2015 Christmas How-to: Terra Cotta Essential Oil Diffusing Ornaments

After way too long of a hiatus, I was able to do our annual Christmas ornament this year.

The usual prerequisites I try to meet on these; fast, easy and inexpensive, but without looking like it! LOL

This year, I was inspired by some essential oil diffuser pendants I'd seen on Pinterest.  The premise is basic.  Make an object from a clay that will absorb the oil, then slowly release the scent over time.  After a few days, more oil can be added.  This is one of those crafts that can be kept simple, or more elaborate, with only a few minor changes.

Materials needed:

Terra Cotta air dry clay
cookie cutters
stamps or textural items.
essential oil

Tools:

rolling pin
skewer or straw
vinyl sheet
craft knife
craft brush
course and fine grit sand paper

The main thing, of course, is the air dry clay.  After doing a bit of research, I chose to use terra cotta clay, as it seems to have some of the best properties to act as a diffuser.

This is one of those areas where you get what you paid for!  I tested out a dollar store brand of air dry clay someone had donated to our church's Bible school art supplies, and it was just horrid stuff.  You defininely don't want to skimp on quality here!  Take the time to knead the clay before starting, and keep some water and a damp cloth handy.

For the cookie cutters, you can go with seasonal shapes, but I chose to go with basic shapes.  As long as the cutter leaves a surface large enough to fit your stamps, if that's what you want to use.

For decorating the surface, I chose seasonal stamps, however you can use anything that will give a texture to the surface.  For example, a crocheted doily, leaves, sprigs, or even some of those textured rollers you can get in the cake decorating supplies.

Start by covering your surface with a sheet of vinyl - it'll make moving things around a lot easier, later on - then rolling to about 1/4 inch thick, and roughly rectangular.

Smooth the surface with a damp cloth or paper towel, if you wish.

If you wish to use an all-over texture for your ornaments, this would be the time to add them.  Place your leaves, twigs, doilies, or whatever you are using on your clay and gently press.

The clay is rolled out fairly thick because the shapes I chose are quite large; the largest of the sets I bought.

Choose your shapes and start cutting out the clay.

If you've used an all-over texture on your clay, position your cutters selectively to get the texture where you want it on the shape.  Otherwise, just fit in as many as you can.

Remove the excess clay and put it into an air tight container or cover with a damp cloth to keep it from drying out while you work.

Choose your stamps to add texture, if you haven't already.

I wanted my squares to be oriented as diamonds, so I placed the stamps at a 45 degree angle.

Take care when pressing the stamps in to keep them even.  You want a nice, deep impression without accidentally including the outline of the rubber stamp.











For the round shape, I tried using a button to add texture.  In the end, I was unhappy with it and re-used the clay in my next batch of ornaments.












Because of the larger size of these ornaments, I used a straw to cut out holes for the hangers.  The skewer still came in handy to push the little plugs of clay out of the straw.

For smaller ornaments or pendants, I'd use the skewer or even a large needle for a smaller hole.








This next part was a first for me.  I had aquired a food dehydrator recently, and decided to try it out to dry the ornaments.

This is where working on a piece of vinyl really helps out.  It makes it SO much easier to move the pieces onto the drying racks.  There was still a bit of flopping and shape distortion.  If that is an issue, you may wish to leave your shapes to dry for a few minutes before moving them.








On to the next batch; this time I used completely different stamps.  They were a bit more difficult to press evenly into the surface compared to the wooden stamps, but I like the designs better.

One of them didn't work out at all and the clay got re-used later.

I used an Xacto knife to cut the shapes out, completely forgetting to leave a space for the hanger hole.

I decided to keep them, anyhow.

In the next batch, I remembered to space them so I could cut out an area for the hanger hole.

A definite bonus to using the dehydrator is the ability to use layers.  Talk about saving space!  The trays are easy to move around as needed.  I was really looking forward to seeing how well this worked.

I also experimented a bit with other shapes, and this is one I ended up keeping.  I used the largest flower shape for the outside, then the smallest for the inside.  I then found a button with a texture I liked and used a skewer through the shank to apply even pressure into the clay.

Here are all of the finished shapes after an hour or two in the dehydrator.

The little heart was something I made using clay that was rolled out thinner, and I used a heart shaped stamp with an all-over texture to it, then cut the heart shape out manually.

The dehydrator fan was noisy, but not too bad.










The shapes are not completely dried through, but I decided to turn off the dehydrator at this point.
















While not as much of an issue with the smaller pieces, the larger pieces started to curl a bit from drying too quickly.  You can also see that the damp clay had started to sink into the mesh of the drying racks.

I've noticed that there are different meshes available for different types of foods to dry, including no mesh at all for fruit leathers.  I think this worked out well enough that I might invest in different drying surfaces for future use.





Here are all the shapes removed from the dehydrator and left to finish drying on a paper towel.

In the future, I think I would sitll use the dehydrator, but leaving it on for a shorter time.  At least if I'm making something that's thinner, like the little heart, or larger, like the squares and flower.  The rectangles had almost no warping at all.

After letting them all dry overnight, it was time for the finishing touches.

For sanding, I find I like these sponges.  They are available in a variety of grits, including the 60 and 220 I have here.  I really ought to have a medium grit, too, but I just don't happen to right now.

Here's a closer look at the fully dried shapes.  You can really see how much the larger pieces have warped from drying too quickly, as well as how rough the edges are.













This is after using the course grit sanding pad, and part of it has been done with fine grit.

I used course grit only to do the backs of the ornaments, while the fronts got a final touch up with fine grit.  I did want to keep a bit of the roughness, so I didn't do too much sanding  Mostly, it was to get rid of the sharper edges.








Clay dust will build up in the grit.  Most of it can be knocked out fairly well, but I found using a stiff bristled brush also helped clean the dust out.  When I was done, I washed the dust out with plain water.

Working over paper towel made clean up much easier!

Here, all of the shapes have been sanded.






For the hangers, I just used some quarter inch satin ribbon I happened to have.

For these, I chose to stop here and not ad any more to the decorations.  Some of the things I considered was using fancier ribbons, hot gluing seasonal foliage to the tops, at the base of the ribbon, or adding something to frame the edges.  I also considered adding colour.  In the end, I decided to just keep it simple for these and experiment with the others.





 Here is one experiment; adding glow in the dark glitter glue around the edges of the rectangles without hanging holes.
















 With the heart, I experimented with adding colour using metallic markers.  I was quite pleased with how well teh colour stood out.

I then added the essential oil to the shapes; I chose Rose for the scent this time.

Because of how large the pieces are, rather than putting on a drop or two and leaving it, I used the stiff bristled brush to spread the oil across the surfaces.

I then reminded myself that, if I'm going to use a brush like that, I really ought to wait until the glitter glue dried, first.

Thankfully, I was able to fix the mess. LOL





Here they all are, fully dry.

And yes, they work quite well as diffusers.  My office smelled like roses for days!

Also, that glow in the dark glitter glue works really, really well.

Our tree now has quite a lot of scented ornaments.  The cinnamon and applesauce dough ornaments have held their scent for many years, and the more recent ornaments with spices decorating them have also maintained their scent quite well.  Even the sachets with drops of essential oil in the stuffing still let off a faint scent.  Now, we have roses, as well.

And here is how some of our new ornaments look on the tree!

Now that I've made these as ornaments, I am looking to make oil diffusers as pendents.  I am also looking into trying a white home made clay recipe.

If I'm happy with how they turn out, expect to see some in my etsy shop!

DIY Charcuterie

Okay, so it's not exactly a craft, but I wanted to share some of the recipes that I've been posting on my Squidoo pages.

This one is for a "Choose Your Own" Charcuterie.  If you're not familiar with charcuterie, check it out to learn more!  I think it would make a great Father's Day treat!

Visit the link for a printable how-to.

Happy Easter!

I hope you all have a wonderful day celebrating Easter!

Shaving Cream Dyed Eggs

We're doing a few things new for our Easter basket this year.  One of them was inspired by an image being passed around on facebook and in Pinterest.  The kids and I thought it was worth a try, so we picked up some foam shaving cream (a harder thing to do than expected; apparently they're mostly gel creams now) and some neon food colouring.  I was going to try Cool Whip as well, but in the end decided against it, since we're already doing several other kinds of eggs, too.

So today, while my husband took our younger daughter out to see the new GI Joe movie (she loved it), my older daughter and I started on eggs.  Even how we cooked the eggs was different this year.  Instead of boiling the eggs for colouring, we baked them - another trick from Pinterest.  We put a dozen eggs into a muffin tin and roasted them at 350F for about 18 minutes.  We've done it before and it worked our rather well, and this way we could do the dragon's eggs and kraszanki on the stove top at the same time.

 Unfortunately, three of the eggs burst their shells while baking, so we were down to nine.  We also lost one of the eggs we soft boiled in preparation for the dragon's eggs.

Lunch was egg salad.

When it came time to dye the eggs, things didn't go quite as smoothly as the Pinterest instructions made them seem!

The first thing was to spread the shaving cream in a jelly roll pan.  My daughter, with gloved hands (that's a must!) tried to spread it about.

It didn't want to spread.  It kept wanting to kinda roll around and stick to her hand.  Weird.

She eventually got it done.  Then it was time to add the colour.

The neon food colouring sure came out darker than expected.  Those green spots?  Those are supposed to be yellow.

Somehow, I expected the colour to sorta spread a bit into the foam.  Not sure why.  Oh, well.  Next step!  Using toothpicks to mix in the colours.

Hmmm...  That... doesn't seem to be working out too well.  This stuff is NOT mixing into the shaving cream well at all.

Maybe it'll spread out more when the eggs are actually being rolled around in them.

Oh, dear.

The eggs did NOT want to roll in this stuff!  They just sorta slid around, so my daughter had to forcibly turn them.  They kept trying to slide away.

Well, we were warned in the instructions that this would be messy!

Then it was onto a wire rack to sit.

We went through a lot of paper towels today.

There's an egg in here.  Honest.

The colours did mix a bit more as time went on, but with only nine eggs left to colour, that didn't mean a whole heck of a lot.  Some of the eggs ended up with almost no coloured cream on them at all, no matter how my daughter forced them around on the pan.

One the eggs were done and on the rack, my daughter gleefully reverted to a five year old and played in the coloured shaving cream before cleaning up the pan.  She had a blast!

The instructions had said to leave the eggs for a few minutes for the colours to set.  A blog post I'd read by someone who tried it said that they weren't really colourfast (she'd made the mistake of rinsing the cream off with water).  We decided to let them sit longer.

I went for a nap.  My daughter worked on a painting.

Two hours or so later, this is how they turned out.

Well, it kinda worked!  The cream was first wiped off with paper towels, then they were rinsed under water, and after two hours, the colours held.  Yes, that almost white egg is how it dyed, not the result of being rinsed in water.

The method was rather fun to do, and a messy, sloppy kind of way.  I don't know that we'll ever do it again, though.  I don't know that the final result is worth the effort.  Not when we can have alternatives like these.

This is how our kraszanki turned out.  This year, along with using skins from yellow and red onions, we also added a spoonful of turmeric paste - the same paste we use to make Golden Milk.

Then, when it came time to do the second cooking of our dragon's eggs, with the tea and spices, I decided to take the leftover liquid from the kraszanki and adding it to the dragon's eggs, just to see what difference it would make.  You can find the recipe we usually use here.

On the outside, quite a lot!  The shells usually don't take on much colour at all.  However, these are made to be peeled, and it did affect the colour in the crackle effect, too. 

When it came time to peel the eggs, we didn't lose any more of them at all, and there's a reason for that!  I tried another hint I'd read about and added a teaspoon of baking soda to the water in the first cooking of the dragon's eggs.  While it worked marvelously - the shells just slid right off! - I don't recommend it for doing this type of egg.  After the first cooking, when the eggs were cool enough to handle and it was time to start cracking the shells, you could feel that the membrane was separated from the egg, right from the first crack, and it make the whole process more delicate.  This is something to save for eggs that do NOT need to have their shells cracked before they are coloured!

Then there were these guys.

We had done Pink Pickled Eggs last year and loved the look of them.  This year, we decided to try it with quail eggs!  They were much harder to peel than regular eggs and we lost about five of them.  These were in the pickling liquid for about five days.  I'm really looking forward to seeing how deep the colour has gone into the eggs compared to regular chicken eggs!

So that's what we've done with our eggs for this year.  If you want to see more photos, I've got them all in a photo set in my flickr account.

Enjoy!
   

In advance for Easter

No photos yet, but we've already started some things for our Easter basket - some new, some variations of things we tried last year.

First, we'll be doing Pink Pickled Eggs again, except this time with quail eggs!  These take 2-3 days to make, but we're starting them now.

Next is a cheese that will be new for our baskets.  I have a recipe for a type of Chevre de Provencal - goat cheese medallions preserved in olive oil, herbs and spices - that I want to try.  I'll be modifying the original recipe, since it has ingredients we don't want to use and others I just don't have.  This requires a week to make, so getting them done today is a priority.  If you want to give it a try, this is what our variation will be.

4 goat cheese medallions (a log cut into quarters)
     note: I got a larger log of goat cheese and will likely cut it into more pieces.
1 tsp peppercorns
4 garlic cloves
4 small bay leaves
4 sprigs rosemary
   thyme (I only have dry, so I plan to use about a tsp)
2/3 cup olive oil (I will be using tarragon infused olive oil)

Place medallions in a canning jar, or in individual jars.  Add herbs and spices.  Top with olive oil to cover. 

Seal and refrigerate for 1 week.

Once they're done, I plan divide them up for the several baskets we will be making this year.  I still have to figure out how to contain them, as the flavoured oil is useable for salad dressing and I want to make sure it's included.

The original recipe is Goat Cheese in Provencal Oil from Paul Gayler's The World in Bite Size; tapas, mezze, and other tasty morsels.

I hope to get some photos up in the next few days.

Merry Christmas!

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and a joyous and prosperous New Year!

From my family to yours.

A new step-by-step, plus a reminder

I've decided on two new crafts for our Christmas decorations this year.  For one, I've started a step-by-step lens over at Squidoo - Christmas Light Luminaries.  Check it out here.

I'm going to be posting more of my step-by-step posts over at Squidoo these days.  The simple reason for it is, Squidoo pays! *L*  I hope you enjoy the different format.

Also, I'd like to send out a reminder to the Edmonton folks that I'll be doing a $5 Yarn Night at the Clareview Michaels, Nov. 17 from 1-3pm.

Hope to see you there!

Putting together our Easter Basket

Not too long ago, I wrote at Squidoo about the traditions and symbolism involved in making a Polish Easter basket.  This year, I found out when a local Polish church was holding its blessing ceremony, so for the first time since moving to Alberta, we were able to get our own basket bless.

Every family does their basket their own way, and we like to change up a few things now and again ourselves.  Here's the basket we put together this morning.

First our basket...


Since we have one basket for 4 people (5, this year), we like to have a rather large basket.  I've tried quite a few different styles over the years, and really like this one.  It's fairly shallow, with a wide, flat bottom that's perfect for spreading the food out.  The handle is quite high, so it doesn't get in the way while arranging things.



I have a thing for tiny, decorative plates and bowls, and they come in very handy for the basket.  My newest aquisitions are the tiny tajines.  I ended up using one of them for the chrzan (horseradish).  I usually try to get fresh horseradish root, but the ones I've seen in the stores are horribly dessicated, so I picked up a jar of prepared chrzan, coloured pink with beetroot.  The divided bowls, meant for sushi sauces, if I remember correctly, are holding two types of salt; Bolivian Rose Andes Mountain Salt (larger crystals in pale pink)  and Alaea Hawaiian Sea Salt (dark reddish, slightly finer crystals).  Usually, I just use table salt, but I've enjoyed experimenting with different types of salt these days.  The butter was whipped with garlic granules and dill.  Last  year we introduced olives and olive oil to our basket, since olives played such a large role in daily life 2000 years ago (and still does, in some parts of the world).  The tinned olives include garlic stuffed, which we tried last year and enjoyed, and anchovy stuffed.  I haven't mentioned that to my family yet; none of us have tried anchovy before.  We decided to include vinegar this year, as it was also a staple for thousands of  years.  When I found a double bottle of both olive oil and vinegar together, I couldn't resist!





The plastic grass is completely hidden in our basket, so it doesn't matter what it looks like, but it helps keep things where I want them when I arrange them.





Since some of the food is damp or might stain or spill, I line the bottom with paper towel.




Then comes the fun part.  Trying to fit it all in!  The pickled eggs are a new addition.  Those were left to pickle for several days.  They're gorgeous, but my goodness, they stain!!  I can't wait to see what they taste like.

The cheese for this year is also a new one.  Cabra Curado, a Spanish goat cheese. 

After this photo was taken, I added a few foil covered chocolate eggs.  Then my husband took more pictures.



This one turned out really well.  What you can't see is me holding the reflector, and the cat that was VERY interested in that basket!

Then it was off to the church for the blessing.  I only took one quick photo.  There was no restrictions on photography, but it didn't feel right to take more!  The blessing ceremony took place in the basement, where several tables were placed end-to-end.



I tried to count the baskets in the photo and got over 50, but it's hard to tell.  This was taken just before things started, and there was a rush of people with their baskets that came in right after I took the picture.  There were so many people there - standing room only, and all ages represented.   The priest was also VERY thorough in making sure all the people and baskets were well sprinkled with Holy Water. ;-D

After it was done, we took our time reclaiming our basket, then headed out, passing a stream of people going the other direction with more baskets for the next blessing ceremony!  I wonder how many they do?  I'm really glad I found out about this.  It feels nice to have a properly blessed basket again. :-D



I had intended to use some crafted eggs for decorations, but there was no room, so they're part of a centrepiece now.  There's wax resist eggs the years and I did years ago, temari eggs, net beaded eggs, also from years past, and crocheted eggs I finished making just the other day.

Looking forward to being able to enjoy the contents of our basket tomorrow morning!

I wish you all a Happy and Blessed Easter.