12 weeks until Christmas!

Yipee, 12 weeks until Christmas! And this beautiful KitchenAid Dutch oven is coming my way! (I'm going to feign surprise.) As much as I try not to be gifty-minded, I love practical gifts, and this one happens to be on sale this week for $29 at Canadian Tire - the regular price is $99! I'm in a peachy frame of mind - I love Thanksgiving, I love fall, I love decorating and coziness, and I love craft fairs, of which I have two coming up. So I made five batches of soap tonight after Phillip went to bed, including the 'glaze' for my chocolate soap 'cake'. Photos to come.

painting, painting

Here's our painted back door and house! We've been working away to get more of it painted before it's too cold. I LOVE it. It looked like this when we bought the house. Yellow and brown. We've been poking away at painting and fixing and replacing things according to our time and budget, and it's easy to forget what it looked like before. We've come a long way, baby. The funny part is that only this back section of the house will be painted for the winter; the rest of the house will have to wait until next summer. Which is fine; I'm learning patience through this whole project!

chocolate soap cake

I try not to post the same things here and at my other blog too often, but I think this one's worth it. My first soap cake, in dark, rich chocolate, and coloured with pure cocoa powder. The middle part, which is lighter in the pictures, turned darker almost immeditely after cutting, and looks beautiful. Mmmmmm. I'm planning on glazing this with some vanilla soap later this week, and having a few of these at my Christmas craft fairs. Cute, eh?

And we fared fine through the storm, thanks! It was still a hurricane when it landed, but quickly lost its oomph and only a few branches from our trees were broken. We didn't even lose power, for which we were thankful.

I'm cooking up a storm this evening, making calzones to freeze and have on hand, as well as some of that heavenly crockpot crème brulée I linked to before. And hopefully a couple of batches of soap - I'm trying to keep up with demand, but people just can't get enough soap! I thought I was getting lots stocked up for the big craft fair at the end of this month, but a local store ordered lots to sell, which depletes my stores. Which is a lovely problem to have. Happy Monday!

quickie

The rain has begun, and Kyle is expected to arrive overnight. I'm cautiously hoping that power to the schools I am to visit tomorrow will be out. (But only the power to those schools, and only long enough for the decision to be made to close them for the day - is that specific enough?) We've battened down, and are hoping things aren't too damaging, but I'm expecting we'll have some yard cleanup to do afterward. Hope you fare well, if you're in the area.

On a completely different note, this is the funniest blog post I have read in a long time.