Christmas Decorations

This year will be the first year Greg and I will have our own Christmas tree together so our decoration selection is null at the moment. We picked up some lights and will be raiding our respective parents' decoration collections but I have a feeling we'll still be coming up short.

So because I have time on my hands and an impressive amount of scrap material I've decided to make tree decorations:

I found this great site with instructions/ideas on letter embroidery and decided to try it out:

I embroidered the top layer on an old piece of stiff white cotton and sewed it onto a piece of red felt, popped another piece of felt onto the back sewed them together (filling it with stuffing) and tada:

These are just circles of material (traced from the metal circle from a jam jar lid) with white felt on the back. I had a few scraps (far right) and decided to make a mish mash of patterns:

Cupcakes

Upon my leaving of Saint John I was given a few wonderful presents from a friend one of them was a cupcake recipe book. I'm not sure why it took me so long to crack open a book dedicated to cupcake recipes but I only did so last night. 

It's a vegan cupcake book, given my inability to digest milk my friend believed it to be a safe bet. I made the standard vanilla cupcakes and the buttercream icing. I actually used butter in the icing (not in the recipe) because thankfully, I can eat it but it turned out to be a terrible mistake. I got really excited because I could use my electric mixer and the icing turned out looking more like cottage cheese than the smooth icing I was promised.

Greg and I suffered through it and took one for the team, eating our way through the 'cottage cheese' topped cupcakes. 

Given my lack of will power I only made 5 cupcakes, I tried to half the batch and I actually cooked them in these super strong cupcake wrappers (part of the cupcake cookbook present):

I made a much more successful batch of icing today and they turned out looking like what I initially had in mind:

I won't be making the first icing again but I will be adventuring more in the cupcake cookbook!

(Almost) Animals in Music Videos

I'm late on this one, I'm sure most of you have watched this video but I'm in love with it!! That elephant somehow tugs at my heart strings, although I totally know it's Chris Martin.

Anyway, if you haven't watched the video for Coldplay's single Paradise take a few minutes and do it now:

Christmas Decorations

Since I have a door that goes directly outside for the first time since 2005 I'm pretty pumped about having a wreath. But a lot of the wreaths you can buy are either really tacky or really expensive. So I made my own:

Now lets hope there are no crazy neighbourhood wreath thieves and I'll be a happy lady.

Christmas Parade, New Glasgow Style

I cant' believe I didn't post this earlier, you'd think I had a busy week but I didn't do much out of the ordinary so I'm not sure what's up - my apologies.

Here we go, Greg and I took in New Glasgow's Christmas Parade last Sunday. It was a great day for it, the first giant snow fall hadn't happened yet so there were lots of dry places to sit on the sidewalk (or in the case of many children the place to run/roll around), the sun was out and it was pretty warm given the date.

There were standard elements to this parade: gymnastic teams, schools, fire department, food bank, etc. I took pictures of a few notable 'floats' or things I wanted to comment about:

Clowns, why does every parade have them?
What do they have to do with Christmas??

The Fire Department rolls up in style and with a Dalmatian!
I thought that was an old cliche that was no longer in style?

Ye olde timey vehicle, classic

It's easy to forget how simple it would be for a horse to crush
you, but from this close it seems like a possibility

Only in Nova Scotia: a herd (about 20)
bagpipers playing Christmas tunes

FINALLY I got candy, I'm not sure why the folks handing it out
feel adults shouldn't get it, I mean...come on! It's a parade!

The best and most terrifying way to end a parade - with taxidermy!
For real, those were living deer at some point, now they are
wrapped in strings of lights and posed in awkward positions.

I hope whatever Christmas Parade you made it out to this year was full of as much hilarity as the one in New Glasgow!

Knitting: Check!

I finally finished the sweater I've been working on for awhile, the button band gave me some trouble so after a couple of attempts on both sides I finally sorted it out - hooray! It seems that New Glasgow lacks in wooden buttons, so I had to go with plastic brown buttons:

I also tried my hand at making mittens for the first time. They turned out pretty well, I had to try a couple of times at making the thumbs, but again it worked out, hooray! These are for a 4 year old and I'm going to connect them with a knitted string, hopefully to increase their longevity:

Wise Words from William Shatner

Now, I haven't really thought of deep fryer fires at Thanksgiving being a concern, but perhaps that's just because it's not as common in the Canadian celebration of Thanksgiving as it is for Americans. Or perhaps it's because deep fryers are not part of the Hutchings family Thanksgiving tradition.

Whatever the initial reason for people deep frying their turkeys William Shatner has some wise words to share about safety while conducting this fat infused meat preparation, take note:



I have also learned from this week's episode of New Girl, that it is also unsafe to thaw a turkey in the dryer. I normally would never have attempted such a crazy act, but it's good to know it would just ruin the turkey.

Hunger Games Trailer

I'm pumped:

Sunday Hike

Greg and I hit the trail today since it was such a nice day. We went to the Gully Lake Wilderness Area, about 35 minutes outside of New Glasgow.

We did a just under 6km loop that had lots of the rain we received on Friday!

An oddly placed shell in the middle of the trail

A hearty bridge with very, very high water running under it

Really old mans beard, we thought Gandalf's

The perfect to stop and have a snack

There were a few rocks to try and cross this stream turned river, but they didn't do the trick. Greg tossed this old fallen tree into the mix and voila! A solution:

Making excellent use of our surroundings

This is what we were crossing, hooray for fjording!

Lots and lots of mushrooms were growing out of
trees in this neck of the woods.

We ran into a couple at the beginning of the trail, they mentioned we'd run into a waterfall at some point. After a hike mostly filled with doubts about a waterfall we found it near the end:

Waterfall!

There are a number of trails within the Gully Lake trail system, I think we'll have to revisit...just not after a huge rainstorm.

Strange Finds at Grocery Stores

Two interesting grocery store finds since we've moved to New Glasgow:

Giant pumpkin outside of Sobeys.
It was cut open at the top so you could see it was a real pumpkin!

Cheese Balls at The SuperStore
Cleary Christmas is approaching - hooray unhealthy holiday eating!

Walking Around Town

Earlier this week I took my camera out for a walk around sunset, this is what I came up with:

The East River

The bridge with the moon above the fancy New Glasgow logo.

Fall colours along the river

A view from under the bridge

Sunset on the East River

My favorite lamp post in town

Our place is the unit on the far right, lots of pretty trees in our
backyard and a fancy looking garden in the yard in front

Tree in our backyard

More backyard, it's mostly rock but something grow

Birds!!

Too cool not to share, check out this video where A TON of starlings are flying together. They look like all kinds of things other than birds:




Found on Open Culture.

Knitting Project Update

Unemployment is great for knitting projects!

Looking like a shrug

Now like a hilarious knitted muscle shirt

And now a one-armed sweater!

Just about finished. There's the other arm of course and then the button band!

Knitting Project

One last post for such a post-filled Sunday. I wanted to share my current knitting project:

It's coming together but now for the potentially tricky part, I'll be updating this project with pictures!

Settling In

To try and house the many, many books Greg and I have accumulated over the years we had to buy a fancy new bookshelf, ($50 from Zellers, the fanciest - right?) but it does the trick:

My mom and Claudette stopped by for a visit yesterday and brought some house warming flowers...making our super sale of a bookshelf actually fancy. Thanks!

Halloween Birthday!

The downside to moving to a new town a few days before Halloween is that every store is sold out of pumpkins. But that didn't stop Greg and I! We bought squash to carve and it worked out pretty well:

Buttercup and acorn squash

The top of a buttercup squash is very similar to a cork

Greg started with the acorn squash...

But ended up with the buttercup...it turns out buttercup are
SUPER tough to carve, so Greg helped me out :)

My pumpkin! The top kind of looks like
this could be a Sherlock Holmes pumpkin

Despite these being squash there were a lot more 'guts' than
I thought there would be

Smiling buttercup full of candle light

YAY! Halloween is saved, by squash!

Squash by daylight, ready to go on Halloween

Some of you might know that Halloween happens to fall on my birthday, yes you read that right. So we pulled out the Happy Birthday banner I made for Greg's Birthday and hung it in our barely unpacked apartment, it worked:

Despite having just moved into a new place AND Greg having worked on Monday he pulled together a very awesome birthday complete with a yummy meal, drinks, desserts and presents:

Halloween cupcakes (and there was lactose free ice cream to
go along with it)

Part of my present...CANDY!

Greg also was thoughtful and remember WAY back when I posted about wanting a tripod and that's what he gave me - yay!!

Overall an awesome birthday and Halloween