When asked to bring “something Hors D’oeuvre-y” to a Pot-Luck Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow (Yes, I know it’s October, I’m Canadian) I decided to make my Roasted Red Pepper Dip that mom always makes me bring to dinners (to humour me, I think). Here’s the tried and true recipe:

This is best made the day before you plan on wowing the world with your mad dip-mixing skillz, as it allows time for the mixing and softening of the … I don’t really know why, it just tastes better the second day.

You’ll need – 4 Red Peppers, One 500ml container of sour cream, 1 small jar of mayonnaise, 2 Tbsp dried parsley, 1 Tbsp dill weed, 2 cloves of garlic, Salt and pepper to taste

1. Realize it is one hour before all the stores close on thanksgiving weekend and panic while you run out the door for ingredients, forgetting the grocery list so you have to return home to get it. This step is not required, but it makes the process more exciting.

2. Realize all your knives are in the dishwasher. Wash one off, cut off the tops of the peppers and remove the seeds. Slice peppers in half.

3. Roast peppers on a baking sheet with melted butter drizzled on top at 350 degrees until the skin starts to blacken. The internet says roasting a pepper should take 20 minutes, but it took about an hour in my oven, so what does the internet know. It needs to be pretty soft and if the skins are a bit black all over it makes it easier to peel off later. I have actually done this in the toaster oven before and it works fine.

4. Mix all other ingredients in a big bowl. No, a bigger bowl. If you think your bowl is big enough, go one size bigger.

5. Cool off the peppers, if you like your fingers. If not, go ahead and burn them off while handling hot peppers. Peel the skin off the peppers as best you can. Try not to think of how they look like prune-y feet that have been in the bath too long.

6. Dump the peeled peppers in the bowl and mix with one of those stick blendy things. You know what I mean, right? Here I’ll show you.. It’s gloopy from the dip, but I hope you can see what I mean…

(Stick Blender Thingy)

7. The dip will turn pink when you do this. Mix until you see no pepper chunks and the dip is a consistent colour. Taste test and add more garlic if it “needs something.”

8. Find something to dip in the dip. Fingers work, but the guests look at you funny if you do that, so maybe use pumpernickel bread cut into cubes, pita or naan wedges.

9. Sit back and enjoy your new status as king or queen of the world.

We’ll start with an easy project, but something you need to get started making early since you have to make so many.

For our wedding favours we decided to make coasters for each guest to take home – 2 per guest or four per couple so that even people who came without a date would still have a matching set. We were told that if you have good wedding favours you will have none left over after the wedding and we think we did okay because there weren’t any left for us – I had to make some more for ourselves later.

The coasters we made from bathroom tiles from the hardware store. A box of 75 tiles cost about $70, giving us a final price of about $2 per guest. We bought 5 boxes and tried to carry them home ourselves since we only live across the street. Don’t do that. They are damn heavy. We almost died.

The only thing else we needed to buy was a roll of cork lining. Then came the fun task of cutting 1400 cork circles – one for each corner of 350 stone coasters. It wasn’t as hard as you’d think. I had a cork cutter from work, but a 3/4″ punch would work well – or you could cut grids and use square feet for the coasters.

Here’s where hubby-to-be comes in. You can either use the “if you loved me, you’d do this for us” or “you can either do this or sign all the thank you cards by yourself,” but whichever you choose, set him up with the tiles, some epoxy glue (the kind you mix together – or some other glue for tile surfaces) and the 1400 little circles. It’s better if you don’t let him see all the tiles at once, just keep bringing in more little piles, or else he may refuse at the beginning. One cirlce per tile corner and you’re good to go.

Then you can package them in little bundles of two. I printed little tags (using black chancery font – like I used for all the wedding stationary) and cut lengths of 1″ wide velvet burgundy ribbon. I attached them with antiqued brass eyelets and used the eyelets to string thin black ribbon to tie the coasters together and place them on each place setting. Ta-Dah!

Year after year I lament not having a classy way to display our incoming Christmas cards, especially since we have some pretty creative family & friends, many of whom make their own card designs that are worthy of a gallery showing. Last year I finally did something about it and now I have a place to display the cards and I have spruced up one of those annoyingly random pillars-in-the-middle-of-a-room thingies like we have in the rec room. It’s exceedingly easy, colour customizable and takes about 5 minutes.

1. Confuse or con your friend named ________ (insert gullible friend’s name here) to drive you to the craft store near your house because your sorry butt is too broke to buy a car.
2. At the craft store, spend waaaaaaay too much time browsing the stamps and eventually wander over to the discount ribbon bin. It doesn’t have to be the discount ribbon bin, that’s just where I found mine. If I had not had this ribbon already, I would have bought some of the beautiful ribbons in the new Martha Stewart line that have been highlighted on Black, White Bliss and Try This At Home recently. The ribbon I used is 3 inches wide, velvet and quite sturdy. The edges are wired, but that is not required. Any ribbon will work, as long as you like it.
3. Place the ribbon in a large plastic bin and forget about it for about two years.
4. Pull out the ribbon again and dust it off. Tie a nice puffy bow in one end of the ribbon and cut from the main roll so that both tails are even. I just used a shoelace bow, but if you are a professional bowtie-er or a Marine you might know some better bow knots to make. This one seems to work.
5. Take the remaining ribbon off the roll and let it hang. Tack one end of the ribbon strand to the back of the bow using tiny safety pins or thread. I sewed the ribbon strand onto the bow with burgundy thread and the back of it looks a little like Frankenstein’s neck (sorry.. Frankenstein’s monster’s neck) but it really doesn’t matter as long as it holds. How strong the tacking has to be depends on whether or not you have children or animals who will play the “let’s pull on this and see what it does” game.
6. Buy a roll of cork WAY too large for your project. Not sure why you need to do that, but that’s what I did so I am just writing it down with all the rest. Line your cupboards with the leftover cork.
7. 
8. Cut a long strip (or many smaller ones) equal to the length of the ribbon strand, from the bow to the floor, if you want it that long.
9. Affix this cork to the back of the ribbon strand with hot glue or some other adhesive. Don’t sew it on or the cork will just crumble. In my pictures the bow is already on the wall for this step, but only did that so I could use one hand for the pics. You can do all this on your workbench, of course.
10. 
11. Place your bow at your desired height on the wall with a tack or one of those sticky hook thingies. I don’t think “sticky hook thingy” is the official name for those things, but maybe it should be.
12. Trim the ribbon (and cork) with a V pattern at the height to which you would like it to hang under the bow. Tack the bottom of the strand and cork to the wall to keep it straight and against the wall.
13. Use tacks to tack up cards as they come in, as below. I didn’t have any cards yet, so I hung up random stuff I found for the picture. We have a lot of random stuff.

TA DA! Done. Now send me a card so I can put it up there. Um… please.

In response to my post about a macro to easily list fonts installed on your computer, I received more than one email asking how to add other fonts to your computer in addition to the windows standards, so I wrote up a quick tutorial for you.

1. Go to a free font website. These websites post fonts made by up-and-coming designers and many of them can be quite good. Some of my favorites include:
http://www.fontempire.com/
http://www.1001fonts.com/index.html
http://www.getfreefonts.info/
http://www.fontstock.net/
http://www.searchfreefonts.com/fonts/p37.htm
http://www.abstractfonts.com/
http://www.fontmaniac.com/
http://www.dafont.com/
http://www.downloadfreefonts.com/
http://www.urbanfonts.com/

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The best way to make yourself sub-conscious about your photography skills is to marry a photographer. But despite the self-doubt, there are also some upsides to having a skilled eye and a $2000 camera around the house. And you get to use the “if you can spend that much on a camera, why can’t I spend that much on a kiln?” speech. In lieu of this, I advise a digital camera at the least. They don’t cost an arm and a leg anymore; you can get a decent one for only part of a shin, maybe a tibia or two. Adam uses a Canon Digital Rebel and I also have a Panasonic Lumix for back-up (like, for when Adam is inconsiderate enough to use his own camera that he paid for when I need it) and I find I can take decent pictures with it, though it took a bit of practice to get used to composing a picture on the digital screen without the aid of a viewfinder.

But, remember, before you start shooting, put the camera strap over your head. I can’t really see how this will improve your pictures, but Adam swears the camera will blow up if I don’t have the neck strap on and swears it has nothing to do with the fact that I drop nearly everything I pick up.

There are a million articles about lighting, DIY light boxes, and how to place your products. But I have found that one of the keys to god pictures is to be careful about how you compose the final shot. The following are some different types of shots that I try to include in every listing, if possible:

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Following a recent “social gathering” I showed my friend Sue the bead spinner that I had made. I think I had a bit too much wine, or I was just dumb that night, but I don’t know if I made sense, so I am officially documenting the creation of my bead spinner for Sue, and everyone else who is curious

1. Accidentally break the hard plastic lid of a sample jar from the lab, rendering it useless for actual sample containment. Try to break the lid on a wide-mouth, fairly stubby jar. Take the useless jar home.

2. Take apart the dot matrix printer (circa 1980) that VJ kept for no conceivable reason. Retrieve metal rods from printer interior (note: a hammer and some re-directed bitter angst about something will be needed for this step).

3. Buy some “NuLustre 55″ resin from Rona, Deck Stain aisle. After writing to the company to point out how lame the product name is, read all safety precautions on the package.

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