Grandma's Chocolate Peanut Butter Balls

Every year my grandma would make a bunch of yummy treats.  Now that her health isn't what it was, she rarely makes them any more, so I asked her if I could copy her recipes.  One of my favorites are her peanut butter balls.  Since I made a batch this year, I thought I would share it with you.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Balls

• 2 cups powdered sugar
• 1 3/4 cups finely crushed graham crackers
• 1 1/2 cups creamy peanut butter
• 2 sticks melted butter
• 12 oz package of chocolate chips

Mix all ingredients, except chocolate, in a mixer.

Form into small balls and chill in a fridge for an hour.

Melt chocolate chips.  Dip balls and place on waxed paper.

Keep chilled until served.

I also made two different fudges (milk chocolate and butterscotch) using the recipe on the back of the Kraft Marshmallow creme jar and some oreo truffles using the recipe from here.  For the truffles, I also made some adding some broken candy canes inside and on top to keep track of which ones they were.

Merry Christmas!

2 Little Hooligans Casserole Carrier

Another one of my homemade gifts that I made are casserole carriers.  I made four.  I used the tutorial from 2 Little Hooligans and I did the same changes as suggested by Homemade by Jill.  They were pretty easy  and speedy to put together or at least they would have been fast if I wasn't making four at once.  Another change I made was that I only put Velcro on the flaps that would be on top so that it would have more flexibility for different sized dishes.  I jostled the carrier with a dish in it to make sure it would hold and it did.

I'm really glad I decided to use the cotton webbing.  I think it really helps to break up the pattern.

Now just two more gifts to sew.  I hope I can make it!

Gingercake's Play Mat/ Messenger Bag

This year for Christmas, I'm making most of the gifts.  One of the first ones I got done were for my two nephews.  I wanted a gift that would be fun and practical. I made them a fun car play mat that folds into a messenger bag.  I used the tutorial from Gingercake.

For the main fabric and what would be the roads, used some discarded jeans from my large jean supply.  I had a couple scraps I wanted to use for the "city blocks" from Monaluna's Taali collection.  

I also purchased two more prints to give it more variety and I didn't have enough of the other two.  I found a really cute collection at Hancock Fabrics with cats, dogs and various forms of transportation called M'Liss Pets.  I really wanted to get a couple yards of this one for the girls.

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I learned that I do not like fussy cutting.  It feels too wasteful for me and I can never decide the best place to cut.  Other than that, it was really fast and easy.   I forgot to take a picture of the first one I finished till the morning after I wrapped it, so oh well on that one.

I used some old jeans for the main fabric/streets and an old belt for the handles.  I also used regular snaps instead of magnetic snaps, because I didn't have any.

In the tutorial, she suggested hand sewing the side panels by hand, but my hand sewing is atrocious so I sewing it with my sewing machine with a bobbin of clear thread that would be on the play side.

I love how they turned out.  I hope my nephews get a lot of use out of them!

Baby Bibs a Plenty.

Last month, I was approached by one of my husband's coworkers to make some bibs for her to send to a relative in Australia, who was having a baby boy.  I finally finished them last week and got around to blogging about them.  I found this amazing tutorial and used that as my base.  I made one to see if my client liked it, which she did, but she also wanted it embellished.  With my sewing machine under the weather, I couldn't embroider anything, so I went to pinterest (as always) to get some inspiration.  There were two that I really liked (here and here).

On the monster one, I put the teeth on the bottom edge of the back so when it is folded up into a crumb catcher, the monster would have a cute little mouth.  The tie one I ended up having to create my own template, but that wasn't very hard.  On the other four I used various sizes of vintage ric rac that my sister gave me.  I had a really hard time finding boyish fat quarters where I looked in town, but I'm happy with how they turned out anyways.

Sugar Baby: Pastry Cream and Fruity Bavarian Cream

The Bavarian cream recipe called for pastry cream and called for pastry cream, so we did a two for one, especially since she said the pastry cream is only good for two days in the fridge.

The pastry cream seemed really easy and we didn't have any problems.  We chilled it overnight before making the Bavarian cream and tasted what was left on the spoon.  Pretty tasty.  The next day we pureed some blueberries and made up the fruity Bavarian cream.  It also was super easy.

The next day after the girls went to bed, we remembered we were going to have it for dessert with the girls.  We decided to just eat it ourselves since the pastry cream recipe said it was only good for two days in the fridge.

It looked lovely and the taste was okay.  The texture bothered me the most.  I think a different fruit probably would have been better.  Overall, I thought it was alright and we might try it again with a different fruit, but probably not.

Waves and Whales Dress

When I saw that Project Run and Play was getting ready to hold auditions, I knew I had to come up with something for it, since I haven't sewn anything but pajamas in recent history and it is a dream of mine to compete on it.  So many ideas went through my mind.  I considered dress up dresses of all kinds including using a scalloped vintage apron pattern as part of the skirt.  

Then I decided to go with something more everyday wearable.  My sister gave me a little bit of vintage fabric for my birthday.  I thought it might be enough for a skirt and I remembered Laurel's outfit she wore for her party.  It was an overall dress with a long sleeve shirt and leggings, super cute!  That was just the right thing.   First, I was going to use an overall pattern and turn it into a dress, but I didn't quite like how I pictured it would turn out.  So next I remembered one of my Ottobre Designs had what I thought were overalls, but they were pants with suspenders.  I almost started with that and worked it into a jumper, but again it wasn't quite right.  So I decided to see what I could find on pinterest (nothing) and then google images.  Finally, I found the perfect pattern and it was a free tutorial!

It was Untrendy Life's Stitch In Color Summer Dress!  I paired a fun whale fabric with turquoise.  Instead of binding, I used orange jumbo ric rac.  Her tutorial was really easy to follow, except I was a little confused on what size to cut the front, so it is fairly narrow.  I might seam rip it and redo it later, but knowing me, probably not.

For the shirt underneath, I used Violette Field Threads' pattern Elise Shirt.  It is a great pattern, because it is super simple and has so many options.  I was going to make leggings to and even cut some out, but when I tried the shirt on Eleanor, I decided that more color would be too much.

She was startled by the popcorn popper being turned on.

Over all, I love how this outfit turned out and Eleanor does too.  She calls it her princess dress.