Edit: We’ve made these available on our Etsy shop!
We’ve been together for a little over six months now. About 5 months ago, we started our first of many “weekend” projects. Screen printing was on Arrie’s Life List, so we decided to make some art for ourselves.
This, by the way, isn’t going to be a How To Screen Print post – there are great tutorials everywhere else (for example), and, besides, I’m not that good at it.
EDIT 11/5/2012: We are no longer selling custom crayon pieces in our Etsy shop. We are now focusing on a new jewelry project, so please check that out and we hope you enjoy the tutorial below!
Edit: We are now selling custom crayon pieces in our Etsy shop! If you have questions about commissioning your own artwork, please see the shop or email us at lightandspoon@gmail.com.
Here’s our contribution to the melted crayon craze on Pinterest. My original inspiration was this one, though original source is apparently unknown, because I found it on Pinterest. Grumble. *Edit! Thank you to commenter SoKnitpicky, I have now seen the original “crayons through a glue gun” pin. Not much more to it than the picture, but she answers a lot of questions in the comments about how to make the crayons work in the gun.
Anyway! We wanted to put a little more of ourselves into it, literally. We started by taking a silhouette photo of ourselves, which Jeff traced on the lightbox and transferred to the canvas with pencil and tracing paper. (We were both smiling in the picture, which means we sort of don’t have lips in the silhouette. But I like it that way.) Continue reading
I made my own dishwashing detergent! Following this tutorial from a blog that sadly no longer updates (and which I discovered on Pinterest, of course), I spent a few dollars and five minutes to whip up I-don’t-know-how-many loads worth of detergent. How many? I don’t know, I’m bad at math. Hold on. 
When we moved two houses into one small apartment, we knew we’d be limited on space. We knew we’d be tripping over extra furniture and Craigslisting a lot. I almost wish I could say we combined two full kitchens into one, but that’s a joke. My contribution basically consisted of a mixer, two pots, five beer glasses, and a half-stale package of grits.
Even so, we very quickly ran out of room to store all of Jeff’s culinary equipment. Small appliances like the rice cooker, electric griddle, and a waffle maker (this was actually my birthday present, and I freakin’ love it), filled up the cabinets immediately, leaving the pots and pans out in the cold. Spices alone fill the over-the-stove cabinet. This man came with a real pantry, full of things like vegetable stock, pomegranate molasses, and 12 types of grains, and we had nowhere to put it all.
So we got creative with our “pantry,” AKA the water-heater room off the kitchen. A cheap shelving unit and a pegboard (and one delightful trip to the Container Store) later, our pots and pans are now just behind the door. The lid rack isn’t exactly meant for pegboards, so we need some zip ties to make sure it stays put.
J’s birthday was Wednesday, so I made him a nerdy little cake.
I’m much more of a baker than a cook, but even so, this cake was much easier to make than it looks. But then, it’s sort of a mess, so maybe making it well would have been more difficult. Enough self-deprecation, onto the pictures!
Inspiration was from this post, but since neither of us really care for cake in general, I opted away from taste quality and cake variety and went for outside aesthetics instead. I used two boxes of devil’s food cake in three 8×8 pans and had more than enough (including a few cupcakes for breakfast).
