Small Christmas gift boxes

This year we thought of a bunch of small gifts to give to the family so I searched for a bit and found some interesting box templates on the internet. And then I found some awesome Photoshop designs from Deviantart user roula33. So I merged the two and here's the result.

Even for me it was very easy to assemble them (after going over the lines with a ruler and scissors) and the only thing that didn't go as planned was printing - my printer didn't like the thicker paper and I had to persuade him to print (reload the paper) 2-5 times for each paper...

Here are the templates if you would like to make some gift boxes yourself:

Squirrel feeder

I love squirrels. So I decided I need to make a feeder for them, which the birds won't empty within a day (a lot of birds here).
I found this picture which inspired me:

To get to the nuts, the lid has to be lifted, so that would mean the birds won't be able to get in there. 

I'm not good with woodwork and don't have the tools for it so I just looked around my drawers full of "maybe I'll need it later" stuff and found this tea box. 

To make the lid and the "window" (honestly I have no idea if it's for squirrels or for me) I used a plastic ice cream container. 

Here's what it came out like

So far I haven't see any squirrels, but there are generally not a lot of them here, I have only seen them in our yard a couple times. So I hope if they decide to visit us again sometime, they'll find the nuts and start coming here more often. I hope the feeder won't fall apart until then... :)

EDIT:  It's been almost a year, no squirrels and the feeder started getting moldy so I sent it to squirrel-feeder-heaven

Pathway with pebbles

This time it all started in spring when two things happened:
1. Our dog ran around the yard after all the snow melted and especially liked one corner which meant that there was no grass and she brought the mud inside
2. I saw this pin

It looked super easy and I thought I could definitely do that. 

But as I started planning it I immediately faced a couple problems. First of all, I couldn't do it directly in the corner because the dog runs around there and the only thing that could keep her out would be a 2 meter fence. Yep, not happening. So I thought I could make these tiles in the other section of our garden where the dog can't go and bring them back when they're ready. 

When I started making them I ran into another problem - where the hell do I get these beautiful pebbles?? I was not going to buy them so I just used little stones that I had and tried my best. Picking out suitable pebbles turned out the hardest task while doing it all...

So I made this weird frame with a box and a brick (to make it square) and covered it with a plastic sheet.

I only had two of theses frames which meant I could only make two concrete tiles at a time. And they dried for 3 days. So it meant I spent my whole summer (okay that's not true, I did some other stuff in between) making these damn stone-tiles!! 

But a couple days into fall I was luckily done.

Yeah, looks okay I guess... But you know what? I was SO disappointed when I finally laid them into place. I am a horrible planner and it turned out I only covered about one fifth of the area I wanted to cover!!

Yeah. Never doing that again. 

Dehydrated bananas

I love food. And I always want to eat. But always eating candy or chocolate is not good so I decided I want to dry some fruit that I can have as a snack throughout the day. Why not regular fruit? Because I also love coffee and drink it throughout the day and coffee and I don't like the combination of juicy fruit and coffee.

First I had to buy a dehydrator. But no, it wasn't as easy as it may seem. :)
Just like with buying a printer, I immediately saw that there are sooo many different dehydrators to choose from. After a couple weeks of research and trying to understand what the hell is the difference between 5 similar dehydrators I finally made up my mind and bought the CONCEPT SO-1060.
So far I'm very happy with it. It cost me 55€, it has a temperature regulator, plenty of room for fruit (9 plates) and most importantly a timer! I can't imagine not having a timer on this thing. It works like that: you put in fruit, set the time (for example 10 hours) and it shuts off when the time is up.

The first thing I tried dehydrating is bananas!

I have bought the dried banana chips from a store before that look like this:

but mine came out nothing like that - in my opinion they taste a lot better! In addition to that the banana chips I have bought for some reason contained oil and sugar? I suspect maybe those were deep fried instead of dried... 

Later I calculated the cost and mine came out a little more expensive (7€/kg) than the ones in the store (6€/kg), but at least I know they don't have any additives!

At first I tried storing my bananas in these pretty little fabric bags that my mother made, but although they really are nice to look at, they didn't work that well - the bananas started getting moist again.

So now I just store them in plastic containers, that works pretty well (if only the bananas weren't so good that I want to eat the whole container right away)

I've also tried drying apples and pears and both came out good! :)

Felted cat

I have 3 long haired cats which means... their hair is EVERYWHERE! And the only thing I can do is (okay besides shaving them down completely) brush them with a special brush. And this results in a big amount of cat hair, which I usually just throw away.
This time I wanted to try and make a little felted cat out of the hair.

To do this I needed:

● at least one cat who is trained to not kill you while you brush it (this is possibly the hardest part of all)
● brush the said cat and collect the hair
● a felting needle (mine cost under 2€)
● a cushion

First I laid the hair down on a cushion in the form of a cat and started kind of stabbing the hair to make it tighter.

Then I took it off carefully and proceeded to add pieces of hair to make it round. This is also done by stabbing the hair with the needle (carefully! if not, the fingers are going to be stabbed and this quite unpleasant).

And now I have a (completely useless) felted little cat!

PS, keep it out of reach of cats because they tend to think it's part of them and that it definitely needs to be licked.

Kitchen towels and holder

The holder was made using decoupage (with regular paper napkins) and the towels made by my mother. She simply sewed some lace on the towel material pieces and now they look beautiful!

Lazy Pavlova

A couple days ago my mother ate Pavlova at a restaurant and loved it so much that she wanted us to try and make one ourselves.
But we are lazy people. And we are not very good at cooking. And we have a very limited selection of groceries in our town.
So instead of wonderful Pavlova we got a pretty great looking but pretty weird dessert with colorful (and awfully sweet) meringue,  (also too sweet) whipped cream and (maybe overly sour) strawberries.

But... we ate it all anyway. 

Crochet rug

About a year ago I saw this picture

and I was dying to try crocheting a rug myself. I didn't have that rope like in the picture but I had a whole lot of old white sheets that couldn't be used anymore, so I decided to try and reuse them and make a rug :)

Firstly I needed to cut the sheet, which I did by cutting it a little and then ripping until the other side. 

So in the end I had a big ball of "yarn" and started crocheting with a large hook! For some reason when I started it last year (I took a random doily pattern), I got carried away by some other craft project so it was put away unfinished. This spring I found it and decided to finish it!

It took about 3-4 sheets and since the sheets were old, they were slightly different color, so I might have to bleach the rug. 

Of course since I forgot where I saved the pattern I had to come up with my own so it has a slightly weird shape... But the cats like it and that's most important! :D

Scrambled boiled eggs

A couple days ago I saw a gif of someone spinning an egg inside a sleeve which resulting in a beautiful evenly yellow egg after boiling.

I thought it was genius and tried to do so myself. 

So I took 3 eggs, spun them around in a shirt sleeve like I remembered the man from the gif did. I even put every egg inside a plastic bag so if it was going to break, it would not be all over the shirt. Unfortunately while I was spinning the carefully wrapped egg I accidentally pushed a carton with 3 unboiled eggs on the floor resulting in a big mess on the carpet...

And for some reason the three eggs I boiled turned out absolutely normal, not scrambled which I was hoping to achieve. 

The next day (because 3 eggs a day is already more than I would usually eat) I decided to search for the original "how to" video, which I found here. The instructions are very clear, so I tried it once again, spun the egg around like crazy for a few minutes. Nope, nothing happened besides the shell breaking.

After a few more regular eggs I went to read the comments under the video and found that there is a new method, described here. Now this looked like something powerful so I decided to try that instead. 

I found a thing left by previous owners of this house (I have no idea what it is) which looked perfect for the egg-spinning. 

 10 minutes of spinning (I consider it a workout for the day) and 10 minutes of egg-boiling later...

Nope! Still a normal egg!

I don't know for how long I can keep eating so many eggs - I just want one beautiful yellow scrambled one!!