HMM, BROWNIES + A TIP

Brownies first, right? These are my "Brownies for Grown-ups", but today I thought I'd top them off with something, and it turned out so yummy I decided to share what I'd done. Since it was spur-of-the-moment cooking, you get a photo of the finished product only, and approximate quantities on the ingredients, but here's what you do:

Bake your brownies as usual. Now get a small bowl and put about half a large package of butterscotch chips in it, with about a teaspoon and a half water. Put it in the microwave and nuke it until it melts. My microwave took about 45 seconds. When you take the bowl out, the chips will be melted, but the oil in them will have separated itself out. No worries. Add one or two teaspoons of chocolate syrup, and stir until the mixture is creamy.

Drizzle the melted mixture over the brownies, and top with chopped nuts. It is Gooooood!

Now the tip.

This is summer. You know, that season with the clothes that won't stay on hangers. Here's a simple way to make a non-slip hanger so your tank tops and scoop-necked tees won't slide right off every time you look at them.

Take two of those big rubber bands they wrap around produce at the grocery store. Wrap them once or twice around each end of your coat hanger.


Hang up your shirt or dress. The rubber bands will keep it in place.


Oh! Almost forgot! 52 Flea has an awesome give-away/give-back going to celebrate her 500th post, but you have to sign up before August 1st, so get yourself over there on the double-quick!

TUESDAY'S TIP: ON THE SHELF

When it comes to patterns, brochures, magazines, and booklets, we crafters can be a bit compulsive. I try to sort through and weed out, but even so, I have dozens and dozens of slender “volumes” to keep track of. I’m sure many, if not most, crafters are similarly blessed.

How to keep them all straight and accessible? Stacking those slim items is inefficient and untidy. Since they don’t have readable spines, shelving them with your books doesn’t work either.

A filing cabinet might be the first, most logical, choice, but that’s not always an option. My solution is one I ran across years ago, in The Messies’ Manual. The authors were talking about children’s books, but I quickly saw a personal adaptation.

I use the big tins you can buy cookies in. They’re available new, full of cookies (my favorite!), or you can find them at yard sales and thrift stores, and they are just exactly the width you need for the average magazine.

Stand them in the tins with the front pages facing the front, and put the tin on your book shelf. Now, when you want to find a particular leaflet or magazine, you can slide the tin out, and riffle through until you spot it.

I’ve got four of those tins so far, and use each for a different crafting category–sewing, beading, crochet, and miscellaneous. Since they are all basically an elongated octagonal shape, the front and back are narrower, which is handy for the smaller booklets, and also makes a good place to stash my crochet hooks.

Oh, and it’s still a really great way to keep children’s books organized, too!

ORGANIZING PAINT

"A picture's worth a thousand words," but I'll add a few to explain the photo above, even though it says almost everything already.

I keep my paints in an old wicker picnic basket in the kitchen. That keeps them handy, but hides them. Unfortunately, I can't always tell what color is in a bottle, just by looking into the basket. Shadows distort the shade, and many times I've pulled out a bottle of what I thought was, say, brown, only to find it was purple, and so on. So I do what I'm sure many other people do: I put a dab of paint on the lid. Not only does it show me the color of the paint, it shows how it will look when it's dry.

That's my tiny tip for the day. I'm 100% sure that I'm not the first to think of it, and certainly I won't be the last, but on the off chance this would be helpful to someone else, there it is!