This Too Cute Tuesday was a little off program. John, my newish boyfriend, was visiting. Naturally I forced him to perform for a group by ordering him to make calzones for everyone.
A little background: John made me calzones the first time I visited him. They were amazing. I had them for dinner, then breakfast the next morning, then lunch. Yup, they were that good.
This calzone recipe is a family recipe passed down from John’s Grandma Capriccio.
My Pepere* was nice enough last fall to give me a 25 pound bag of fresh Maine potatoes. And boy, did they make some spectacular oven fries those cold winter nights!
As a single woman living by herself living a lower-carb life, it has taken me almost this entire time to get through the whole bag. I have two potatoes left but they are beginning to sprout. And if it is one thing I know, when life hits you with sprouting potatos, you make potato stamps.
Ah, Tuesday. It’s the cutest, especially when we make a less labor intensive craft and just drink wine and dish.
Kind of like doing laundry, making bath salts felt like we were passively getting stuff done, if only because Dorrie was doing the heavy lifting and the rest of us were just yaking away. And by heavy lifting, I mean stirring stuff.
Here at Craft Central, we’ve been meaning to needle felt for awhile. Unfortunately, this requires felting needles, which is a special kind of needle that I ended up driving the next town over to get.
No matter, with the proper equiptment in hand (and some fiddleheads à la Nicole in our stomachs) we enjoyed stabbing fiber and creating cute creatures!
Materials Needed
Fiber (this is cool terminology for wool/fur that hasn’t yet become yarn, you can apparently buy this in craft stores by the bag though if you have friends who are “into” fiber, they just have some lying around)
Felting needles (I got the variety pack of 4 needles for $6)
Styrofoam (stolen from workplaces)
Cocktail of the Day: Margaritas! (Note: Make sure you can handle sharp needles and alcohol before proceeding with the cocktail)
1. Make fiddleheads (you can look up a recipe or get my super-easy good one tomorrow on the blog!). Tis the season!
2. Pour cocktail. Have friends take out their bags of fiber and compare their wares.
3. Make a vague shape of what you want with the fiber. (ie My ant head was a small roundish ball and the ant abdomen was a slightly larger variation of that). Stab using the styrofoam to protect yourself, cutting board style. Stab evenly around the fiber, which will keep your shape round. The more you stab, the tighter it’ll be.
4. Despite warnings of sharp needles, stab yourself and draw blood. Continue with the craft because one has to work through the pain.
5. You can use the felting needles to also “stab” the multiple pieces together. Eventually you will have an animal, promise. Dorrie had a dragonfly, Sarah a mouse, Sue a fish, and Nicole an ant.
6. Embarass your unembarassable dog by sticking your new animal on top of her head.
Aren’t you crafty? And really isn’t it fun to stab things?