Meal Plan Sunday - 8/7/2011

This is where I would post my meal plan for the week, but I have to admit that I am rather planless. In a few days, we will be moving, so I will be making nothing but creations with items we already have on hand. Hopefully, there won't be any real grocery shopping this week.

What am I planning on create with the leftovers?

Here is an example:

Hazelnut-Sugar-Cookies

I covered a cookie tray with aluminum foil.

I collected miscellaneous ingredients I had flying around in my cupboards. They included honey, syrup, chocolate powder, hazelnuts, brown sugar, and flower.

I combined 1/2 cup of butter, 2 Tbsp of Syrup and all of the brown sugar I found (about a cup) in a sauce pan.

Once the mix was completely liquid, I added a cup of hazelnut, 1 Tbsp of Chocolate Powder and 1/2 cup of flower.

This is what my creation looked like.

I then dropped spoons of the dough on my cookie sheet and out the whole thing in the oven at 350F for 10 minutes.

After ten minutes I had some very sweet cookies. My son loved them, I had some too. I am not sure if this is a keeper recipe though, because these are some very sweet hazelnutty cookies.

"Enjoy".

On the move ...

Here are some news for my few readers:

I am moving out of country in less than 2 weeks and I am going crazy. Several reasons I am not going to elaborate on for now made us decide for this move, and starting mid-august, I will be posting from Germany. That's right. We will live in Germany, buy a house (hopefully in a year or two), and raise our son there.

After a lot of research, looking at moving companies and options of sending boxes overseas, we decided to sell all of our furniture, etc and to just take 6 suitcases plus hand luggage.

This means, that the last month we have been busy going through piles of stuff, sorting, donating, throwing away, selling, .... I believe you get the idea.

Trying to reduce your household to about 6 suitcases plus a few bags is not an easy task. Bags and bags full of stuff have already left the apartment. Today, I will hold a yard sale and on Saturday somebody will come to buy our car.

source

I never thought how hard it would be to let go of things that were cherished. Everything had to be cut to the minimum. Clothes (I donated and sold about 7 bags), photos, books (I sold all but 2) all had to go through the evaluation - keep, toss, donate/sell.

However, all this letting go of things also means that I will start with a completely blank slate in about a month. I will need furniture, kitchen supplies, everything but clothes.

So in between the process of getting rid of my current household items, I have been busy making mood boards, wish lists, and lists of items I will need to start a new household and I have a lot of ideas floating in my head.

These are the kind of pinterest plans I have on my boards - kind of a combination of color inspiration and rooms that go into the right direction. Obviously I am planning of finding and using a lot of pieces that I can refinish according to my ideas, but I'll have to see how that goes as I am not too familiar with the different paint products available in Germany.

So, in order for me to have an idea how much I will spend for a complete room, I registered with the Ikea in Germany, and started creating shopping lists for each room.

I think it is obvious that I am very excited about the idea of starting completely from scratch.

Soon I will post pictures of how our apartment looks like at the moment (not picture perfect, that's for sure).

Also, for those of you noticing that I am painting walls like crazy, I'd like to offer an explanation. Since we are allowed to paint, I am kind of using this opportunity to go out of my comfort zone with the paint colors and to try out different colors.

So that's the big news for this week. I will post more details as they become "available".

Zero-$-Comfort

To make it short: Our last sofa pillows got ripped apart by our chocolate lab who figured they would make a great snack.

Since I was to cheap to spend money on new toss pillows, we spent a few months without any pillows.

Then the other day I decided, that I had to change something. Obviously, I did not want to spend any money, so following instructions I had seen all over blogland I grabbed two dollar store placemats (purchased a few years ago), an old pillow that was taking up space in our closets and some yarn and went to work.

Here is how I made my pillows:

1) I started by opening my place mats at the seams on one side (about 5 inches or so). The opening was wide enough for my hand to get into the mat, but not too much so that I wouldn't have to sew the entire thing back together.

2) Next, I opened ripped the old pillow open as well:

3) I removed the stuffing from the pillow (supported by my little helper) and put it in the place mat. I made sure that it got all the way into the corners of the place mat so that my new pillow would be puffy in all the right places:

4) My place mats looked like this at first:

and then like this, once I thought they were thick enough:

5) Then I took some yarn and a needle and started sewing up the seems. I just tried to make this as neatly as possible. You can also use some hemming tape and an iron to close the seem, but since I didn't have any, I worked with yarn and needle instead. After less than 20 minutes, I ended up with 2 of these:

Here is a close up:

I like the swirly design on the mats/pillows and they now decorate my previously empty sofa. Hopefully our lab won't feel the urge to eat pillow any time soon ;)

Not bad for free, right?

Linked up here:

Just a Girl - Show and Share Day

End-of-Summer Decor

I did some re-arranging of decoration on my dining room shelves, mostly involving removing picture frames and I like the results:

Here is the before: Lots of pictures and accent pieces in blue and naturals.

During my little change, I actually removed all of the pictures and added other pieces to update and neutralize the look a little bit. Here are the afters:

The entire color scheme still includes blues, naturals, browns and whites, but this time the shelf looks cleaner.

 

That blue vase with the tile accent is I think my single most favorite item of decoration in the entire apartment. I think the colors are perfect and I snagged this off at Home Goods even before it was put on the shelves.

 There is by the way a reason for me removing all of the pictures, but I am going to explain that later this week. For now, enjoy your day everybody!

What's hot in Blogland?

Have you realized there are several things hot in Blogland right now? To me, this became very apparent at the Pinterest challenge, but also at different other link parties and I had fun listing the different DIY projects everyone seems to be working on this month. Ready to take a look?

1) Have you seen all the map art and where-I-am-from art that seems to pop up on almost every DIY blog? I think these are great and for sure add some meaningful artwork to any home.

Found here

 

Found here

Found here

2) I also saw a whole bunch of fairy-gardens and fairy-doors this past couple of weeks. These are so cute.

Found here

Found here

3) And then how about the toilet paper art that several bloggers have worked on. These canvases are so easy and cheap to make and still create a good amount of impact:

Found here

Found here

4) Another type of DIY art I saw all over the last couple of weeks and which I created my own version of were the graphic striped canvases.

Found here

Found here

Found here

Found here (this one is my version)

5) Finally I loved all the melted-crayon-canvases and I think the possibilities for these are endless. Either following the colors of the rainbow or using just 2 or 3 specific colors seem to result in some pretty random but high-impact art:

Found here

Found here

Found here

So there you have it. This was my little round-up of what I saw repeatedly throughout blogland the last couple of weeks.

Inspired ....

 

http://www.younghouselove.com/2011/08/320-pins/

Here is my little project:

I have a Pinterest board with DIY canvas ideas and one I really liked is this one:

found here

 This was something I could do, spending $ 0.00 since I had everything for this project on hand.

I started with an old canvas, which I had in the bathroom but where the colors just didn't co-ordinate with my existing color scheme:

I used some of my free quart of Glidden paint I was able to snag a couple of months ago and painted over the entire canvas (the color is Soothing Green Tea):

Once the three layers were all dry, I taped sections with painters tape:

 Then I went over the whole thing with Teal Blue paint (this time a free Valspar paint sample in Ocean Slumber):

Before the layer of paint dried, I carefully removed the tape and then I waited again for this to dry.

Once dry, I taped my canvas in a similar way as previously but this time horizontally.

I went over that with my teal color as well.

At this point, I forgot to take a picture, but I pretty much removed that second layer of tape and then used some of our hallway paint (Behr's Lime Light, a very light blue) to fill in some of the boxes with  more color. I also had to do some touching up, because I had paint bleeding through the tape.

Here is another picture:

I like how this turned out, especially since it adds another pop of color to our bathroom.


Linked up at the following parties as well:

Thrifty Decor Chick - Before and After Party
Uncommon Slice of Suburbia - Tuesdays Treasures 
House of Hepworths - Hooking Up
The Shabby Creek Cottage - Transformation Thursday
The Shabby Nest - Frugal Friday 
Designer Garden - VIP Party

Meal Plan Sunday - 7/31/2011

Here is what I will be making this week:

Breakfasts:
Cereal, Fruit, Milk - x 2
Oatmeal, Fruit, Milk - x 2
Pancakes, Fruitsmoothie - x 2
Rice pudding, Fruit

Lunches:
Veggie Soup - x 2
Beef Wrap
Green Salad
Toast w/Joghurt and Fruit
Rice, Beans, Scrambled Eggs
BBQ w/ Salad 

Dinners:
Rice, Chicken Stroganoff (w/  Mushrooms and Broccoli on the side)
Rice (leftover), Beans, Meat
Baked Potatoes, Meat, Steamed Veggies
Leftovers or BBQ
Rice, Beans, Meat
Tilapia, Rice, Steamed Veggies