ATTN: Crafters Everywhere...

With not working right now, I have had more time to not only stay on top of the cleaning in our home, but also find little ways to make it feel more like home, and not just an apartment. It has been a lot of fun getting creative and finding cheap, small ways to transform our living space into something that fits our family. One of the things I generally have a hard time with is meal planning... I am not a big fan of cooking anyway, but when I have to do it last minute, I am especially bad at coming up with a good recipe :) So I recruited some help from my book blog, and found a great book that gave me the idea of creating this simple, cute menu planner:

The great thing about this was that I had almost everything I needed in my home, and it cost me about $4 to make (I could have easily found a frame for less than that, at a garage sale or something, but I was impatient...) 

The book is called Petit Collage, and Lorena Siminovich does a stupendous job of coming up with cute, creative ideas and also making them easy to follow. The book is full of pictures that give the reader a clear idea of what the project will/should look like, and the back of the book has pages of templates for the projects! While books like this can easily turn an enthusiastic beginning crafter into a discouraged one, Petit Collage will make crafters of all skill levels feel prepared to start creating :)

To learn more about the author, who also writes children's books, click here.

This book was given to me free from the Blogging For Books program.

The Search for Not-So-Greasy Alternatives

As some people may know, I have recently had a run with some health issues, one being gastritis, or inflammation of the stomach lining. This issue can be caused by many things, some of those being stress, greasy foods, excessive vomiting, or even certain medications. The thing that doctors usually tell you to do first to try and control it (beside heartburn medicine) is to eat the world's most bland, boring diet. 

While I wasn't too excited about this, I definitely didn't want to go through another bout of inflammation, seeing as how it felt like I was having an hour-long contraction... So I decided to go with the bland diet. In my search, I found that I was able to choose and review "The Blender Girl", a recipe book by Tess Masters with 100 gluten-free, vegan recipes inside. I was excited when I got the book, and set to work perusing the recipes right away. I was a bit disappointed in what I found; while the recipes sounded good, many of the ingredients involved were foreign to me. And the ones I did recognize were a bit pricey! 

The recipes I did make were pretty tasty, and fit the bill when it came to my bland die -- Tess Masters did a good job at making 'boring' food delicious, and it was a good feeling knowing that I was feeding my body healthy options instead of sugar and dyes. The recipes are easy to follow, and I also enjoyed the amount of pictures in the book -- that always helps in choosing a recipe to make!
For more information on this book and the author, click here.

I received this book for free from Blogging For Books for this review.