Washing the washing machine

A recent pin via Pinterest was a tutorial on how to clean your HE washing machine.  I’ve owned my HE washer for over 8 years and I never thought of cleaning it.  So, after putting Jake to bed last night I washed the washer.  Here’s the general idea:

With the machine empty, run a hot cycle with 2 cups vinegar.  Next run a hot cycle with 2 cups bleach.  And finish with another hot cycle without anything. 

Click here for the original post. 

In the end the washer looks sparkling clean!  Maybe my clean washer will make my whites whiter and my colors brighter!

Valentine’s Treats

For Valentine’s Day I decided to make two treats that I found via Pinterest.  First up were Chocolate Covered Pretzels, which I’ve actually done before, but this time with a twist.  These are for Jake’s daycare.

I used the mini twist pretzels and covered the top half with white chocolate.  Once that solidified I used candy colors to dye the white chocolate pink and purple.  I used a piping bag to make lines and dots.  It was fairly easy to do and looks super cute!

Next up were Homemade Snicker Bars.  Those that know me best know that I LOVE snicker bars!  And some of you may not realize that Jamie loves them more than me, so I thought I would whip him up a batch.  But a batch is a 9x13” pan, so I am sharing them with my co-workers too.

These look daunting and the recipe even seems hard, but I would say this was actually easier than the chocolate covered pretzels.  Go here for the recipe.  I cheated though and used the freezer to cool each layer, that way I could start the next layer immediately.  I also took her advice and bought an aluminum pan which made it so easy to pop out and cut.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Fun foods

My brother invited us to a Super Bowl party this past Sunday.  And the only reason to watch the Super Bowl when your favorite team isn’t playing is for the commercials and for the food.  Being back on Weight Watchers meant I would have to make sure there would be some healthy food too. 

The first thing I thought to make were fruit kabobs.  I love fruit and that I can eat lots of it while on WW.  I wanted to make them look like the rainbow, so I picked fruit from every color.

I bought strawberries, clementines, pineapple, green grapes, blueberries and red grapes which were more on the purple side.  Some pieces of fruit were larger than others so I just arranged as needed.  The pineapple was hard to keep on the skewers, but I made it work.

I made 30 of these and they were gone fast!  The kids really liked them although the parents were a little nervous of the pointy sword-like skewers that were left, but at least they ate something healthy!

 

I also wanted to make a dessert, so I made football Rice Krispie treats.  I used Cocoa Krispies to make them more realistic and also used melted white chocolate to make the laces.  While they aren’t the healthiest dessert, they were fun and tasty!

I hope you enjoyed the food and commercials too!

Winter Mittens

For Christmas this year I made some winter mittens for my girlfriends using old wool sweaters.  My friend, Juli, made them and sent me the link on how to make them.

http://studio5.ksl.com/?nid=61&sid=4456414

The woman in the tutorial claims you can make a pair in 30 minutes.  Well, I must be really slow, because it took me 3 hours to make each pair.

First I had to find some old wool sweaters, so I hit up Goodwill during my lunch break and found some goodies!  It said to make sure the wool is at least 60% cotton, although I think two of these were only 50%.

You need to felt the sweaters by washing them in hot water which makes the wool shrink and helps keep the mittens warm. 

Next up was cutting out the patterns which can be found on the link above.  The pattern is pretty simple, but watch the video to figure out how to sew them together.

I was going to do a step-by-step on the process, but I forgot to take pictures and the video is really good.  So here’s the finished mittens.  Becky got the blue ones, Jenny the pink strips and Chris got the grey ones.