Fall!

Fall is one of my favorite seasons by FAR! I just love it! The colors, the leaves, the cold breeze. The decorations. And I thought, I could make my own wreath. So after a shopping trip to Michaels, I picked up a wreath made out of faux branches and red and orange berries. 

I wove the berries into the branches and used hot glue here and there to make sure it stayed. 

It worked great! I love the fall colors on our yellow couch. 

And it looks even better against our red front door!

 I also decided our house could use numbers (since we don't have any). So I printed up some bold numbers on an orange and gray chevron background and put the paper in picture frames from Ikea. I hot glued ribbon to the frames to hang them up together. The roomies didn't like the festive colors so I also tried out red (matched the door, went with fall, Christmas, Valentine's day, 4th of July, basically all the holidays) and a mismatch of frames.

We ended up going with red in all black frames. The ribbon didn't last outside for long, so we ended up propping the frames up on the front steps, which worked fine until it rained. And then...well it was strange. The color behind the numbers dripped and then disappeared but the black numbers are still black numbers. I don't know. Either way I am STILL looking for a good solution to our house number problem.

I also decided to make some fun fall treats: Pumpkin truffles! They have nothing to do with pumpkin other than they are orange. But so cute and so tasty. I made regular Oreo Truffles (like the footballs from the last Superbowl Party) but I  used the vanilla Oreos and added orange food coloring to them and dipped them in Orange dipping chocolate. I found green licorice and cut those in half to use them for stems. I wish you could see the orange inside. I had wanted to use limited edition candy corn Oreos, but couldn't find any.

 I'm clearly still working on dipping the chocolate, but they turned out fine. I also made pumpkin muffins and wanted to make a cream cheese icing (and dye it orange) for the tops so they would also look like pumpkins. But I didn't have time. You'll soon learn that I love theme partys. It's sort of an obsession. And oreo truffles and nutella stuffed sugar cookies. I pretty much make them for every type of party and change the color or shape. Thankfully they are always a crowd favorite, so this 2 trick pony doesn't feel bad about it.

Fall also meant trips to Harper's Ferry to Hike with my newly married bestie and her hubby and kz and an annual trip to Summer's Corn Maze with some of my favorite college girls.

Newly married bliss. 

 

I'd say it was another successful fall. Lots of baking and crafting and mazing and hiking. Plus some DELICIOUS crock pot recipes. Not to mention...Frankenstorm...my next post...

How does she do it?

So everyone seemed to love the Flat Iron Case and Cosmetic Bag Christmas Gifts.

Since then I've even had requests for more! So I thought I'd post some photos of what I did, so that I don't forget if I need to make them again!

This one was for my momma.

Supplies are pretty simple. Fabric, lining, rotary cutter, thread, and fabric. 

And my machine of course.

Flat Iron Case

Lay the fabric right sides together on top of the lining. I think I used pieces that were 17" x 15", but it would totally depend on the size of your curling iron/flat iron. 

I pinned it all the way around. And then you sew it together, leaving an opening large enough to flip it inside out. 

 Trim the edges so it's nice and smooth. 

Fold the bottom third up and pin it in place. Sew from the base of one fold all the way around to the next. 

 At this point, I added the ribbon and sew over that so it's attached. 

And there you go. You have a flat iron case with a ribbon to tie it. 

It's the perfect size for my curling iron. 

I can put it in while it's still hot. 

And fold it up so it's ready to go. 

Useful and adorable. 

The matching Cosmetic Bag

Start with fabric and fusible lining (to make it a little bit more stiff)

Iron the lining to the fabric.

Sew the right sides together with the zipper inside. Do the same thing to the other side of the zipper. 

Sew from one end of the zipper to the other. 

Trim and finish the edges. I used a zigzag stitch since I don't own a serger...yet. 

Turn it inside out and there you have it. A flat iron case and matching cosmetic bag. 

That all your friends are sure to love. 

This is the fabric I got for B...I hope she likes it...

Brunch

Brunch seems to be the thing to do in D.C. The perfect opportunity to eat breakfast at a more reasonable time. I'd recently discovered a couple of recipes but they aren't the kind of thing you make for yourself. I mean, do I really want 24 muffins or 8 scones just lying around? No, I don't. Because I would eat them. All of them. And that's probably not so great. So making them for other people is the PERFECT solution.

What did I make, you ask? Well, thanks to pinterest I discovered two recipes that looked beyond amazing. Honeyed Grapefruit Oat Scones and Earl Grey Poppy Seed Muffins.

The Earl Grey Poppy Seed Muffins were super easy and perfectly delicious. 

First, I heated up some milk, it was almost boiling, but not quite. You don't want it to curdle.  

For the tea, I used double bergamot earl grey. It has a stronger flavor, so I think it made the earl grey more pronounced. And since I like tea, that's a good thing. It's supposed to be better if you can use fancy loose leaf stuff, but this is what I had. 

So I just steeped the tea bags while the milk cooled.  

Then I mixed all my dry ingredients together. 

The result is now a large supply of poppy seeds on hand. So I have a feeling these muffins might be making another appearance rather soon. 

I cut up all the butter and put it in my cute little dish to heat it up. 

Got the eggs all ready. I love owning little clear dishes to put my ingredients in. It makes me feel like I'm on a cooking show. 

You can see the milk really changed color. I think I left the tea bags in about 10 minutes. Shorter would mean less of a earl grey flavor, but as we've discovered, I love tea. So 10 minutes it is. 

There is something disgusting about melted butter. And yet, it makes things taste SO GOOD. 

Then I poured the milk into the dry ingredients. Well, I also poured the butter and eggs in too. and mixed it all together. 

The result: DELICIOUS BATTER. Seriously, so good. I could have eaten just the batter. But I tried not to, raw eggs and all. 

I bought cute little blue cupcake wrappers. It matched the poppy seeds soo....

It only made 12 muffins. There was some batter left, so I think I could have made a couple mini ones too. I also used self rising flour, so I think If i had let it sit a little longer, I could have turned it into 18 cupcakes that were a little more airy. 

Then I put them in the oven. 

For 25 minutes. 

And waited. 

Then I took them out and let them cool for a bit on a wire rack. These babies really rose. I think I could have put less batter in each one. Next time that's probably what I'll do. I didn't realize how much they would rise. 

But seriously, how cute are they?

Then I melted down a little bit of orange marmalade and glazed the top. 

It added the perfect amount of sweetness. 

I couldn't help myself. 

So good!

Then I made the scones. I personally don't like warm fruit, so if I were making an entire batch just for me, I would probably leave the grapefruit out, maybe add some of the juice, but I'd rather eat a scone and a grapefruit separately.

Here's the dough pre-oven. 

And I totally forgot to take pictures of the scones after they came out. But they were tasty. So tasty that there is now nothing left of them. But I do have 2 new brunch staples. That I can confidently bring over to someone's house!