Note-to-Self: Caramel Apple Adventure

Happy Halloween! So this is by far my favorite holiday to celebrate all year...spooky front porch decorations, making fall wreaths, decorating the mantel, carving pumpkins, baking pumpkin seeds, costume craziness, candy, and of course Caramel Apples! There are so many things to do around this fall holiday that I thought I would take my first turn at making Caramel Apples - how hard could this be?

To start out, I actually was able to pick up a kit from Keopsels Farm in Baileys Harbor, WI on my last trip in August. This kit looked like a lot of fun, and very tasty too!

Keopsels Caramel Apple Kit

Next, I was able to set out all of my items that I would be using to construct these apples. In the picture below there are my 6 small to medium green apples, wooden sticks, fluted wax paper cups, chopped peanuts, caramel, and a small hammer.

Keopsels Kit items

Why use Green Apples? Green apples (or Granny Smith Apples) hold up better than any other apple because of its firm skin and crisp interior - these apples will not mush on you!

My first task was to get all of the wooden sticks into the green apples. By using a small hammer, I was able to tap lightly on the end of the sticks (which were tapered at one end) to go nicely into the apples. Turn the apples upside down so that the bottom is facing up towards you.

Green Apples with wooden sticks inserted.

Note-to-Self: Caramel is not your friend! So... the instructions stated to put the container of caramel into the microwave for 1 minute, stir, then another 30 seconds. When I took the caramel out of the microwave I had about one nanosecond to put some caramel onto the first apple before it started to harden! Yuck! I would definitely suggest a double-boiler situation here where you would have a low heat on the caramel to get a nice thin smooth consistency while applying all apples with the caramel. I ended up trying to reheat the caramel for each apple to get a thin covering. This did work, but for future caramel apples, I will for sure do a double-boiler. After getting the caramel onto the apples, then press the apple into the crushed peanuts. I put the crushed peanuts into a smaller bowl so that they were easily managed.

Caramel dipping station.

This was a fun fall project and I was really happy that I learned some new "tricks" for the trade. Below is the final product! Happy Halloween - have a spooky day!

Yummy apples!

Beautiful fall treat!

Good-to-Know (GTK) - Organized Chaos: Wall Frame Collage

Here is a fun GTK for every home. This project works really well for a large blank wall that you may want to hang some photographs, but know that it will take more than one photo frame to cover the wall. There is nothing more disturbing than a large blank wall that has only one small item hung on it, or even a couple tiny random items placed not in relationship to one another. In my living room, I have a large blank wall behind one of the couches. This is the only wall that doesn't have an architectural feature on it, like a set of windows, fireplace, or french doors. This makes it the perfect opportunity to make a wall frame collage.

This is what I call Organized Chaos. One might think, at a first glance, that the arrangement of these photos are random, but really they are well thought out and the placement is calculated making the visual of this collage very appealing.

Here is the wall photo collage finished.

First Good-to-Know:
Within this collage are several horizontal and vertical alignments that make this collage work and also makes the eye read the arrangement in an interesting way. The great thing about this collage is that all of the frames come from different times in life, different places, have different sizes, and have different finishes. They have one thing in common: they are all going on the wall together! And this is what makes the chaos organized.
To begin: make a practice arrangement on the floor in front of the proposed wall. This is where you can try out sizes, shapes, and alignments. In the photo below you can see that the blue line shows the centering of the arrangement on the couch and on the wall. This makes the arrangements the centerpiece of the wall and really brings it to life.
Next: the white lines represent the vertical alignments of the photos and the black lines represents the horizontal alignments. By doing this, you make sense of the different sizes, shapes, and colors and really make the arrangement cohesive.

This photo shows the blue centering lines with white vertical and black horizontal lines.

Second GTK:
As you are pretty happy with the arrangement that you have pre-arranged on the floor below the selected wall, take one last look at the composition (and maybe take a picture of it to remember what goes where). In the photo below you will notice an oval shape over the wall arrangement. This oval represents the organization of the arrangement that your eye follows as it sees the outer-edges of all of the frames and it begins to make a circular motion. This seemingly simple configuration makes a great focal wall without competing with the other prominent architectural features of the room.

This photo shows the oval superimposed over the collage making this a true focal wall.                             

How-To: Conventional Item - Creative Use

Through my adventures in home decor I always love finding a creative use for a conventional item and also reusing what I have in a new way. Here are two examples of fun ways to use seemingly simple items.

Item 1: Wall Decor in a new way.
I was looking for something fun and graphic to go on the wall in our bedroom as a centerpiece above the bed. I wandered into Pier One Import and found a wire leaf basket that is normally used to hold fruit or other items. Background info: while in Architecture school, our professors would always take our finished models and turn them upside down or on its side and then proceed to hand it back to us and say "there, that is how it should look", namely, the lesson in that is: always challenge your ability to look at things differently. So, I took the wire leaf basket and turned it on its side as if it were to be hung on the wall and AMAZING! I grabbed the last two baskets and had Scott nail them onto the wall centered on the headboard. I love the way that they look on the wall, they add height to room by drawing your eye up to the ceiling, they emit a leaf shadow onto the wall from the sunlight, and by pairing two baskets it repeats the element and reinforces the design creating a graphic effect.

The original item used to hold everyday items.

The new use for the wire leaf basket over the headboard.

Item 2: Recycle, Reduce, Reuse!
In our first house we had a kitchen that was noted as the "Contractor's Special", being that this kitchen was installed with low-end generic cabinets from a big box retail store. My husband and I decided to paint the majority of the cabinets in a beautiful vanilla white and add hardware (that is a whole other project!). The cabinet that was over the refrigerator was ill-proportioned and took up too much dead space. We took out that upper cabinet and added open shelving, which really expanded the use of the space (and another whole project). As the upper cabinet was sitting on the floor of our outdoor screened in porch I thought, that would make an exceptional BOOT BENCH! We really needed a boot bench on our porch - what a great opportunity! So I went to work with these steps...
1. Sand and Paint the cabinet
2. Cut and mount wood footings to each corner
3. At the craft store, buy a thick foam rectangle and cut it to fit in the inlay of the top of the cabinet
4. Buy some duck cloth from the craft store and sew it to fit around the foam cushion
5. Enjoy!
What a great use out of an item (this cabinet retails for $68.00) that we normally would have donated or thrown away.

The original item sold as an upper cabinet.

The new use for the item: a functional boot bench.

The boot bench placed in our new home is functional and stylish.