Apple Chips

Growing up, our family preserved A LOT of food. Canning, freezing, pickling, dehydrating... you name it. My sister and I caught on pretty quickly that preserving food was great, not because could we eat delicious food out of season, but because we could enter what we made in the fair and keep the prize money. 

Nowadays, I don't preserve much food. We don't have the dozens of fruit trees my parents did, nor do we have a large garden. We eat what we grow in season and freeze what little is left.  It's been at least 6 years since I've used my canning kettle and at least double that since I've done any pickling.

I have done some dehydrating though. Our family had a dehydrator when I was young; now I use the oven.

Apple Chips

Step 1:
Peel and core apples. Slice into thin slices and place on a baking sheet. (This one is lined with a Silpat, though my other pans weren't. It doesn't really matter.)

Step 2:
Sprinkle lightly with cinnamon. (You may also choose to sprinkle with sugar, though most apples don't need it.)

Step 3:

Put pans in a 190° oven. After about 5 hours, they'll have shrunk significantly and darkened slightly. At this point, they are perfectly delicious, but will be soft, not crisp. You can eat them as is, or turn them over and put them back into the oven for a few more hours. The total drying time will differ significantly, depending on humidity, juice content of the apples, etc. 

Step 4: 

When your apple chips are crisp, remove them to a plate to eat immediately or store in airtight containers. 

Crayon Resist Halloween Art

In other parts of the country, you have this thing you call "Fall" where the leaves turn beautiful colors and fall off the trees. It starts in September- I see it on my calendar every year. Around here, the leaves are green and clinging tightly to the trees well into November. Last year, our leaves (and temperatures) didn't start dropping until the 2nd week of December, when the rest of the world was getting ready for winter. So to me, October doesn't mean Fall. It means Halloween! An entire month of Halloween decorating and Halloween crafts. Here is one of my all-time favorite Halloween crafts.  

Crayon Resist Halloween Art

Materials: 

• watercolor paper
• crayons
• black paint
• paintbrush
• paper towel

Steps: 

Use the crayons to draw a Halloween scene.  Ideas include spooky trees, a full moon, bats, pumpkins, ghosts, gravestones, or black cats.  Be sure to color heavily and fill in all spaces where you want color.  Use the white crayon to make ghosts- you can see mine to the left of the tree.

Dilute the black paint with water.  I use a small squirt of paint in 1/4 cup of water.  

Paint over the entire drawing.  The wax of the crayons will resist the paint. 

Wipe the paper towel across the paint.  The colors will really pop, especially the white.

Here is my artwork, before and after adding the paint:

Here is Steve's artwork:

And here is Trevor's.  As you can see, he did not color as heavily with the crayons and the colors ended up more gray.  It's also very hard to see his ghost (at the top between the T and the r in his name).  The project still looks good if you don't color heavily, but it's a different look.

(The artist at work.  I love his concentration.)

Happy Halloween/Fall!

Dealing with a Missing Letter

Is there anything more frustrating than planning a title, pulling out the perfect chipboard letters or alphabet stickers and being short one little letter?  I hate that!  Of course, there are many ways around the problem.  Here are some of the solutions I use the most often.

Trim letters:  In just about any font, u and n can substitute for each other.  M and W are natural substitutions, as are b, d, p, and q.  With a little snip, it's easy to make the letter c from an a, b, d, e, g, o, p, or q.  The letter t can become an f.  In this layout, the u is an upside-down n and the lowercase y is actually an uppercase X.

Stamp the missing letters:  If I can't spell all the words of a multi-word title, I stamp the words with the missing letters. 

Mix fonts or colors:  On a whimsical page, I'll mix fonts and/or colors in the title words.  Here I used a variety of colors in similar fonts to echo the colors of the party.  (Also, notice that the two p's aren't quite the same.  The 2nd is an inverted d.)

Trace the letters:  If I'm short a letter because my title uses that letter more than once, I trace the chipboard.  In this example, I had an e, g, and s, but not a second g.  I traced the letters for a uniform title and can now use the chipboard letters on a future project.

Use the negative:  I never throw out the negatives from an alphabet set.  They can be used as stencils or to fill in for a missing letter.  They work especially well as the first letter in a title.

Use a button, flower or themed shape for the missing letter: Here I had all the letters except an o.  Because it hit 100° during the trip, a sun was a natural stand-in for the missing letter.

What other tricks do you use to deal with a missing letter?  Please share your tips!

Lucky 7

At any given time, I usually have 4 or 5 layouts in progress.  I go through phases where I am very inspired by certain aspects of scrapbooking and not others.  This doesn't bother me- I just set the partially completed layouts aside and come back to them when inspiration strikes.  A few days ago, I counted the growing pile of incomplete layouts- there were 18.  Yikes!  It was definitely time to finish some of them.

Here's my latest layout.  Steve and I celebrated our 7th anniversary with a stay in Benicia, CA at the wonderful Inn at Benicia Bay. 

I'm pleased that I managed to get 12 photos on there without it looking crowded, though I do have to admit that it bothered me a tiny bit to cover up part of three photos with the focal photo!  I don't think I've ever done that before.  I like the way it turned out though.

Fiskateers Orange Blog Hop!

Welcome to the Fiskateers Orange Blog Hop!  If you came from Snippitysnaps's Scrapalicious World, you're in the right place!   To start at the beginning of the hop, click here:

In honor of our Orange Blog Hop, I wanted to make something that truly showcased my love of all things Fiskars.  Here's the card I made.

Do you recognize the Fiskars products?  I used 7 different Fiskars items on this card.  They include: a texture plate, orange ink, the sentiment stamp, a stamp block, a squeeze punch, a border punch, and my trimmer.  The card is based on a sketch by Valerie Salmon, a member of the Fiskars Design Team, so this card is Fiskars x 8!

I'd like to share how I made the background paper for the card.  I gathered white paper, a white crayon, orange ink, and a texture plate.

I put the paper over the texture plate and colored heavily with the crayon.  If you look carefully, you can see the pattern on the white paper.

Using a Tsukineko sponge dauber (I love these things!), I applied orange ink to the entire surface. 

Then I used a kleenex and rubbed.  The result was a very fun homemade patterned paper!

Time to hop along!  Your next stop is For the First Time.