Minecraft Plushy

 

My little brother has been into this Minecraft game for some time now, so I finally decided to figure out what it’s all about.  It definitely looks like a game I could get into if I only had the time!

 

My brother turned 13 this year, so he is at an age that can be difficult to craft for.  That’s why I had to do some research!  If I had planned ahead a little better I would have done something more.  Pixelated games just work so perfect for craft projects!  But I was running out of time, so in addition to some art supplies I whipped up this super simple creeper head plushie.

 

I cut out 6 squares of green felt about 4 inches wide.  Then cut the eyes and mouth out in black and stitch to one square.

 

Stitch all the square sides together except one.

 

Stuff the little guy with fiberfill/pellets

 

Stitch the last side together and you have this adorably creepy little creature to watch over you.  My brother loved it :)

Citrus and Herb Soap Recipe

A simple soap recipe for adding to melt and pour soap bases; I added the following herbs to this company’s olive oil base. 

INGREDIENTS:

Lime peels, grated

Carrot, grated

Rosemary, finely chopped

Stinging Nettle Leaves, finely chopped

Orange essential oil

4 Leaf Clovers, dried (for decoration)

Melt the soap in a double broiler

Add herbs, oils, etc.

Pour into mold

Then I pressed 4 leaf clovers into the soap

Allow to cool and harden completely

Beautiful!

Sarsaparilla Soda

No matter how hard I try to cut soda out of my diet, I just can’t help but grab one every once in a while!  So it might as well be homemade.

For the first time around I bought a couple soda extracts from my local brewery supplier, sarsaparilla and birch beer.  Which it turns out, both are basically just root beer, coming from different plants but similar in taste.

Recipe went as follows…

Rehydrate 1 tsp brewer’s yeast in warm water.

Combine soda extract, 4 lbs (or 8 cups) sugar with enough warm water to dissolve.

 

Stir in yeast and add warm water until you have 4 gallons of soda.

 

Fill bottles leaving 1-2 inches of head space.

 

Age 3-4 days at room temperature, then store in cool, dark place for total aging of 2 weeks

Refrigerate and enjoy! 

(My 4 gallons filled 28 12 oz. glass bottles and 2 2 liter soda bottles)

 

Can’t wait, it already tastes good, just needs to carbonate.

Brewing Beer

This Christmas my Dad and stepmom set me up with a complete beer making kit.  I thought about asking for one for Christmas but never did, they know me too well!  I had an American pale ale recipe for my first brew.  The kit had everything I would need already measured out, so it was a good way to start brewing. 

I’m just going to go over the basics to give you an idea of the process, because basically I just followed the recipe in my kit.  It was relatively simple and very rewarding! 

Cooking the Beer

First I poured the grain into a muslin bag and tied it shut, dropping it into 2 gallons of water.  Heat to 150°F, then reduce heat and let simmer for 30 minutes, draining grain bag occasionally to let all the flavors seep out.

 

Remove grain bag, bring to a boil then remove pot from heat and stir in malt extract syrup. 

 

Next add the hops, hops are added at different stages of the brew for different flavors. 

The first hops added are for bitterness, and then the beer is boiled for 45 minutes.

The next hops for flavoring, and boil another 15 minutes.

Another batch of hops is added for aroma, the heat is turned off and the brew sits for 10 minutes.

Remove hop bag and sit pot in sink filled with cold water until it cools to 100°F

 

Fermentation

 
Siphon or pour brew into primary fermenter and add yeast stirring to aerate mixture.

Cover fermenter and put out of direct sunlight and ideally between 65° and 75° F.

 

Within the next day the beer should foam up.

 

After 5 days I added more hops for a dry flavor.

In 6-8 days the foam should disappear, which means the fermenting is done

At this point I transferred my beer into my secondary fermenter (although a secondary fermenter isn’t necessary for lighter beers, it does make the beer more pure by not giving the yeast residue time to taint the flavor. Plus I wanted to learn how to use all my equipment.)

 

After 12-16 days the beer should be ready to bottle.  A hydrometer reading is taken to be sure fermentation is complete.  Apparently bottles can explode if fermentation is not complete!

Bottling

Bottling was easy. I siphoned the beer into a priming container with a spout.

 

Stirred in fermenting sugar, which is what creates carbonation, when the remaining yeast eats the sugar.

 Then siphoned the beer into bottles and capped them with a double lever capper.

 

Pale Ales are good to go 2 weeks after bottling, but best after 3 weeks. 

Xmas Presents

For the past several years I have made all my Christmas presents.  There are so many reasons to make things yourself around the holidays.  A handmade gift means a lot to loved ones and helps keep us away from all the over consumerism associated with Christmas these days.

Throughout December I’ve been posting what I’ve been making, but I’d like to compile everything here to give you all some ideas of easy, affordable home made gifts.

 

Simple knit skirts

These are for my Mom.  I used a skirt that I made her years ago for my pattern, which I believe was made with Simplicity pattern #4604 plus an elastic wasitband

 

Bay Rum Aftershave and Soap

 

Smells amazing!  I made these for my Dad, brothers, boyfriend, and male friends. (recipe here)

 

Reusable Muslin Tea Bags and Homegrown Hyssop Tea

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My first batch of tea from the garden!  These are for my step-mom, and a couple other tea drinkers in my life.  I found a nice tin container to store the empty tea bags and made tags with a picture of hyssop and explanation of all its medicinal benefits.  Hyssop is an amazing herb! (tutorial here)

 

 

 

Leggings

 

For my sisters and lady friends (although I probably could have made these for everyone, since boys wear leggings too!) I’ve wanted to make try McCall’s pattern #6173 for a while!  It was super simple and they turned out great.  Never buying leggings again!

Printed Sweatshirt

For my 12 year old brother, who is too young to shave or care about soap, I printed a chicken skeleton on the back of a thrift store sweatshirt.  My brother takes care of the chickens and other birds at my dad’s farm, so I think he will be into this print as much as I am!

I made a silk screen (you can always make a stencil if you don’t have the equipment) and printed on a scrap of a t-shirt, then cut the patch out and sewed it on a hoodie.

Revenge Bot

 

OK, so maybe this isn’t one you could make easily.  We have a Christmas exchange on my Dad’s side of the family and I had my cousin who recently started his own skateboard company, Revenge.  So I made him one my robots with his logo on a robo-skateboard and the chest plate. Worked out perfectly!

 

 

Last year I made everyone food related items; hot sauce, soup, bread, fudge, chocolate covered cherries, peppermint bark, and even dog treats/catnip toys for pets.  I still wanted to make a few sweets this year and just take them to celebrations.  This is what I took….

 

 

 

 

Chocolate Covered Cherries (recipe here)

Homemade Pretzels Dipped in Chocolate

 

I used this recipe here and then melted vegan chocolate chips.

I dipped some in chocolate and crushed candy canes; others were covered in peanut butter, and then dipped in chocolate.

 

 

 

Skittles Vodka

I found this recipe here.  Tastes great, so glad Skittles is now gelatin-free!

 

 

And if you don’t have the time or energy for a diy Xmas, you can always shop locally and buy fair trade goods online.  My boyfriend has wanted a backstrap loom for a while; I found a really nice one here from a fair trade non-profit in Guatemala.

I made him this actual backstrap to go with it!

Bay Rum Aftershave and Soap

 

For the men in my life I made something a little different this Christmas.  I found this recipe for bay rum aftershave and had to try it.  This recipe uses a West Indies bay leaf, Pimenta racemosa, which is a different type than what you buy at the grocery store, making it hard to find!  What I did find was too expensive, so I bought a bottle of Pimenta racemosa essential oil on ebay. 

Apparently sailors in the West Indies used to rub the bay leaves on their skin to cover odors.  Eventually the bay was combined with the local rum and bay rum was invented to be used in extra manly colognes and aftershaves.

8 TBSP Vodka

2 TBSP Jamaican Rum

Pimenta racemosa essential oil (I used 2 or 3 drops per bottle)

Orange essential oil (1 or 2 drops per bottle or add fresh orange zest)

¼ TSP Allspice

¼ TSP ground cinnamon

Basically I just mixed everything together in a 2-liter bottle.  Let it sit a couple days, shaking it up every once in a while.  Then strained it through coffee filters and bottled it up in recycled yeast bottles.

Yeast bottles worked perfectly for the aftershave and I added a label on the lid along with a tag explaining the origin of bay rum. 

 

 

 

I’ve wanted to make soap for a while, and I didn’t realize how easy they had made it!  This company makes several varieties of vegetable based soaps.  You can just buy blocks of… soap basically, at craft stores.  Just melt the soap, add oils, herbs, etc. and pour into molds.   I used the olive oil base and added the bay leaf oil, a few drops of orange oil, crushed dried sage, cinnamon and allspice. 

 

 

 

 

I wrapped each bar in wax paper, tied with ribbon, and made muscle man labels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All in all I spent about $50 on ingredients and made thoughtful, handmade gifts for 6 people.  Plus I have quite a bit of rum left!  I tested both products on my boyfriend and they met his satisfaction.  And mine, he still smelled very manly after a full day of work!

 

 

 

Reusable tea and herb bags

 

I made a batch of muslin tea bags for a few people for Christmas.  As I’m growing more herbs, I need to make more tea!  So I figured I could fill a couple bags with my own hyssop tea from the garden and through in some extra tea bags for a sweet, green gift.

A ½ yard of 44 inch wide unbleached, preshrunk muslin made 24 tea bags.  I also bought 10 yards of cotton string that is used in making some type of fancy curtain (available at fabric stores).  But you could use any natural fiber string.

I cut my muslin into rectangle pieces measuring 6 x 4 inches, and I cut my string in to 12-15 inch pieces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Press in half and trim edges with picking shears to prevent fraying.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Press the 2 short sides in about a ¼ inch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Press one long side in about ½ inch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Place your cotton string inside the hem line and sew across the top, creating a pocket for the pull string.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fold the rectangle in half again, with seams facing out.  Stitch along the side and bottom to form a bag.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clip your corners, clean off any hairs or stray threads, and turn right-side out. Tie the cotton string together and make yourself a cup of tea!

 

 

After finishing these, I bought another half yard and made 6 larger bags for storing/drying herbs and spices (I followed the directions above, but used 9 x 14 inch rectangles and 18 inch pieces of string).  You can make the bags as big or small as you want.  Larger bags also work for compost tea!

When doing small, repetitive projects like this it often works best to do it assembly line style.  I cut everything out, then do all the ironing, sew each bag, clean them up and package.  It goes much quicker!

Jim Morrison Wall Art

It’s my amazing sister Holly’s birthday today!  I made her a huge Jim Morrison painting.  It turned out great; I really wanted to keep it for myself!  I think I will just have to do another one for us… maybe with Lux Interior instead?!  I basically just made a huge paper stencil and painting on canvas.

 

I made my own canvas with 24” and 32” stretcher bars and light tan canvas.  You could buy a pre-made canvas too, but it’s usually cheaper to make your own if it’s big painting. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I took an image of Jim Morrison that was easy to recognize and decent quality so the basic details would show up in a stencil.  I used Gimp (a free, open source photo editor) to edit my picture.  I changed it to black and white then adjusted the levels, brightness and contrast of the photo until it was straight black and white.  Gimp also has a color option called Posterize (not sure what it’s called in Photoshop); where you can choose to only have 2 colors, black and white, in your image.  With these tools a stencil is easy.

 

Once I had my stencil I made the whole image the same size as my canvas and split it into 8.5” x 11” paper sized sections.  You will have to do some math for this part.  My image was going to need to be printed on 9 pieces of paper.  I made sure to overlap where I cut my image into sections, so that I could easily match the pieces up and wouldn’t miss any part of the image.

 

I printed each section out and then cut the border of the page off.  I assembled the image together and taped the paper with packaging tape on the front and back.  It may be helpful to print the whole image out on a separate piece of paper just so you have a model to look at.

(Also note that I printed my image in colors because I was out of black ink, but I will refer to the colored sections as black and the white as white to make it easier)

 

Now that you have your image, it’s time to make the stencil.  Cut the black spaces out with an X-Acto knife and scissors.  For any floating white spaces (as in not touching other white areas) you will need to keep a little “bridge” of black paper to keep it attached and make placement easy.  It may help to draw the “bridge” before cutting so you don’t make a mistake, as I have done many times with stencils!

 

Once all the black spaces are finally cut, pin the paper onto your canvas.  Take a permanent marker and outline around every line of the stencil. 

 

 

 

 

 

When you finish the overall outline you can go back through where you made the “bridges” and as you’re unpinning, draw in where the floating white pieces begin and end.  I drew a squiggly mark over those spots that would become black to make painting easier.

 

Now just color it in!  I used black silk screen ink with paint brushes, and then added a second coat of paint with a sponge for a smooth finish.  You could use acrylic paint too, but I wanted it to be flat and smooth like a giant silk screen.  I heat set the ink with an iron, although I’m not sure if it was necessary, but maybe it will help keep it from fading.

 

Such a large gift required a lot of wrapping paper, so I taped old phone book pages together and tucked the edges under the stretcher bars.  I even found her name in the listings and drew a heart around it as a gift tag.