectangle size

Supplies you probably need:

sewing machine with white thread
scissors
scoring board with bone folder
stapler

Let's get started . . .

1.  Fold your paint chips.  I used a scoring board to get a nice, crisp line, but you could just fold the paint chip up and over a ruler.  You need to fold up about half an inch for the bottom portion and this looks good with either the darker color or the lighter color, so I do a mixture of both.  Next fold the top part down so it overlaps the bottom by 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch.  Note where the folds go and score all your paint chips at once.  Score the wrong (non-colored) side of the paint chip.

2.  Cut your filler paper.  Measure the finished size of the matchbook and cut paper squares 1/4 inch smaller in width and height (or 1/8 inch on each side).  Using a paper cutter, cut three sheets at a time into strips, then cut each strip into pages.  Putting eight to ten pages in each matchbook is a good number as far as usefulness and as far as what a sewing machine can handle.

3.  Prep matchbooks.  Pre-fill each paint chip with pages and set aside to facilitate faster sewing.

4.  Sew matchbooks.  Sew a short seam across the bottom of the matchbook, 1/4 inch from the bottom. Make sure to back stitch at each end.  Trim threads close and tuck in the cover.  No sewing machine?  You could just pop a staple through all the layers where you'd sew and call it good.

As a result of the needle punching through the paper, the backside of the matchbook doesn't look as clean as the front and I haven't been able to figure out a way around this.  If you know, please tell me about it.   In the meantime, it didn't really matter because I was putting a printed business card sticker on the back anyway.  You could add any sort of sticker, a color-related phrase would be a really cute thing to do.  How about "You Are My Sunshine" on the back of a bright yellow matchbook?

I really hope you'll try this project.  It's easy to make a lot fairly quickly so you'll always have some on hand and extras to give out to anyone who needs something to write on.  And then won't you be the nicest, most creative person everywhere you go?  Well, okay, I bet you already are.

It tastes like summer: blackberry pie

Remember a couple weeks ago I said that I knew how to make a flaky, delicious pie crust?  This is me proving it.  The story goes that my parents spent their first year of marriage eating the two things they knew how to make well: steak and pie.  As I was born just two days before their first anniversary, my mom spent a large part of that first year pregnant, so eating just steak and pie is entirely feasible.  Pie figured heavily in my childhood--we didn't have birthdays, we had Pie Days.  One thing was always the case: pies were always, entirely, made from scratch.

This is the pie crust I grew up watching my dad effortlessly roll out.  It always looked so easy, the way he cut the butter into the flour, then ultimately draped the sheet of dough over the pie dish.  I remember the first time I was pressed into doing it myself and it was HARD.  Using a pastry blender on a cold stick of butter is all but impossible.  And good luck even getting to the point where there's a smooth sheet to drape.

I eventually got the hang of making crust and then moved on to the endless types of pie fillings.  The recipe, named for my great-aunt, is a little different as it includes egg and vinegar.  Over the years I've made a few changes, namely subbing whole wheat pastry flour for the all-purpose flour and changing how I handle the butter.  The original recipe calls for half butter and half vegetable shortening, but I now use two-thirds butter and one-third vegetable shortening.  I never got the hang of cutting in the butter so I do something altogether different now: I grate it.  Yep, you read that right.  By grating the cold butter on a large-holed grater the butter starts basically the size you want it to end up, so once you give it a couple stirs, you're good to go.  You save A LOT of time and effort this way.

 

The blackberries I used came straight from my grandma's house.  She grows apples and picks the berries growing on her property, so I end up with copious of amounts of peeled, sliced apples, homemade applesauce, and blackberries in the freezer.  Poor me, right?  We eat A LOT of apple crisp in this house and the boys don't even know what applesauce that comes from the store looks like.  It's almost time to start filling back up, so I need to use everything from last year so there's room in the freezer.

And with that, here are my family's pie crust and blackberry pie filling recipes.

Since there are two recipes and the pie dough recipe is long on instructions, I didn't want to take up all that space with both full recipes.  If you would like the full version of either recipe, just click the recipe above and you'll be taken to a download page.  I ask that recipes are for hobby room readers, so sign-up before you download if you please.

I know you'll have extra pie crust pieces, that's unavoidable.  But if you also have extra pie filling, make some mini "sample pies" in ramekins.  They take half the time to bake and then you can have a taste while you wait for the pie to cool enough to serve.

What is your family's food legacy?  Do you have any special recipes that everyone in your family uses?

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