September 2007 WhatTheCraft Forum Contest

Check out the awesome entries for this month’s contest!

WhatTheCraft.com Forum members were asked to created something inspired by vintage fashion, and the entires represented a wide range from Victorian corsets, to flapper dresses, to the bold patterns and colors of the 80′s!

Voting for the contest ends October 3rd, so head on over to the forums to cast your vote for your favorite vintage-inspired creation!

October’s contest theme is DiY Halloween Costumes, so if you’re crafting a kickass homemade or reconstructed costume, join the forums and enter!

Smoothie 101

Good morning, class. Today we will discuss the proper elements to crafting the perfect smoothie. For today’s lecture, you will need:

a blender
an array of fresh and frozen fruit
fruit nectar or juice
banana (optional)
yogurt (optional)
honey (optional)
lemon (optional)

Step 1. Place your array of fruit in the blender. (1 cup of fruit per person)

Step 2. Add fruit nectar or juice. (approx. 1/2 cup per person)

Step 3. Add banana, fresh lemon juice, or yogurt, if desired.

Step 4. Blend. It usually helps to use the “Pulse” button a few times to chop everything up a bit, then move onto the “Puree” or “Smoothie” settings. You’ll want to continue blending until there are no large chunks visible, and the smoothie has a consistent color. You might have to stir it with a spoon between blendings.

Step 5. Taste the brilliant concoction and add honey to sweeten, if desired.

Step 6. Pour into a glass, add a spoon or a straw, and drink! Beware the brain freeze!
The smoothie pictured above and to the right had the following ingredients:
6 frozen strawberries
3/4 cup frozen pineapple
1/2 cup frozen mango
3/4 cup peach nectar
1/3 cup vanilla yogurt

Honestly, all of the measurements are approximate. But if you follow these rules of tongue (ha!), you won’t need to measure either. Once you’ve got the basics down, you can mess with the recipe all you want and get delicious results pretty much every time.

Smoothie Rules from a seasoned smoothologist:

FRUIT
The trick to a thick, cold smoothie is frozen fruit. I’ve seen smoothie places use ice, and I can tell you that unless you’ve got a Super IceBlaster 5000 blender, you’re not going to get the same results. Any blender I’ve ever used just can’t crush the ice the way a restaurant grade blender can. You get big chunks of ice and a watery smoothie, and it’s just not very tasty.
If you want to do a mix of fresh and frozen fruit, stick with a tried and true basic for the frozen team: frozen strawberries. A handful of those will give you enough texture to balance out most fresh fruit.
That being said, there are some fruits that I recommend only using frozen: watermelon (fresh is too watery) and pineapple (fresh is too stringy). There may be others, so if you find one that doesn’t work, try freezing it first.

Here are my tested and approved smoothie fruits:
strawberries
blueberries
peaches and nectarines
watermelon (frozen)
kiwi
mango
papaya
pineapple (frozen)
mandarin oranges (frozen)
pears
raspberries
cantaloupe and honeydew (and pretty much any melon)
bananas*

Some fruits I’ve tested and do NOT recommend:
grapes (the skin just doesn’t work well with the blender)
apples (not the right texture)

*Every smoothie place always puts bananas in their smoothies! That’s fine, but I find that bananas generally overpower the homemade smoothies, so I usually leave it out. I still throw one in sometimes, but there’s no rule that says a smoothie must contain bananas! Mix it up!

JUICE
I generally stay away from the regular juice (welch’s, minute maid, etc.), because they don’t really taste like fruit, and that kind of defeats the purpose of a smoothie. I prefer fruit nectars, which are made from fruit purees.
I’ve used Jumex, Valle and Kern’s fruit nectar, and they’re all relatively the same, so I usually go with whatever is cheapest (which is usually Jumex). Jumex and Valle have a wider variety than Kern’s- strawberry, papaya, guava, tamarind, and on and on… all of them are really good. My favorites are peach, mango, guava, pineapple, tamarind and guanabana. You really can’t go wrong with the stuff. It’s also fantastic mixed with iced tea or lemonade.
If you don’t have nectar on hand, and you’re dying for a smoothie, the two best alternatives are orange juice or lemonade. You can use regular juice if that’s all you’ve got, but the nectar is really part of the key to a great smoothie.

YOGURT + extras
I prefer Stonyfield Farm’s fat free or low fat vanilla yogurt. I usually steer clear of anything marked “fat free” or “low fat”, or even “yogurt”, but this stuff is tasty. If you’re feeling extra sassy, try a flavored yogurt.
As far as sweetening, I find that with the nectar and most fruits, I don’t need to add any honey. I recommend adding the honey after the initial blending because 1. you’ll have a better idea of how much to add after you’ve tasted it first, and 2. honey + chunks of frozen fruit don’t mix. You’ll get a nice wad of congealed honey on the bottom of the blender.

Once you’ve got these down, go wild.  Throw in a spring of fresh mint, try vanilla ice cream or fruit sorbet instead of yogurt, pour in some coconut milk… you won’t know until you try!

That concludes our class for the day.   Test on Monday!

WhatTheCraft contour bust tutorial in action!

Check out the awesome top that Craftster user pennydreadful made using the contour bust tutorial at WhatTheCraft.com! She used two 97 cent leopard print bandannas and some t-shirt material for the bust, and inserted a zipper in the side for easy on-and-off!

Contour Bust Tutorial

Step 1

you need 4 pieces for this one.
the back, which is pretty much a standard tube top back.
the front is 3 pieces: 2 contoured bust pieces (they kind of look like sunglasses), and the bottom is like a tube top, but with the boobs cut out.

Read more

Bust’s Girl Wide Web

YIPPEE!!!! WhatTheCraft.com is in the “Top 10 Links” over at Bust’s GirlWideWeb!

 

body modification for pumpkins

I came across this post at Craftster a few years ago, and I’ve been dying to try it ever since. Now that I’ve got a garden, I can!
Unfortunately, having a garden does not necessarily mean you will grow things. In my case, my flowers did okay, but my vegetable garden was a big, fat failure. Of the dozen or so veggies I planted (corn, cauliflower, carrots, zuchini, watermelon, etc.), I got 3 pea pods and a handful of lettuce.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I noticed, not one, but TWO large pumpkins in my backyard! And then not one, but TWO birdhouse gourds! Hurrah!

I planted 2 kinds of pumpkins, Sweet Something-or-others meant for pie making, and Big Fatties (or something large sounding) for carving. I have no idea what kind I’ve got. They do look a little different, so I’m hoping I’ve got one of each and hopefully more on the way.

I’m definitely trying the pumpkin scarring technique on one of them. I’m really excited to try it. Compared to carving, it seems like this would open up a lot of possibilities as far as the amount of detail in the design.

I will be sure to post the results. It would have been cool to try it on the birdhouse gourds, too, but I picked them already. If I get anymore, I will definitely try it and see what happens!

mexican pizza for the soul

When I was in elementary school, there were 2 school lunch menus that made it a necessity to ditch the bagged lunch for a day. They were Taco Bar, and my personal favorite (and my brother’s)- Mexican Pizza. It came shaped like a hexagon, which has never really made sense to me. I have yet to see another hexagonal pizza… or another hexagonal food of any sort, for that matter. Anyway, it had ground beef, some sort of taco-ish sauce, cheddar cheese, beans (?), and maybe a few superfluous green peppers mixed into the beef so us picky children couldn’t see it. It was pure deliciousness.

I have attempted many times (as has my father), to replicate this delicacy. I think he came really close to getting it perfect, once. But my dad has a tendency to quit making a particular recipe once he’s perfected it. I don’t try that often to find that piece of Mexican Slice-of-Heaven on earth, but sometimes I muster the strength.

Here was tonight’s attempt:
I used ground turkey instead of beef, because I think it has a better texture (plus, I like to pretend I’m a health nut, it makes excuses for eating junk food come easier). The crust is a very decent frozen crust that always thaws out insanely fast. The sauce was Boboli that I Mexicanized by adding some spices and a lot of sauce packets from Taco Bell. I know, I know, but I ran out of chili powder.

Topped with a Mexican Blend cheese, jalapenos, tomato & onion and served with shredded lettuce and a dollop of sour cream.

You can, like any normal pizza, customize this “recipe”. Olives, bell peppers, chorizo, beans… I’ve used refried before, but I bet whole black beans would be awesome, too. Or a bean mix for vegetarians- kidney, black, chili? Yum. You can make your own dough, or use a pita or tortillas (taco bell style!).

Fast, easy, cheesy. The longest part is letting the pizza dough rise, and you can either skip that step, or go do something fun while it does it’s thing.

So, while it didn’t meet my very high standards of the Mexican Pizza ala Pinckney Elementary School cafeteria, it’s still yummy, and a good change of pace when you get sick of regular old Italian style ‘za.

Craft Swaps

A few years ago, I did a lot of craft swaps over at Craftster.org. It’s so much fun to make something tailored to someone else’s tastes. You wind up making things you probably wouldn’t have if not for the swap. These are some of the things I made for past swaps:

Now that I’m done with school, I’ve started doing swaps again. Right now I’m doing a Tim Burton swap and a Zombie swap, and I’m signed up for another Day of the Dead swap in a few weeks. Pictures from those coming soon.

embroidered wolf pouch

So here is the finished belt pouch I made for my brother. The front is the sigil and motto of house Stark from the Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin. We’re both fans of the books, and our last name is Wolf, so it seemed appropriate.

Here’s the back. I embroidered it with Chinese characters, which was a bit of a gamble, since I can’t read Chinese. I kept thinking of all of those people with kanji tattoos that are supposed to say “Faith” or “Strength”, but they really say “Dirty Whore”. My brother has a friend from Taiwan who happened to be at his “going away/birthday” party, and Evan (my bro) asked if he could read it. His response was, “It looks like a child’s handwriting, but I can read it.” It says Red Wolf, a nickname his friends gave him because of his Russian heritage.

I’m pretty pleased with how it came out, the shieldy party and the script could have been better, but they’ll suffice. I think it turned out excellent for my 3rd or so embroidery project. I haven’t actually ever done embroidery on a hoop, so we’ll see how that goes at some point.

Craftastic!

Welcome to the WhatTheCraft Blog, where I’ll be bloggity-blogging about crafts, sewing, cooking, and other diy endeavors.

My current project is an embroidered belt pouch for my brother’s birthday/going-away-to-China gift. I’m totally an amateur embroider-ist… I’ve done 2 or 3 other embroidery project before this one, and I’ve had zero instruction. So I only really use one stitch and they’re not that neat, but it’s turning out okay. I actually need to finish up tonight because I’m giving it to him tomorrow.

In addition to improving my needleworking skillz (cross stitch seems like it’d be fun to learn, also), I want to start doing glass and tile mosaics.

I did this one for a high school art class, and it was a lot of fun and looks rad. Her hair is blue and black glass, unfortuntely the blue doesn’t show up.

My plan is to do a huge mosaic mural on our fireplace. Right now it’s kind of a dingy brown brick, a little too traditional for me. But I definitely need to practice a little first. I think I’m going to do some framed pieces that can be hung on the wall, as well as some table tops. I want to do one with grapes for my boyfriend’s mom (her kitchen is all decorated with grape stuff) and a whooping crane for my mom.

So that’s it for now. I’ll post pictures of the embroidered belt bag once it’s finished.