Birthday parties, booze bouquet, recipes and mini bar ideas

Last night I hosted my husband's 40th birthday party. It was really fun, we had a lot of friends over, and since our house isn't huge, we decided to try having the party in the garage. Early October in South Dakota can be either warm or cold. Last night was cold! But we moved the car and truck out and borrowed a few space heaters, and viola, the party was perfect. We moved in our patio tables and chairs and I didn't care at all when a drink got spilled on the garage floor. It was a great way to show off the whole "man-cave" to his friends. (I have a fun idea to add to it for Christmas.)

For my gift to him, I always throw his party and make his bourbon cake. No, I can't share the recipe, the friend who gave it to me told me not to. Last night we increased our guest list and I spent 2 days cooking getting ready. I served chili (with hot dogs for chili dogs and french fries for chili-cheese fries), homemade runzas - a divine food from Nebraska and southwestern egg rolls. For the kids I also made pizza rolls - they burned through those in no time flat, and pink lemonade cupcakes.

I sewed 3 Girl Scout vests to help me pay for the party and was able to buy him the first 2 seasons of the show "Archer" on DVD along with the book "How to Archer"

The second part of his gift was a booze bouquet inspired by an image similar to this:

Except to make mine, I went thrift shopping (like you didn't see that coming,) and I found an awesome retro-70s-faux red leather ice bucket for $2.50. Then I bought a pack of 10 chopsticks at the dollar store. At the liquor store I bought 10 different individual shot-sized bottles, the most expensive was $1.79. To put it all together, I hot-glued the bottles to the chopsticks at varying heights and added some festive-sparkly ribbon to each one. I filled the ice bucket with ice and added the booze-on-a-sticks. All said, I think I spent about $20 on the whole thing. And now we have an ice bucket.

His friends kept showing up with unnecessary gifts so now I have 3 bottles of bourbon, a bottle of tequila and all those mini-bottles to store. This has inspired me to start a new quest. We need a DIY Mini Bar!!! I'll post more as I decide what to do.

My friends asked me to share the recipes for the egg rolls and runzas, so here they are:

Southwestern Eggrolls:
1 small can refried black beans
1 small can drained black beans
1/2 pkg frozen spinache - thawed and squeezed dry as possible
2 medium fresh tomatoes, diced
1/2 bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
4 green onions, finely chopped
1 tsp cumin
salt & pepper to taste
3/4 cup grated cheddar cheese
3/4 cup grated monterey jack cheese
flour tortillas
oil for frying

Combine ingredients (except tortillas) in a large bowl. Put a couple heaping Tablespoons of mixture in a warmed tortilla. Wrap like a burrito-very tightly. Use a toothpick to hold closed.

Fry in 1/2 inch deep oil in a skillet over medium heat (oil is ready to fry when it bubbles around the handle of a wooden spoon when you insert it). Turn and brown on both sides. Remove to a cooling rack over a paper towel. Cut diagonally and serve with dip or salsa. Can be prepared and refrigerated before frying or can be fried and the frozen. Reheat in a 350 degree oven for about 10 minutes.

Runzas
Filling
1/2 lb ground beef
1 onion minced
2 cups cabbage, chopped fine
2 Tbsp butter
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper

Dough
4 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup shortening
2 eggs
2 packages of dry yeast

Preheat oven to 350.

Filling: brown ground beef and onions. Wilt cabbage in butter and then add to beef.
Dough: Put about 1 3/4 cup flour in a bowl. Stir in sugar, salt and yeast. Heat milk, water and shortening until warm and add to flour mixture. Add eggs and beat with mixer on low speed for 1 minute. Beat on high speed for 3 minutes. Stir in rest of ingredients and knead dough for 3 minutes. Cover and let rest for 20 minutes. Roll dough very thin and cut into rectangles (about 4x6). Place 3 Tbsp of meat mixture in center and bring edges together. Bake 10 to 15 minutes until golden brown.

Variations: (swiss cheese & mushroom), (pizza sauce, sausage, pepperoni & mushroom)

Vintage Wooden Ornament Wreath

One of my favorite things about Christmas is the vintage wooden ornaments that I was given by my mother-in-law. We have funny little gnomes that have furry beards and our cats steal them all the time. The other fun set I got from her was a neat set of spinning circus themed ornaments from my husband's childhood. I then went to my mom and asked for her old stuff. I was able to find a few miscellaneous ones from my childhood and I love the look they add to the tree. I decided they would make a very cute wreath, but I have no heart to hot glue our family mementos to a wreath, so I decided to start checking the thrift stores. I found a ton of cute little ornaments that look like they were produced en mass in Japan or China in the 60s. Perfect! I think I payed less than $5 for all of them (aided by my friend gifting me a blank wreath.) I sat down with the ornaments and removed all the strings and then started randomly gluing them on. I wasn't trying for a pattern or anything because I wanted it to look like a section of a Christmas tree. I could not get any of my ribbon to look good with the wreath and I decided to try the ric rac. Perfect! It looks homemade, and it looks like something done back in the day.

Homemade Christmas? Ornaments & Garland

'tis the season to make some holiday cheer! I have been hard at work on a few Christmas projects. First off, we have a yearly fundraiser at the library and I was asked for some ideas of what I would put onto our tree this year. One of my jobs at the library is to help sort and sell donated books. Sometimes books are in such bad shape that I can't do anything with them but throw them into the recycling bin. (Some people cannot throw books away, no matter how bad of shape they are in.) Apparently there has been a 'fall cleaning' mindset going on in our town because we have had so many books donated that I have no room to put them onto the sales shelves. So I said to myself, we're a library, couldn't we make ornaments out of old books? I quick search on the internet later and I knew this was going to be fun. I didn't expect the whole tree to have my "recycled books" theme, but the director liked the idea and was willing to give me the chance to run with it. I found inspiration for the paper tree topper at Great Green Goods. The topper is actually 2 pieces tied around the top of the tree. The backbone is a page from a very badly torn board book. I then made 12 spiral rolls of pages from picture books and hot-glued them on to the backing. Then I made 12 spiral rolled pages of old romance novels (which were about 1/2 the size of the picture book pages,) and glued them in between the first set of spiral rolls. To make a center for the topper, I added one of the fanned ornaments made out of picture book pages and glued on a sparkly snowflake.

The fanned ornaments were an idea I found on the blog Pinecone. I didn't make them with two layers but we did use the button center idea and the assistant director helped me out by adding glitter to the edges of the ornaments.

We made the cutest round ornaments that I found on the blog Craftside out of children's books that had broken spines. I liked this type of paper best, it is heavier grade and holds up better.

The last touch for the tree was to make a garland. I cut strips of paper about 1/2 inch by 6 inches long from old romance novels, kids' books, graphic novels and atlases These were randomly woven into a gumwrapper weave. You can find instructions and videos on how to do this all over the internet.

The final touches that really brought the tree together were the great idea by a coworker to use glitter hairspray to add some sparkle to the fanned ornaments and the tree topper, old fashioned strands of silver icicles and a random box of vintage glass ornaments we found stashed in the storage room marked, "Janitorial Supplies." I think the tree topper looks like a prairie windmill and so I'm going to give my tree a title: Homemade 1940s Prairie Christmas.

Recycle a broken spoon ring into earrings.

I have been blessed to get some of my Dad's mother's jewelry. Grandma died about 30 years ago, so her jewelry is at least that old; most of it was costume and I use it in other projects, but some of it was nice stuff so I kept them to wear. My 3 favorite pieces were my angel wings ring - like a spoon ring that wrapped around my finger (sterling silver), my gold and silver cuff bracelet and my sterling silver spoon ring. I can't wear the angel wings anymore because it broke, probably from constant wear and readjustments. My husband took it to the jewelers and had it fixed, and that is when we discovered it was sterling silver. But I have been told it is too thing for everyday wear, so I save it for special occasions. So I started wearing my spoon ring, it was a really cool one that was identical on both ends instead of one being smaller than the other. Unfortunately last month it broke, almost exactly in the center.

So, what to do??? I had a flash of inspiration and thought I might make the two sides into earrings since they matched pretty closely. I started by putting the pieces of the ring between 2 washcloths and gently hammering them flat. Then I used a pair of needle-nosed pliers and carefully bent the skinny top part back on itself to make a loop behind each piece.

Finishing the earrings was a simple as adding a jump ring to each one and some french hooks. Super easy, and I think super cute.

Zipper corsage bracelet

Okay, I want to apologize up front for not being able to give credit to the crafter whose blog had the zipper bracelets on them. They are all over the web but I saw one on StumbleUpon and now I can't find it to refer you to. Basically the blog said to find a zipper, I went to the thrift store and bought 4 for a quarter each. I tried to get ones that were just a little too short for my wrist. Then when I got home I cut as closely to the zipper as I could. I took the blog's advice and used a lighter to singe the edges down so it won't fray. Then I used my mini drill to drill holes into the end of the zipper and into the zipper's pull to add jump rings and links/fasteners.

As I've mentioned before, I have some of my grandmother's old jewelry. I have been looking for ways to reuse it in a more contemporary way and this turned out to be a fun opportunity. I used a pin and clip-on earrings set. I removed the hardware from the back of the earrings but not the pin. Then I attached the earrings to the pin using a large jump ring. The I simply attached the pin to the zipper bracelet. Kind of a funky-vintage corsage bracelet.