Quilter's Fun Run

Last weekend I went on a Quilter's Fun Run with a couple of friends. There were ten shops on the Fun Run. At your first shop you received your passport. At each store you got your passport stamped, a pattern for a quilt block, an entry for a door prize, and an entry to win your purchase. At the final store you received two extra quilt block patterns plus your packet of fabric for making the 12 blocks. 

For the most part the stores were in surrounding communitys with three stores being in town. We started at the store that was farthest away and worked our way around till we got back to the city.

It was a fun day. We even visited a couple local roadside attractions along the way. The Vegreville giant Pysanka, Ukrainian Easter egg. 

We also saw the giant Ukrainian sausage in the town of Mundare.

We made it to seven quilt shops on Saturday. Bought a lot of quilting fabric and had a great day. Over the last week I made it to the last three stores so now I have all my patterns and fabric.

The fabric is Stonehenge by Northcott.

So now there is quilt contest in April where you can enter your creation. It must include the 12 patterns made with the fabric provided. After that you can add anything you want to it. Should be interesting to see how different everyone's designs turn out.

Halloween Wreath

I made a Halloween wreath for our front door. I got the styrofoam ring from Michael's. The boas are from the dollar store, I used six of them. They were a little bit on the thin side. The Trick or Treat sign is also from the dollar store.

I wrapped the boas around the ring and tacked the ends in place with straight pins. Then I tied the sign on with a ribbon. Quick and easy.

Mostly Homemade Mondays

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Chocolate Mousse

One of our family favourites is Chocolate Mousse. Its really easy to make and is extremely delicious. 

200g of Milk Chocolate

6 egg yolks

500g of whipping cream.

First you whip the cream with an electric mixer until stiff.

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Next you want to separate your eggs and have the yolks ready to go

Melt your chocolate in a double boiler. I just use my small pot over a larger pot of boiling water, stirring the chocolate constantly. My preference is Cadburys milk chocolate even better if its imported from England.

Once the chocolate is melted remove from the double boiler and add egg yolks, quickly stir them in before they set.

Then add the chocolate egg mixture to your whipping cream.

Fold it in with a spatula.

Then pour your mixture into bowls or glasses for serving. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate.

Meringues

We had a sewing day on the weekend so I decided to make Meringues and homemade strawberry "soft serve" ice cream to take. My one friend had a lot of food allergies and as the two items only have three ingredients total its was a good choice.

For the meringues all you need are 6 egg whites and 1 1/2 cups of sugar. Pre-heat the oven to 230 F. Beat the egg whites till stiff. Then gradually add the sugar till its all mixed in.

I placed aluminium foil shiny side down on my cookie sheets. Spoon about two big spoonfuls of meringue for each one

Then bake for about an hour and a half. Be sure to keep an eye on them to make sure they don't over cook. You want them to brown just slightly.

For the soft sever I just put frozen strawberries through my Yonana machine, it can also be done in the blender or food processor. 

Backyard

Our backyard is finally complete.The grass is in. All the planters are built and filled with dirt. We're all ready for spring planting.

Fountain

I put a fountain in the backyard. My friend had an awesome solar pump for her fountain so I decided to get one for mine. It keeps the fountain running only when the sun hits it. It doesn't store energy which is great because then its not running all night long. Its actually a solar pond pump if your looking for one, I got mine off of eBay. My husband didn't care for the terra cotta colour of the fountain when we bought it but it ended up matching the colour of the planters perfectly so it works really well in the yard.

Get Away

  We needed a break from all the work around the house so we decided to head to the mountains for the weekend. We went to Canmore and Banff, Alberta. The weather was so beautiful for this time of year, especially for the mountains. We live in such a beautiful part of the world.

This is the view from our hotel room.

Main street Banff

Main street Banff

Banff Springs Hotel

Banff Hot Springs.

Gibbons Garage Sale

A couple of weeks ago one of our neighbours told us about a small town nearby where the whole town puts on a huge garage sale once a year. I checked it out online and found out it was this weekend so we went and checked it out.

Needless to say it was huge. The streets were packed with people. Lots of cool things to see.

We only found a few things we wanted to buy but it was fun to walk around the whole town and check out all the stuff. We bought two more bikes. That's it no more bikes after this. We just missed getting my Mom a sweet cruiser it sold just before we walked up. Oh well. Also got a brad nailer and an old brownie style camera.

Planters

I wanted to do a lot of container gardening in my backyard so we decided to build a whole bunch of planters  to grow the veggies in. We got a lot of reclaimed wood from my husbands workplace to make them out of. Mostly crates and a few pallets. Crates are much easier to work with and take apart than pallets are.

It was a lot of work to disassemble them all.

We decided to invest in a planer since we plan on using a lot of reclaimed wood for many projects around the house.

It just gets the wood all to the same thickness and a nice smooth surface to start a project with.

Once the wood was planed it was all cut to size for the vertical planks for the planters.

Then they were all stained.

They were then all lined up and screwed to a frame from the inside so all the screws wouldn't be visible from the outside

We made the mistake with the first planter of not really thinking about how we were going to join all the sides together. On the other planters we inset the frame 3/4 inch so the panels would join up overlapping the frame so you couldn't see it. The first planter we made the length from the stairs to the outer edge of the deck. Its huge.

We just used full length boards for the back sides of the planters since no one would ever see it. Much easier and faster than all the short planks.

Here's the first planter completed and filled with dirt. We have the slight problem than our whole backyard is on a slight incline. We didn't account for that with the first planter so there was a lot of digging down into the dirt to level it out.

On the second planter that went up against the garage we took that into account and made the back panel shorter than the front panel and put a slant on the bottom of the side panels.

So far we've got four built and one left to go off the left end of the deck. Grass is coming today so it'll finally start looking nearly complete.

For this project the wood was all free. The only cost was the screws and the stain.