Glazed Flower Rolls

I enjoy making bread from scratch, but tend to make the same favorites over and over. That's not an issue; I've made enough bread in my life to have a half-dozen tried and true recipes that I love and I don't have too much incentive to mess with perfection. 

That said, it is fun to use the same bread dough to create different shapes. This week, I challenged myself to come up with a new shape using the same dough as Rose Rolls. I ended up with these glazed flower rolls. 

To make them, I followed the recipe for Rose Rolls until the shaping step. Instead of making coils, I made rounds. Then I used kitchen shears to snip straight down six times on each roll, making the cuts an equal distance apart to form the petals. I gently pushed the petals, then rolled a small ball of dough to place in the center. 

This is how the rolls looked after baking:

When they were completely cool, I put the rolls on a wire rack, made a simple powdered sugar glaze, added food color, then drizzled it over the rolls. 

I am kicking myself for not adding LorAnn flavor extracts (affiliate link here and below) to the glazes. I have 6 or 7 flavors and they are awesome. I particularly love the raspberry and lemon extracts, which would be perfect for the red and yellow rolls. I'm thinking grape for the purple, strawberry kiwi for the pink, and orange cream for the orange. Yum! 

In searching for the LorAnn affiliate link, I discovered that LorAnn sells 'You Choose' packs ranging in size from 2 dram bottles to 100 dram bottles! While I don't think I can justify getting 100 bottles (even though they're much cheaper in larger quantities), I will be putting one of the smaller 'You Choose' packs on my Christmas wishlist for sure. I think it will be a lot of fun to see what flavors someone would pick for me (hint: not banana). There are so many things you can flavor with these oils: water (no calories, lots of flavor!), lollipops and other hard candies, frostings, and baked goods. 

You can see a list of all the flavors in the third photos for the 100 dram bottles listing. Tell me in the comments what flavors you've used or which you'd most like to try!

Diamond Art Joy Ornament

This time last year, I was frantically designing Diamond Art holiday crafts. I was contracted to make fifteen projects that would appear in Leisure Arts' Sparkle Holiday book, along with four projects for their Paper Crafting book. I had a ridiculously short turn-around time and I did pretty much nothing except Diamond Art for two weeks in November. It was awesome and I loved the whole experience. Plus, I am really proud of what I designed. 

Leisure Arts bought my actual projects from me. So when my friends at Creative Crafts invited me to participate in the 2020 Christmas Edition, I decided to make a Diamond Art ornament that I can keep and display. I actually like it better than the glass ornament I made for the book. :)

Diamond Art Joy Ornament

Materials:

• plain glass ornament
• white feathers
• white glitter
• letter stickers
• Sharpies (green, red)
• Diamond Art liquid adhesive
• Diamond Art gems (red and green)
• red ric rac

Steps:

Remove the top from the ornament and fill it with glitter and feathers. Replace the top. 

Use Sharpies to color in the letters JOY while the stickers are still on the sticker sheet. Then, adhere the letters to the ornament. 

Use a small paintbrush to spread the adhesive onto the letter stickers, trying not to get any on the ornament itself. Add tiny dots of adhesive around the edge of the ornament top. Wait 15 minutes, or until the adhesive becomes clear. 

Time for dotting! Add red dots to the J and the Y and green dots to the O and around the top. Add a loop of ric rac and your ornament is ready to display!

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If you're looking for more ideas for holiday dotting, I highly recommend Leisure Arts' Sparkle Holiday book. It makes a great gift, too. Here are some of my favorite projects I designed for the book (the ones I most wish I still had and could display in our house):

  

  

  

For even more fun Christmas crafting ideas, check out these ideas!

Evacucation

I shared our August evacuation story from the LNU Lightning Complex fire after we returned home. This is the scrapbook version. 

Evacucation (affiliate link)

Actually, this is Part 1 of the scrapbook version. This tells the story of the evacuation-turned-vacation ("evacucation") and what a great time we had with the friends who took us in. I'm planning a second layout that focuses on the actual fire and how close it got to our house. 

I made this layout for the Pensieve: Memories in Review challenge at Victoria Marie Designs. The challenge was to preserve a memory in detail. Most of my layouts do that, as I'm a big fan of using lots of photos and plenty of journaling, but I made this one specifically to meet the challenge. I tried to show (through pictures) and tell (through words) about the emotions as well as the facts. I'm very happy with the finished page. 

Dimensional Pumpkin Thanksgiving Card

Thanksgiving is going to look very different for a lot of people this year. So much has changed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With so many of those changes being negative, I think it's particularly important to focus on the good things in our lives whenever we can. It can be hard to remember at times, but I try my best to be thankful for everything I have and everyone I love.

I made the orange and green papers I used for the pumpkin using this crayon melt technique. In fact, the green pumpkin stem came from the scraps I saved after making my iguana! If you don't want to do crayon melts, then paint the paper or just use colored cardstock. (But crayon melts is the most fun.)

 

Dimensional Pumpkin Thanksgiving Card

Materials:

• cardstock (brown, blue, white)
• papers colored with melted crayon or paint (orange, green)
• scissors
• pen
• foam dots
• craft glue

Steps: 

Cut a card base from brown paper. Use the scraps to make the piece for the ground and the mat for the sentiment. 

Cut a piece of blue paper just smaller than the card front. Cut a rectangle just smaller than the mat for the sentiment. 

To make the pumpkin, you are going to cut three pieces from the orange-colored paper. The first is a pumpkin that is slightly smaller than the width of the card base. The second piece should be the same height, but narrower on each side to mimic the ribs of a pumpkin. The third piece is leaf-shaped and will be in the foreground. Cut a stem from the green-colored paper. 

Glue the blue card front to the card base, then glue the brown ground piece on top of that. 

Write THANKFUL on the blue rectangle, then glue it to the brown mat. Use foam dots to adhere the sentiment to the top of the card. 

Glue the largest pumpkin piece and the stem to the card front. Use foam dots to adhere the second pumpkin piece to the first, then more foam dots to connect the third pumpkin piece to the second. 

Add a message of gratitude inside and your card is ready to send.

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I did a search for THANKFUL on Amazon and found a lot of cool stuff. My favorite find is this shirt, which is so simple and so pretty. I love that it isn't seasonal, just like being thankful is not only for November. It comes in a handful of colors, but I think I like this dark grey the best. 

Panama Canal 2017

Once again, I get to scratch a layout off the top of the need-to-scrap list! With this page about our 2017 cruise through the Panama Canal complete, the oldest story not yet told is from our trip to Ohio in summer of 2018. It's crazy to think that I might actually get caught up with vacation photos before the next time we're able to travel! 

Panama Canal 2017 (affiliate link)

My goal with this page was to include as many photos as possible (39!) and still have space for a lot of journaling. Everything else about the page was inspired by the "Defense of the Dark Arts" challenge during the Yer a Wizard Online Virtual Crop. The layout had to feature dark-colored embellishments, background, and title. I don't normally use a lot of dark elements, so this was definitely a challenge. I don't love how it turned out, but it's fine. I'm definitely glad to have it in the album.