Adventures in Wreath-Making

This post could also be called “Crafting with Wine.” Or, most accurately, “Sh*t I Will Never Do Again.”

No, it was not that bad. It was tedious. And it took forever. And the outcome was neither symmetrical or perfect, which are two unrealistic outcomes I strive for during every DIY project, the unsatisfaction of which is the reason why this is not strictly a DIY blog and why I do not craft for a living. I’m not going to tell you not to do it, because it was simple and relatively inexpensive. I will share with you why I hope this wreath lasts me forty years so I do not have to do this again.

Me loves ornaments. Specifically red and silver ones, which are the only ones allowed to join the festivities in my house at Christmas. Last year I wanted an ornament ball wreath for the front door, but splurged on a wreath that is so bodacious my children had to open the front door all the way to come inside. It is the Fat Elvis of Christmas wreaths. I worship it.

This year with the addition of our uber-fabulous turquoise front door, which my short, walking, talking units of testosterone and boogers still think is odd and does not match our house, I resolved that I would make a red-and-silver ornament ball wreath for the front door. Because buying one from here or from here would have been too simple and impersonal, and I’m all about personal touches.

The opportunity for a seizing of creativity came two weekends ago, when the boys were in Beaumont and Corey was in New Orleans for a class. This girl hauled off to Hobby Lobby to score some supplies at 6:30 on a Friday evening. I know women are supposed to be “gatherers,” the historical term for “shoppers,” but I defy that characteristic because I hate to shop. Order your supplies from Target. I bought 130 PLASTIC red and silver and white ornaments of various finishes and sizes, all half off, and a straw wreath, which you will leave the plastic on. The hot glue melts and fuses to the plastic on the wreath, so there is some extra hold there. You can also use a foam one, which I’m told works just as well. It’s also probably more visually pleasant from the back.

I recommend you start here, but this step is completely optional.

You have to pull all the little tips off the ornaments and throw them away. I glued ornaments in a circle all the way around the outside of the wreath, standing them out where the tip used to be. I wanted a wreath as wide as I could get it.

I did the same thing around the inside. It is not going to matter if the ornaments do not meet up perfectly. That gap will be covered when you fill it in.

Stability in your wreath, which at this point is floppy when you pick it up, is achieved by putting a dot of glue between each perimeter ornament and sticking them together.

After you wreath is stable, start filling it in. I could have done it a little tighter, but I was trying to make 100 large ornaments work. My bad. I could have used 110 or 115, but by the time I realized that, Hobby Lobby was closed.

Now, I will blame it on my frustration and partial boredom at this point that that pictures stopped, because this is around the point that I realized that I did not have enough ornaments and since Hobby Lobby was closed, I would be schlepping back over there on a Saturday.

I wanted it to be more than just round sparkly ornaments, but could find no inspiration for what that extra glitz should be. I hung it on a door and looked at it for a while before going to bed.  The next morning, I braved Hobby Lobby for twenty more small ornaments and some accents. I ended up with a silver "Noel," a red reindeer and a white snowflake. I also bought a wooden "A" and modge-podged some candy cane wrapping paper to it. All of these items are stuck to the wreath with high temperature hot glue.

There are about 150-160 different sized ornament balls on this wreath and there are STILL holes. I just got to the point where a) I could not add any more and take myself seriously and b) realized no one would see my small holes from the street.

For the size, which measures about 28 inches across, the $50 I spent on it it way less than I would spend for a similar wreath of a smaller size from my favorite Christmas stores. It may have to be an indoor wreath next Christmas. We will just have to see how it holds up. So far, in the six days it has been on the door, I've only had to replace two ornaments that fell off, and closer inspection revealed they were not glued that well to begin with.

I am getting much braver on the crafting. Look out, Martha.

The Official Chili Recipe for People Who Don't Eat Ground Meat

Could also be titled "Cooking Chili that Picky Eaters Eat."

I do not eat ground meat. Any of it. Ever. This means I do not dine on breakfast sausage, hot dogs or hamburgers. It makes me a social pariah at cookouts and tailgates. It means I have to be quick and creative in the kitchen because the easiest weeknight dinners are spaghetti, lasagna, tacos, chili dogs and hamburgers. I love beef, chicken and pork in their boneless, slab forms. Just don't put it in a grinder and then make me cook it. I often substitute chopped chicken or shredded beef in recipes.

Enter the chili dilemma. Who doesn't love a good pot of chili? Over Fritos with a bunch of cheese and spiced-up sour cream on it? I certainly do. So for the last four years I've been looking for a chili recipe that did not have ground meat it in. Every one I tried was unsuccessful - either because it just tasted like beef chunks in well-flavored tomato sauce or set our orifices ablaze at both entry and exit. This was the exact day I learned that the smaller you chop something, the more intense the flavor. So when you put a couple of honking big chipotle peppers in the food processor and make them a paste, you'd better ready yourself for the Fiery Colorectal Rejection that will occur before bedtime. I thought I was going to have to run Corey by the Emergency Room.

The losing streak ended Sunday.

I found this recipe for Steak Chili at Tasty Kitchen, and decided to try it (judging by the quantity of chili powder), but I could tell there were some tweaks I needed to make to the ingredients. On Sunday, at the same time that we were painting the "B" side of our front door navy blue, I was testing a chili recipe. That knowledge of surrounding activities should explain why I took a picture in the middle of prepping the ingredients and then did not take another one. At all. Until I put leftovers in a bowl two days later.

Steak Chili, Allbritton-style

2 pounds chuck steak, cubed (I used a tender chuck, less fat)

2 tbsp vegetable oil

Season salt

Black pepper

Kosher salt

1 whole large onion (I used red)

2 jalepenos, without the seeds

4 cloves of garlic

2 tsp Adobo sauce (from a can of chipotle peppers)*

3 tsp cumin

3 tsp coriander

1/4 cup smoked paprika

1/2 cup dark chili powder (not ancho)

3 cups beef stock

1 cup tomato sauce

1 cup beer

2 tsp sugar

3 tbsp cornstarch

1/2 cup water

*An important note about texture: If you like your chili chunky, you should chop the onion, jalepeno and garlic and use one cup of diced tomatoes with juice. If you do not like your chili chunky, use the tomato sauce and finely, finely (almost puree) your onion, jalepeno and garlic in a food processor.* 

*A more important note about spice: This is of a medium spice. We do not eat chipotles in this house, because of that screaming hot entry and exit I mentioned earlier, so I used only the sauce from the can of chipotles. My mother put cayenne pepper in everything we ate growing up, so my spice tolerance is the highest in our house, and I. cannot. handle. the. chipotle. The adobo sauce is quite spicy. Extra beverages were poured at our table but we could not stop eating it. If you do not like extra spice, omit the jalepeno and adobo sauce entirely.*

After I cube my steak, I dump it in a bowl and coat it with Lawry's Season Salt and black pepper, and use my hands to coat it evenly. In a large Dutch oven, heat the 2 tbsp vegetable oil over medium heat until it shimmers. Add half the beef, turning until brown on all sides. Remove to a plate and cook the rest. Remove all meat from the pot, leaving the oil and cooked fat. Put the onion, jalepeno and garlic, either finely chopped or chunky, to the pot and cook until soft. (That's about 90 seconds for finely chopped and five minutes for chunky.) Add the adobo sauce and cook for one more minute. Add the cumin, coriander, paprika and chili powder and toss around for one more minute. Add all of the beef with juices and turn to coat.

Pour in the beef stock, beer, tomato sauce (or diced tomatoes) and sugar and bring to a boil. (Your instincts will tell you to add salt, but you should wait.) Once the pot starts to boil, turn the heat to your simmer settings (mine is 3.5 on my electric stove) and put a lid on the pot, but leave a vent for the steam. Cook for two hours, stirring every half hour or so.

After two hours, you need to taste it. Then you should start salting it. I prefer kosher salt, which is less salty than table salt, and ended up using three big pinches, which is probably a little over a teaspoon. Start small, taste, and keep adding until the flavor explodes in your mouth. When you like the taste, cover, vent and cook for another hour.

By this time everybody on your street can smell that you have cooked chili, and they will be trying to get in your door to eat it. You may need to leave a bat by the door. After the tortuous three hours are over, the meat will be shreddable, so I used my potato masher to just push on it in the chili and get it to shred. Worked like a charm. If you find that, after you shred your meat with the tool-that-has-many-purposes-beyond-its-name potato masher, you would like a thicker chili, which I did, mix a few tablespoons of cornstarch with 1/3 or 1/2 cup of water and add it to the chili. If you use a thickener, you will need to bring it back up to a boil, stir it for a minute, then turn the heat back down.

The recipe says you should serve it with some shredded cheese, a dollop of sour cream and some green onions, which sounds just divine. I would typically put fritos UNDER that combination. Corey, Jake and Landen all crumble Saltine crackers into theirs. On this night, I made an accompaniment to my chili, and was ostracized by my entire family for doing so. I like food more than they do, so you'll want to listen to ME and put your chili over these here mashed potatoes. I did not use any milk and went instead with seven tablespoons of butter, but if you're not adventurous, or you did not eat pats of butter as a kid, you should stick to the low-butter-add-milk recipe.  THEN you put all that in a bowl. . . .

And reject the judgment from your husband, your children, and your seester and ENJOY your steak chili over your cheesy chili mashed potatoes. Stand up for what you believe in.

I believe that anything is better with some taters in it. 

Turquoise Front Door: The B Side

If you are not a child of the 80s who remembers buying cassette tapes with a hit single on one side and a random song from the album on the other (the "B" side), this title makes no sense to you.

If you have not already, you need to join Pinterest. It's basically an online bulletin board where you "pin" pictures of things that you like or inspire you or items from websites you want to buy, and it keeps it all organized by your "boards." I have board for projects I want to do, stuff for the boys, Christmas decorations, Christmas gift ideas to give others, rooms I love, upgrades I want to make to my house, food I want to cook and stuff I want my husband and my mama to buy me for Christmas. If you click on that little "P" icon over on the right under each of our names, you can see what we are "pinterested" in.

I love blogs almost as much as I love Pinterest. My favorites are the ones where common, untrained people like me work on their houses and then tell you what they did and how they did it. Two of my favorites are Young House Love and Bower Power. They happen to be best friends who came up with an idea over the summer to do a non-affiliated "Pinterest Challenge," where they would complete a DIY project they liked on Pinterest and then blog about it. They invite people with blogs to also do a "pinned" project and link to it on their site. I was planning to do this project anyway, so I just time it for this past weekend so I could put it up on the Pinterest Challenge.

The simplest explanation for why I keep slapping paint on everything I can think of and find the energy to complete is because we are not currently budgeted for the two main things I want to do to my house: built-ins in the liviing room and adding cabinetry in the kitchen. I do keep convincing Corey to not only entertain but assist with these little projects of mine, and he's always pleased with the results. Recently, we painted our front door turquoise, which has gotten quite a pleasant reaction, because it's bold and suprising, and I revealed it in this post, but, here's a photo to remind you:

Then I kept looking around Pinterest and home magazines and those decorators kept telling me not to ignore color on the doors INSIDE your house. This led me to the conclusion that the inside of my back door needed to be painted as well. And the obvious color was Navy. See? Look how dull it is in this picture of the house readied for Landen's First Communion party, painted the same color as the walls with white trim:

This is very sad for me because I have since been forced to get rid of this couch.

This weekend, the weather was lovely and the boys were in Beaumont, so we reserved our Sunday afternoon to do a bit of painting. Corey taped up the windows and the top and right trim, thinking we would have the door cracked open to paint the left side of the door. We ended up taping the left trim after I ran the paint brush up and down it, screamed like an injured walrus and washed it off quickly with Pine Sol.

Corey also sanded the door with a fine grit sandpaper. We did not use primer because we were painting dark over light, but we should have used a rougher sandpaper to make sure we could get all the sheen off the old paint so the new paint would stick. This would be a lesson learned during Coat Two. But "thin and even coats" is the tedious and correct way to go, so after one coat, we had this:

While Coat One was drying, I took the hardware outside to strip and paint it. Ultimately I am going to paint all the hardware in the house (instead of paying $12 per door to replace with eighteen doors). So it's a commitment to paint the hardware on this door, because the rest of the hardware will soon follow. They did not have the Cobalt Mist I used on the front of the door, so I went with the similar-but-more-brown and very trendy oil-rubbed bronze. Step 1 is to clean the hardware with something that does not leave a residue. I use watered-down Pine Sol. Step 2 is rubbing the entire thing with a deglosser, because you cannot sand it. Step 3 is sticking them into a paper plate, or that's MY step because I spray paint my entire arm if there is no shield. Step 4 is applying a primer. I use a spray auto primer, because it is meant to go on metal.

The paper plate allows you to pick it up and turn it so you can spray in all the angles you need. I find that spray paint needs to cure, cure, CURE for a very long time between coats - up to two hours. It may be the sub-tropical weather I paint in. I just do not add coats of paint until the previous coat is no longer sticky. I ended up doing three thin coats of oil-rubbed-bronze spray paint, which I did not photograph again until the hardware went back on the door.

After about an hour, Coat Two was ready to go on the door. Coat Two actually redistributed the paint from Coat One, which was followed by another injured walrus yell and then a hearty Lucy Ricardo wail/whine which ended with resolution to let TWO HOURS go between Coats Two and Three, to make sure the paint was bonded and would not removed under the brush strokes of wet paint.

Okay, I'll back up and let you see the full door after the second coat.

This puts us at 6:30 PM applying the third coat to the entire door. Then at 8:30 PM we put another coat just around the windows, which is the area that really needed the stern rubbing with coarse sandpaper. If I had used primer, we still would have put three thin and even coats on the whole door, so the fourth coat of paint around the one area did not end up being more work. Before we went to bed, we put the hardware back on and closed the door.

Monday morning we admired our blue door (Laura Ashley's Navy matched to Valspar Latex Interior Semi-Gloss) and removed all the tape. My husband and children always sound surprised to me when a project I devised is finished and looks tremendous, and I really feel that constantly having to declare that you are really good at something chips away at your credibility. But I insist that I have a vision for this house, and my vision will never be wrong. It's again a bold statement in the room, but there's enough navy in the rugs and porcelain and lamps that it does not look out of place here. Plus it's a great interruption to these too-neutral beige walls.

I did not get a picture of the door before Corey put the plastic back on it. If you are wondering what those little silver dots are or why the bottom of the door is shinier than the top, it's because there is a piece of thick plastic mounted to the bottom of the door so that the dog does not scratch and ruin the door. I had a friend who put this on the outside of her back door, (but her huge dog still destroyed it.) Little Murphy scratches at the door when he has to potty, or he sees us coming up the driveway, or someone or something walks/runs/bikes in front of our house.

Here's a close-up of the knob and lock with the very cured oil-rubbed bronze spray paint.

This concludes a very long post about my completion of the non-affiliated Pinterest Fall Challenge. Thanks Sherry and Katie for opening the field for all of us who tinker with our houses as a hobby (because we have not yet figured out how to get paid for it) to contribute to your blogging event! If you did not get here from their pages, please make sure you go check out what Sherry and Katie and Ana and Erin, the professionals, completed for their Pinterest Challenge, and check out what all the other bloggers contributed.