Week in Review- A little bit of everything

Hello friends!

Well here it is, the crazy blog where "everything else" goes! lol. I had some other pictures I wanted to share, but on their own they weren't much. I also figured before we got snow DUMPED on us I should post the pictures of the last crazy snow we got on the 25th!

Ok well I hope you already ate or drank before you read this, if not you will be starving and thirsty by blogs end ;)

Visiting with Ricky's parents.....

We were actually supposed to see Ricky's parents over New Year's Eve weekend, but they ended up getting snowed in, in Colorado. So we got to see them over the weekend of the 21st.

I was excited to give Malina(Ricky's mom) the bracelet I made for her. 

 

This bracelet style is similar to my "Flying Gobstopper" style bracelet I offered in my Etsy shop awhile back. Incase you missed it, here is a picture. My friend Holly ended up snatching it up for one of her birthday presents. It was pretty sweet 'cause you can either wear it as a bracelet or asymmetrical necklace :D The wing dings, rubber o's and soldered rings with crystal dangles are all "floaters".

 Sweet idea eh? Yes, I know, I should make another. I need to add that to my "to-do" list.

 

This bracelet was called "Green Horizon". 

 

We ended up going to a few of our favorite local places including, Tea Drops in the Westport area of Kansas City. Here you can see Ricky, his mom and his dad working on a puzzle they had on one of the tables. 

 Here is the bubble tea I got. It was coconut, rose and green tea. YUMMY! So delicious!

 The morning that they left we went out for breakfast at another "down home" cooking style restaurant. They sold these KILLER cinnamon rolls! Above you can see Ricky's mom with our cinnamon roll.

 Mmmmm I totally took this picture to tease you. Doesn't it look YUMMY? Well it totally was just as delicious as it looks!

While the Knable family was in town we stopped over at Costco and picked up some groceries. Rick and Malina thought the dogs needed a dog bed too :) As you can see Leeloo is happily laying on top of me on the couch. I had to convince Kayla she wanted to lay on the bed. She kind of did. I guess the side was as good as I was going to get. I guess they are kinda sketchy about the cedar smell of the bed. I think it smells fantastic, but what do I know? Apparently I'm not a spoiled dog. *rolls eyes*

HOLY SNOW, BATMAN....

Can you believe this snow we got?! This was taken the morning after it finally stopped. This was just last week.

 Here is the side of the house. Crazy huh?!

 The front from the street.

 Some WICKED icicles. I knocked them down after photographing them. They could seriously impale someone. The dogs were happy to crunch on them so at least someone enjoyed them ;)

Yummy snacks....

So Ricky and I have discovered the joys of stove popped popcorn. Not only is it delicious, but it's low calorie and way better for you than microwave popcorn. Did you know that not only do microwaves heat up your food, but the COMPLETELY change their chemical make up too? Ewww...

So to enjoy this tasty snack of awesome and win  you will need the following ingredients:

Bragg's Liquid Aminos, Bragg's nutritional yeast, Bragg's sprinkle, sea salt, cayenne pepper, organic popcorn, and vegetable oil, oh and olive oil(not pictured). 

So here's the secret to awesome popcorn. We read this somewhere on the net, but since I can't remember where I will just have to tell you here.

So first you set your stove to 7 heat. For one serving of pop corn you need 2tbs popcorn and 2tbs oil. Don't freak out, you only get half of the oil in your popcorn. The other half of the oil kicks it on the lid and pan bottom ;) 

Ok so you heat your stove to 7 and put the oil in the pan with 1 kernel of popcorn. When that kernel pops you remove the pan from heat, add the rest of the kernels, cover the top with a lid and vent one side of it and shake back and forth across the stove burner until there are only 1 to 2 seconds inbetween popcorn pops. This will help you judge when the popcorn is done cooking. 

 Next you will need large bowls. What is the crappiest thing about getting popcorn out besides the fact that it tastes like styrofoam, the seasoning not being on ALL of it. So divide your freshly popped pop corn into 2 bowls. Do the next steps in both bowls.  Add a squeeze of Bragg's liquid aminos around the rim of the bowl, next a dash of sea salt, a few dashes of nutritional yeast, sprinkle, cayenne(if you like it hot, if not, omit), and a teeny mist of olive oil.

 Combine both bowls together and scrape the empty bowl with a rubber scraper to make sure you get all of your seasonings :D Enjoy! You will be totally addicted, promise. This recipe is only like 156 calories and 9 grams of fat(from the oil). 

Gluten free goodness....

This was my breakfast the other day! HOLY CRAP, was it good! Ricky breaded the potatoes with gluten free bread crumbs. They were corn based so they were super crusty! Yes, that IS a good thing! The rest is eggs with broccoli, onions, and feta! I love that my hubby cooks me delicious things to eat :D

Incase you missed it on Etsy....

 

"Double Love" Watermelon adjustable ring.

 

Love Daisy "Aster"  adjustable ring.

 "Hugs and Kisses" mixed-media earrings.

 

"Love You" mixed-media necklace.

Collaboration!...

Awhile back I asked a few people if they wanted to collaborate after the first of the year. One of the lovely people was Amy Freeland of Copper Diem! Here you can see the complete blog post and reveal!

I made the lampwork beads and she designed the necklace. We are going to be offering it up on Etsy and donating to a charity. I believe it will be going to My Mom Pattie, but I need to double check with Amy. You all should totally check out the shop! It is run by the very talented, Marsha Neal. She dedicated the shop to her mother and they have some amazing pieces to offer! Also be sure to check out Marsha's work! She makes GORGEOUS clay pieces among lots of other lovely things!

What to expect this week....

I have some SUPER sweet stuff in the kiln today! I can't wait to see how everything turned out! :D

I took some pictures for my Etsy listings for the week. I tried to take them outside, but the sun wasn't cooperating with me so I had to shoot them inside. I got some KILLER photos! So be on the look out for some new stuff.

I just got the proof for the "Jaw Breaker" hollow tutorial from The Flow magazine! It looks SOOOO AMAZING! I can't wait for you all to see it. They informed me that it may get in this month's magazine, but if this issue is too full it will go in the next. I am crossing my fingers that it gets in the most recent issue. I will totally keep you all posted!

Here is the bead in the tutorial incase you missed hearing about it. I LOVE making these style hollow beads. I just plain old LOVE working with cane glass period. You can make so many awesome things!

Well that wraps it up for now, but I'll see you soon!

Much love,

Genea

A little bit of Christmas Mayhem

Hello friends!

Are you staying sane in the last little bits of Christmas mayhem? We went out today to a few grocery stores for the last little bits of food needed to make some tasty hors dourves (or horsey doovers as my family calls them :D). We are making a yummy Reuben dip w/ rye chips, some dip with packet of organic dill packet w/Greek yogurt Terra sweets and beets, and some plain kettle chips, some pre-made hummus by Sabre, with lots of fresh cut veggies, and a large can of salted mixed nuts :D

Here is the dip recipe if you are interested! 

REUBEN DIP
8oz corned beef or pastrami chopped
1C sour kraut, rinsed, drained, chopped
1-8oz pkg cream cheese
2C shredded Swiss
1/2 C thousand island dressing

Mix together and serve warm with rye chips or other crackers or bread.

We are using Bolthouse thousand island dressing since it's gluten free so Ricky can partake in the dip. He can't eat the rye chips so we got him some yummy gf crackers :D

I can't believe tomorrow is actually Christmas Eve! Our family always celebrates then and Ricky's parents usually celebrate Christmas day. Ricky's dad is the head pastor at the Vineyard of the Rockies in Fort Collins, CO so on Christmas Eve after a day of services the family all goes to Macaroni grill. His parents sent us a gift card to out since we all won't be able to go together. 

We also got lots of awesome stuff from them in the mail. They always think of awesome gifts and presentation. I didn't photograph everything, but we did get this awesome MONEY TREE and tickets to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

I was excited to be a part of the Secret Santa exchange put on by Lillyella!  My secret santa was Macy J's and she had a special necklace put together for me by Junebell :)

My gift came wrapped in this lovely shimmery bag.

  

Here's my necklace! Isn't it lovely?! :) Thanks to Macy J's and Junebell!

It has been COLD, COLD, and COLD here in Kansas City! I have been such a slug lately. I has been hard to stay warm. I have been spending lots of time under my blanket on the couch with the dogs and my newest knit scarf :D

 

Knitting is like one of the BEST things ever since it your supplies are generally 1 pair of knitting needles and a ball of yarn. This is SUPER convenient for travel or for having a product of sitting on your couch. I productive persons dream, a project completed while sitting around doing "nothing" :D

Ricky and I also started another puzzle! I forgot that Amanda had given me this Alice in Wonderland puzzle awhile back. Winter is the perfect time to work on puzzles :D

 

Here is what the puzzle will look like when it's finished.

 Here is how far we have gotten so far ;) Still a ways to go. This baby is 1,000 pieces! That damn chair takes up like the WHOLE puzzle too! Ack!

Well that pretty much sums up what has been going on around here for the time being. It's been nice to have a little breather before the holidays :)

I hope you all have a Blessed Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

See you soon!

Much love,

Genea

Holiday Cheer- Puzzlemaking, cookie baking, snowflake crafting, soaptastic, holiday get-together GOOD TIMES!

Hello friends!

I have so many pictures to share with you :)  I attended many events recently and have just now gotten to edit them. 

So the night before Thanksgiving we pulled out our Christmas boxes to see what we had in the way of decorations. As I said usually we are gone over the holidays traveling with Ricky's family so it was nice to be at home this year. We don't have a ton of decorations, but we enjoyed stringing a few strands of lights on the front of the house. I love the glow of old skool Christmas lights. The new led ones are way too bright to give that cozy glow.

One of the first holiday events we did this year was based on a gift from Ricky's parents. This was such an amazing idea. I had wanted to blog about our progress, but it only took us like 2 days. So here is what our gift was. Each of us(his parents, his sister and her hubby and us) got the same puzzle on which to work. We received it just before Thanksgiving. Our mission was to work on our puzzle and take pictures of the progress and share them on Facebook since we aren't all in the same city to enjoy the holidays together.

 Here is what the puzzle looked like. It is by "Tooniverse" and it was called "All dogs must be on a leash". This zany cartoon puzzle had dogs running amok in the city.

 

Here you can see Ricky hard at work using his strategy of building the outside of the puzzle first. I always tease him because when he is totally into something he gets that crinkle on his face while he is concentrating :D

 

Can you sense the intensity? lol he was pretty into this puzzle :D He was being a puzzle hog at first and it was hard to work together.

Here is the outer edge of the puzzle and a few more pieces. After a little while we worked together. I separated the puzzle pieces into similar pictures for easy construction after sorting and he would describe to me the things that were on a piece he needed. This worked out pretty well.

 

Ok so they were right. It was pretty addictive....

Getting closer... Just a few more pieces.

 Finito! Ok so it was pretty fun. I was kinda ready to do another one after we finished this one. My mom always does puzzles in the winter too. It was really fun to do one in our home this year.

Now this next event is a MUST no matter if you are watching calories or not over the holiday season. Who doesn't participate in cookie baking?!

This year we tried a new recipe my sister found on Betty Crocker. These were called "Coconut-Butterscotch-Fudge cookies". You start by taking a base of sugar cookie mix and rolling the balls in coconut.

 

Next you bake until golden brown.

 Once they are a little bit cooled off from the oven you put on butterscotch drizzle and then top them with fudge. These are both ice cream topping thingies. They were pretty f*ing delicious! They pretty much tasted like an Almond Joy Twix. Yeah, I know! Mmmmmm!

 Next we got the Hershey's kisses ready for Peanut Butter Blossoms. These have been one of my favorite cookies to make over the years next to frosted sugar cookies :D

 

Mom and dad's dog, Lucy was eager to get her nose into the food while we were baking. Can you hear her thoughts? "Drop it, drop it, DROP IT!"

 Peanut butter containers are always a pain to clean out so we gave the jar to Lucy to get it clean. As you know dogs are CUCKOO for peanut butter!

 

I love putting the kisses in the cookies when the come out from the oven. Too bad mom and Nina were faster than me! While I was busy documenting they pressed all of the chocolate into the tops of the cookies.

 What is Christmas without making Mexican Wedding Cakes? I dunno, but we have made them every year for forever and so have most of the people we know :) Ok so this wasn't the exact recipe we made, but it's the first one that came up in Google :) 

 Mom said I should take a picture of her and Nina so here it is. The bakers in the family :)

What is this season without some simple decor, right? Why not make some paper snowflakes? My friend Ronnie and I had both posted this so we thought it would be fun to get together and make handmade paper crafts :D

Now whilst in the holiday spirit, you know one can't go to a snowy craft making session without some snowy jewelry, right? :D

 I wore my snowflake necklace Melissa made me last year. She was inspired to make a snowflake designed pendant with one of my etched glass lentils. I am not sure if she is teaching this class at the store this year or not?

 

She also made me this prettiful bracelet design that she created including one of her lampwork starflake beads :D

I also thought to bring over my peppermint candy cane from Hammond's that I purchased at our local grocery store. It reminds me of candy canes I used to get back in the day when I was a child. At my dad's work's Christmast party they would order candy canes from a local shop in my home town of Racine Wisconsin. They were pretty sweet because both ends were angle cut. 

 While living in Colorado I had this debate with Ricky's dad the candy cane connoisseur. He told me that these style candy canes didn't exist! I knew he was wrong so I made it my mission to find them. When I had asked mom about them she had told me that it was from our local town. The shop had long since closed down because the man that had owned the shop had died and his kids didn't want to continue the family business(wtf?! Why do people always do this with the good stuff?!!)

Shortly after I found these candy canes in our local grocery store and HAD to prove myself right to Ricky's dad! :D

So before getting started on our snowflake making, Ronnie and I separated his snowflakes from Christmas' past. 

 

I loved them all, but I was impressed by Martin's snowflake on the right. He isn't really an artistic person by nature so I was impressed with his design :)

 

Aren't they GORGEOUS? Ronnie is one of the most artistically talented people I know, so I was honored to share this fun pastime of snowflake making with him :)

 

Look he even made teeny snowflakes with the left over skinny rectangle of paper scrap from making the larger ones.

While we were creating snowflakes, Bronx, their newest addition snuggled in his blanket while we were busily cutting and listening to Christmas music :D

Yeah, he's SOOOO cute, isn't he?!

 

He was pretty cold so he got into this cute little ball :D

Here was Ronnie's first snowflake. Pretty huh?

 Here was mine. Ok so I'm not the expert, but I was happy with it :) After you cut them out you put them inbetween 2 pieces of wax paper and iron them. This keeps them flat and makes them a bit sturdy.

"Ronnie, show me your pretty snowflake."See!  I told you he was really creative! Look how pretty his snowflakes are. He even made pretty edges. Mine kind of all ended up round.

 

We continued until we had a pretty good stack of snowflakes. Ronnie let me keep his since he had a lot from the other years he had been making them :D 

Here you can see them in action  on my front door :D

Our next event was actually at Indigo Wild for their friends and family invite only night, but I didn't get a chance to click some pictures :( I saw someone there clicking photos so I bet at some point they will end up on their facebook page so if you are interested keep checking back there.  There were lots of amazing people, awesome food and of course my very FAVORITE all natural, local products including their Zum Bars!

So now I can finally show you what Santa(me  :D) made for them for Christmas! Before I show you what they got, let me catch you up on how I came to know them.

My romance for their amazing products took place after purchasing a Zum Bar from our local grocery store. I do believe that Zum Bars are the "gateway product" ;)

I was inspired by the artistic nature of their soaps. On one rainy afternoon I had the incredible idea to translate their products into glass! My very first design I made was for their owner, Emily Voth.

Here you can see their swirly soaps made into glass along with some Hilltribe silver. Their company is one of the best I have ever encountered! Their products are top notch, their people are incredible, and they run an amazing business! Did I mention they were also eco and awesomely silly? I mean who else can get away with saying things like "Did you make Santa's "A list" or "A-hole list?", stop production to sit down to lunch together, and bring their dogs to work?!  LOL I just LOVE everything about them! This must be why they inspire me ALL of the time!

Ok so onto their gifts....

 Here were the gifts I made for Co-Owner, Betsy Medina. She is such an incredible person for so many reasons! She survived breast cancer so to honor her journey and raise awareness they created the Besty Bar, which is lavender and lemon scented. Proceeds from each purchase are donated to their favorite organization, Turning Point: The Center for Hope and Healing.

Here is the front side of the necklace. It includes  upcycled paper from their catalog made into a soldered charm, a glass Betsy Bar, some Swarovski crystal, a silver swirl and a pink breast cancer ribbon.

 Here is the back side of the pendant. The new catalogs have these amazing black and white drawings in them. One one of their catalog pages it says "Boobs,Bitches, and Babes". I cut the "OO" out of the "boobs" part to go along with the "breast" theme :D

 Here is one of the Zum Bar keychains I made for Emily. It is their Sandalwood Citrus bar with a shrinky dink dangle.

 Here are the Zum Bar wine charms I made featuring their popular scents: Lemongrass, Patchouli, Lavender- Mint, and my very favorite, Frankincense and Myrrh.

Our last event for the week was Ronnie and Martin's holiday get-together at Martin's house. Martin has a gorgeous older home in downtown Kansas City. It is ALWAYS immaculate and fancily decorated!

 

The front of the house was all decorated in pretty white lights.

 In the dining room a palm was decorated with silver glass ornaments and a red up-light. The glow was really pretty. My non-flash picture didn't turn out so here you can see it with the flash on.

 

Here was the dining room table next to the palm.

 In the front room a large Christmas Tree was decorated.

and the stockings were hung with care :)

I hope you are enjoying the holiday season as much as we are.

Happiest Holidays to all!

Much love,

Genea