Exciting News!!

Yep! This is happening! We're pregnant! I'm 9 weeks tomorrow, so we're hoping our baby can have fireworks for their birthday ;) We're super excited! And I'm glad I got this chance to practice my photoshop skills.

Apple Turkeys

If you haven't ever done these, you've gotta do them in the next few days! They were so fun to make when I was little, and are even funner to eat now! ;) It's a good excuse to buy swedish fish! They're super simple too. And maybe you can require your kids to eat the apple before the candy (yeah, right).

All you need is a big red apple for each person who's making one, a whole bunch of toothpicks, and various candy that should include gumdrops and swedish fish. In these pictures you can see how our turkeys have evolved. Sometimes we got candy that looked like wings, gummy worms for gobblers, and such. So, please just be creative and use what you can find! It's so much more fun if everyone makes it there own.

Really all you need to know is that the swedish fish are meant to be turkey feathers. So stick them with a toothpick and poke them into the apple where you'd like the feathers to be. The gumdrops are meant to be the head and the feet, so again, do it the same as the fish. Have at it! Hope you enjoy!

Thanksgiving Indian Vests

 If you can't tell from all the pictures, this is a tradition that has stuck in our family! I remember doing it as a kid every year and loved it so much that I did it with my friends later on. So, if you want to enjoy your Thanksgiving season as much as I enjoy mine, you should definitely join in the fun and make an Indian Vest of your own! :)

My brother and I! Looks like we used markers this first time.

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Quick Chicken Noodle Soup

This is one of those recipes I can make over and over again! As soon as I smell it cooking on the stove I feel all comfy and at home. It's perfect for a cold fall/winter day or a day when you're not feeling well. It's got a perfect blend of flavors and nothing strong. I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I do and feel at home when you taste the deliciousness. :)

Quick Chicken Noodle Soup
Adapted from: My mom's kitchen

1/2 onion chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped (optional)
1/4 cup margarine or butter
3 quarts of water (I usually end up adding another cup or two)
4 Tbsp. chicken bouillon (if you add more water add a tsp. more of bouillon per cup)
2-3 cups cooked chicken, cubed
6 carrots, diced
1 tsp. pepper
1 Tbsp. dried parsley
2 cups medium egg noodles

Cook celery and onion in margarine until tender-crisp. Add water, bouillon, carrots, chicken, pepper, and parsley. Boil. Reduce heat and simmer 15 minutes. Add egg noodles and cook according to noodle package directions. Stir occasionally. Serve and devour!

Enjoy! -Allie

A Little Love from the Husband

Hey All - I just got home from class and Chandler had written a blog post for me to post because life's been hectic and he wanted to help me out. He's so sweet. Anyway, if any of you are men reading this, what he did is a dang good way to make your wife happy! :) I'm a little embarrassed to be posting this because of all the cutesy stuff he says about me, but here you go! I hope you enjoy  ~Allie

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Crock Pot Chili

This chili is perfect for a blustery fall day like this one! It's super delicious with crackers, in a bread bowl, or on top of a scone. It's one of the easiest recipes ever which is an extra awesome bonus! :) We made this two weeks ago for a ward Halloween party and it was a favorite for many. Whenever I get lots of compliments on something I make I feel super awesome because I don't cook much - and this got me plenty of feel-goods for hardly any work. :)

Crock Pot Chili
Recipe from: My mom's kitchen

1-2 lbs. ground beef
1 cup chopped onion
3/4 cup chopped green pepper (optional)
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 (16 oz) cans tomatoes, cut up
2 (16 oz) cans dark red kidney beans, drained
2 (8 oz) cans tomato sauce3
4 tsp. chili powder
1 tsp. basil
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper

In a large pan brown hamburger, onion, green pepper, and garlic together. Drain the fat out of the pan once it's all cooked. Dump the contents of the pan into the crock pot and stir in un-drained tomatoes, kidney beans, tomato sauce, chili powder, basil, salt, and pepper. Simmer on low for 8-10 hours. (You can also add all of this into the pan if you want to cook it faster on the stove. Bring to boil; reduce heat. Cover and simmer 20 minutes.)

Failed Failure Friday: A good thing?

Well this is pretty sad. I failed Failure Friday! I was sick most of this week so I didn't have time to make anything to put up on here. Last week was midterms and a whole lot of other craziness so I guess I worked myself almost to death. It's always good to have a slow down and heal week though. There's a lot that I should have/could have done this week while I was laying around the house but I didn't. I think that even though I "failed" at getting things done this week that I should have, I also "succeeded" at something else... We ALL need to take a break and slow down from time to time to keep ourselves healthy. If we don't take care of ourselves, we can't take care of others.

One of my favorite books is by Jeffrey R. and Patricia T. Holland. In this book (On Earth as it is in Heaven) Patricia says this:

"Anyone who reads a newspaper or magazine is constantly reminded that proper diet, appropriate exercise, and plenty of rest increase our daily capacities as well as our life span. But all too many of us put off even these minimal efforts, thinking our family, our neighbors, and our many other responsibilities come first. Yet in doing so, we put at risk the thing that people need most from us: our healthiest, happiest, heartiest self."

Isn't that such a great quote?? I love it because it reminds me of how important it is to take care of myself and make sure I'm healthy physically, emotionally, and spiritually. This week felt like a detoxing week for me. I was sick and tired and needed some time off. There was so much that I just needed a break from and hopefully after this slower week I can hop back up and have more motivation and energy to finish out this semester strong! So this is my challenge for you: Take some time for yourself this weekend. Eat something healthy and do something you love. Take time to work out. Watch a movie or take a nap! Take care of yourself so you can take care of others.

Don't look at not getting things done as a failure, look at it as a triumph for yourself because you took time for yourself - and that in turn will help you do more for others.

Halloween Pumpkin Sugar Cookies

This has been a tradition at my house longer than I can remember. We always made these deliciously moist sugar cookies, frosted them with orange frosting, and decorated them with chocolate chips and candy-corns to look like jack-o-lantern faces. We'd help my mom frost and decorate them and she'd take them to neighbors and friends. And we were always allowed to decorate one or two for ourselves to eat. Mine, of course, had every inch of cookie covered in candy-corns because if they were on my cookie, I could eat them :) This is super fun to do with kids, or just with friends! It's such a delicious recipe and it's fun to make because you get to feel all artistic!

Rolled Sugar Cookies
Recipe from: My mom's kitchen

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cubes butter
2/3 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups sugar (white)
2 eggs
2 Tbsp. milk
2 tsp. vanilla
4 cups all-purpose flour
3 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt

Directions:
Cream together butter and shortening for 30 seconds; add sugar and beat till fluffy. Add egg, milk, and vanilla; beat well. Add dry ingredients, beating until well combined. Cover and chill at least 3 hours. Working with 1/2 the dough (or less) at a time, on a lightly floured surface, roll to 1/8" thickness. *Cut into desired shapes. Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 375 for 8 minutes.

*To get a round cookie, we always used a cup. That way you don't have to buy round cookie cutters. :)

The butter cream frosting recipe can be found here. This is the best homemade frosting recipe ever and goes great with these cookies!!

Enjoy! -Al

Failure Friday: 7 Crock Pot Tips for making the Best Meal

To learn what failure Friday is click  here

One thing I consistently fail at is cooking. I'm really not that great at it and am always learning things I need to change to improve the meals I make. Usually when I make something new I call my mom and ask her about all the little things she does that I don't think about doing. So hopefully these crock pot tips can help me and you!

I love how people are always coming out with new crock pot recipes and freezer meals to save the food maker some time. SO great and definitely my kind of recipe. Since this is the new thing I thought I'd do a post about some crock pot tips so that your (and my) food will turn out the absolute best it can!

Halloween Candy Corn Centerpiece

Do you remember this? I did a tutorial on how to mix paint and mod podge to add color to glass here. This is the project that came out of that tutorial. The only other thing I did to this was add candy corns and a black table cloth! This is what I planned for and why I painted it with orange and yellow. I think it turned out awesome for Halloween, don't you? (Plus it was a great excuse to buy candy corns!) :)

Check out my tutorial and tell me what you think!

Halloween "BOO" Sign

 

Not too late to Decorate! And this baby is so inexpensive and easy you won't be able to resist making it to hang on your door. Plus it's freakin adorable, right? 

Failure Friday: Homemade Mild Salsa

So I wouldn't call this a complete failure. It's only the second time I've made salsa. It tasted pretty good and we ended up eating most of it! It's a great starter recipe but, it was a little bitter and I feel like it could be a lot better. So I'm going to tell you what we did and maybe you can help us out! :)

This whole ambition of making salsa started with Chandler and I going up to my Aunt and Uncle's for dinner. They had a bunch of extra tomatoes in their garden and asked us to take them off their hands - they had so many that they even made ketchup with them! Apparently it takes a lot to make a little when you do ketchup. So we picked a good bunch of them and headed home.

Then next day was our date night. We went out to dinner and were trying to figure out what to do with the rest of our night. It's hard thinking of new things to do on dates without spending too much money. I'm sure you know the feeling. . . We talked about going to a movie but there weren't any good ones at the dollar theater. Then we remembered our tomatoes! Hey - Cooking together is fun - let's make Salsa!

We called up the master cook, Chandler's dad, and got to it. My father-in-law helped us figure out what to buy since we didn't want to have to go home to find a recipe and come back into town. What we did:

Ham Fried Rice

This is a recipe my husband has been working on perfecting for about 2 years now. It's so easy so we love having it all the time - probably at least once a week. It's great also because it can be really cheap and you can add pretty much anything you want to it! : ) If you want to check out the recipe head on over to Beauty Through Imperfection. I'm a new contributor over there and will be putting up recipes once a month on Paula's blog.

Feather Nails

There's only one thing I love more than painting my nails, and that's having someone paint my nails for me! Especially when its a super cute design. Look at these adorable feather nails my sister-in-law, Shelby, did for me! :)

Failure Friday

Have you ever felt like a failure? Have you been excited about doing something that you thought would be super easy and fun and you'd be great at? If you haven't, you must not be a living breathing human being with a heartbeat and a soul.  Cuz I know all of us have encountered this at SOME point in our lives.

Now, as I have made this transition into becoming a blogger I've figured out that all of us bloggers try to put our best foot forward and show off all the great things we can do. Its kind of like dating. We hide all our flaws so we won't get dumped before we have a chance to impress. Only with dating you eventually find out all those quirks and weird things - if not through dating, you discover them through marriage.

But ...

DIY Halloween Hanging Spider

So I've got this giveaway going on for these adorable Halloween Spider decorations and I thought that for those of you who'd like to make your own I'd provide a DIY tutorial! If any of you are interested in the giveaway click here for the details.

Hanging Halloween Spider Giveaway

(Giveaway details are at the bottom of this post) 

Ok, I must say that when I started this project, I had NO idea they were going to turn out so ADORABLE! I mean look at this little guy:

National Good Neighbor Day

Well, I know it's kind of late in the day but believe it or not, today is National Good Neighbor Day! I just wanted to take advantage of this and share my appreciation for all good neighbors.

Shortening a Skirt the Easy Way

The original long skirt

So I had this super pretty looking skirt that I just didn't quite like because it hung funny on me. I figured it was the length and the cut combined. It kind of flares out at the bottom like a mermaid skirt and I thought if I shortened it it would be a lot cuter and more "hip". :)

Conference Bingo

LDS General Conference is just around the corner. Two weeks away in fact! And I've been working hard on this one to get it done in time for you to use to help your kids pay attention and be entertained. When I was little my mom had Bingo cards she'd pull out for us every 6 months when conference came around. My siblings and I would lay out our cards and use beans to mark words that we heard the prophets say. Once we got Bingo and the Blackout, we'd get a prize - usually M&Ms or something. But the cool thing about it was that you had to actually hear it. No copying off your brother or sister's chart. ;) ...

Korra Cake with Frosting Recipe

Well, I guess I've been into cake lately! Made another one. Are any of you into Avatar the last Airbender? Well, we are. And the second show just started up again this weekend so we had to have a party. And parties require cakes! :) So all I did was make a regular cake out of the box. The frosting was the fun part. Here's the recipe I used. I love it because it's not as thick as store-bought frosting so it doesn't make you sick if you get a slice of cake with a lot of frosting on it. . .

Candyland Cake

We made this adorable cake for my little sister for her birthday a couple of years ago. Super easy to figure out and it also let's you be creative. She loved it and so did everyone who got to eat it :) A lot of it you can figure out just by looking at the picture, but I'll go through a list of things we used to make it easier. The first thing you gotta do, of course, is make the cake. You can use whatever kind you want. It's easiest to fit everything if you do a 9X13 pan like this. You could do one even larger if you have a good cake pan. Also, make sure you get a good, thick, white frosting. It makes it easier for things to stick together when it's thick.

60 Recipes for the Cookie Dough Addict!

I've been super excited for this post! I've been working on it all week - and Sunday is the perfect day to post a bunch of dessert recipes. :)

DIY Cooking Utensil Holder

This is probably my favorite craft I've done so far! It just turned out so well. It all started with my husband and I trying to reorganize our kitchen a bit better. We've been in our apartment for a little over a year now and are just figuring out that the way we have some of our things organized doesn't make sense. We've been keeping all our cooking utensils in a box in one of the cupboards because we have no drawers. I finally realized how dumb this was and so I pulled out the ones we use the most and stuck them in this glass vase I had and stuck it by the stove. Much more accessible, but not very cute. And then i pulled out the Mod Podge . . . :)

Free 5X7 Photo book

I don't know if any of you guys are interested, but I just got a free 5X7 size photo book with 20 pages at this website. I love getting free stuff, especially photo books. They have way cute backgrounds to choose from and it was super simple. All ya gotta do is put in the code MYBOOK and pay the 2.99 for shipping. No pressure - I don't get anything for referring you to this - I just had to share the wealth ;). Let me know how it goes if you do it!

Bobby Pin Tea Cup

I found another way to paint on glass! I was just looking around Michael's and found this Multi-Surface Acrylic Craft Paint. You can use it on wood, glass, metal, and fabric. You can use it on indoor and outdoor things - it's weather resistant. You can also wash what you paint in the dishwasher. Also, they have all kinds of colors and types. I used the Satin kind but they also have pearl, metallic, and some others I can't remember right now. And the cool thing about this is if you wait 21 days before washing or using, it won't chip or come off. I made these a couple weeks ago and just went and tried to chip the paint with my fingernail but nothing happened. :) Cool stuff!

Mod Podge + Paint = Awesome

So this started out as an experiment. I feel like I have tons of glass bowls and vases and dishes in the house that I want to do something with. But I don't want it to be complicated or expensive. So I looked at what I had in the house and I found a lot of acrylic paint and Mod Podge and thought "What if I can mix this together and paint with it?" So the picture below is me trying it out. As you can see it was kind of thin and as it dried it got more transparent. So I decided to do 3 coats. Since it worked out pretty nicely, I took pictures of the rest of the process.

Chevron Coasters

So, I found these tiles at the D.I. for 50 cents each. Total steal for a crafting opportunity - Coasters. So I picked my paper and I picked my pattern (Chevron) and got to work. I cut a whole bunch of chevron lines out of my multicolored paper and a couple out of solid paper to throw in a little bit of interest. (My tutorial on how to get the perfect chevron lines can be found here: here).

Perfect Paper Chevron Lines

I feel like if you can cut Chevron lines out of paper and get a bottle of Mod Podge there are hundreds of cute crafts you can do. In fact, I wanted to make some Chevron Coasters. And so. . . I learned how to get the perfect Chevron lines cut out of paper - AND it's super simple.

Tablet Stand

I've been really excited about this post. I have a Kindle Fire and have found that I use it more and more when I bake to view recipes - it's just easier and smaller than a laptop. The only problem is that it's flat and so it's awkward to look at (and sometimes has a bad glare) while I'm cooking but I don't want to pick it up because my hands are usually covered in flower or some other messy ingredient. So, I made this awesome stand for it that would work for any tablet. It was super simple and very affordable to make.

Homemade Oreo Cookies

So, this is definitely one of my favorite things to fix for dessert. Homemade OREO cookies!! So mouth-wateringly delicious. Can't you just smell them by looking at the picture? And it's such an easy recipe too - probably one of the fastest desserts I know how to make. Thank goodness for my mother who made me a recipe book that includes this one! So here's the recipe:

Weekly Calendar

I've seen a project similar to this all over Pinterest. The one I've seen is a recipe planner for the week. I thought it was super adorable but the problem is . . . I'm lucky to know what we're having for dinner an hour before we eat let alone the whole week! So if I made a recipe planner it would just sit on my wall, unused, and gather dust. But one thing I always struggle with is keeping the week organized and remembering where to go when and what I need to do each day. So I decided to create this adorable little dry-erase weekly calendar.

Fab Fixes

There are a couple different kinds of fixes. Fix could mean a repair; something is broken or not working and is made to work again or work in a different way. Fix could also mean to adjust or arrange; to fix your hair or to fix a display or to fix dinner. Another meaning of fix is to make fast, firm, or stable; and in this sense I'm thinking of fixing your life - making it stable and firm. This blog is about all these kinds of fixes. I love being able to make things work in a creative way especially when it's been a problem I've been thinking about for a while. I love being able to make things look beautiful. And I love improving lives and making my own life stable and strong.

(P.S. I suppose the only thing I don't want the word "fixes" to apply to is heroin. LOL. This is a drug-free blog.)

And so here we go!