DIY Mason Jar Soap Dispenser

February 12, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 2 Comments

I’ve eyed the useful mason jar soap dispensers made by creative people and thought I’d try to make one myself. Was it difficult? Not at all. This DIY project takes a few minutes to pull off.

All you need is a mason jar with a wide mouth lid, a push pump from a discarded soap or hand cream dispenser (I had to cut mine down so it would fit in my pint jar,) a pair of pliers, and a Sharpie.

Find the center of your flat mason jar lid and punch a hole in it with a can opener (oh right, that’s one more tool you’ll want.)

I was able to make a hole quite easily with my pliers. Draw a circle around the hole that’s in the center of your lid, is in my first picture, and start to pull the hole apart, making it wider and wider.

You simply keep pulling the pieces of metal wider and wider around the edges of your circle until they’re just wide enough for your pump to fit through.

When you have sufficient room for your pump, slip it through but try to keep the fit quite tight.

I pressed the edges of the metal lid down tight against the lid to prevent any future cuts when I need to add soap to my dispenser. You can use a silicone sealant to lock the pump down to its center hole and smooth out your sharp edges.

This whole project took 5 minutes once I had gathered my supplies.

When we went away on vacation our cat knocked over a pretty glass dispenser I gave my husband for Christmas. My husband is the dishwasher after dinner and I wanted him to feel like he had a cool “tool” to use at the sink.

We mostly use baking soda for our dishes, but this liquid soap gives great suds if you like ’em and makes a mild hand soap, too. Our current liquid soap is an extremely watered-down (like 6:1 water to soap) biokleen dish soap.

Valentines: The Original Folk Art Scrap Hack

February 11, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 8 Comments

I remember having to make valentines cards in elementary school for each of my classmates. The handmade cards tended to come from whatever scrap paper, lace, and paper doilies we had around our home. Each valentine was different, a scrapper’s attempt at making beauty from what was available.

And then things changed, and there was a new ethic afoot: Skip the handmade valentine and buy a mass-produced version for your friends, complete with a stash of sweets. All you had to do was fill in your name, the recipient’s name, and add a packet of hearts. It certainly was a time-saver, but these so-called valentines felt like a cop-out and an opportunity for some not-so-creative folks to make money off of us. I’m still a big fan of the hand-crafted valentine. You might say the valentine is an original form of folk art, and some still practice it today.

Our kids, over the past few years, have been assigned, at school, to make valentines for their classmates from materials found in their home. Alas! We could bring back the tradition. Here are a few examples I’ve pulled from our photos over the years:

1) The Traditional Scrap Paper Valentine: We first gathered our scrap paper and cut out traditional hearts on card stock we had rescued from the landfill. We also save pretty scrap paper from magazines and junkmail so we have plenty of colors and textures to choose from for projects like this.

2) A Scrap Fabric Valentine: Then we found some pretty scrap fabric and cut out hearts to glue to the reclaimed card stock. Those felt a little more 3D and folksy.

3) Bookmark Valentines: Cut long strips of paper about 2 inches wide by 6 inches long.

Punch a hole (we punched a star, really) into one end of each strip.

Tie a little ribbon or scrap fabric through the star, and you’ll have bookmarks ready to decorate as useful valentines.

4) Valentine Heart Wands: In our pantry, we found some pie tins and colorful plastic straws we had found on the beach, saved, and washed. These would become our raw ingredients for heart wands we made for several of the students:

Cut a heart out of your pie tin and glue it to the end of a straw. They work with pretty sticks, too. And if you want to embellish your silvery pie tin heart, you can glue a smaller heart to your tin heart.

The Tin Man would be proud.

5) Wire and Yarn Hearts: We often craft wire hearts from scavenged wire and then wrap them in yarn. The children love hanging them around the garden. The little heart below was made by my daughter when the deer ate her bleeding hearts. She was so saddened by the loss of her hearts, she placed a fence around them and crafted this wire heart on the outside for the deer to eat, still leaving them something to enjoy. The sweetness of a 6-year-old is undying.

6) Classic Hand-Stitched Valentine: My daughter love to sew by hand. These hand-stitched valentines took her a month to make, but she poured her love and talent into each one. She left a little pocket in each to be filled with organic jelly beans, her favorite treat we buy in bulk at our local store. These are pretty easy to make so long as you have felt. We asked for felt on our local Buy Nothing group, and neighbors had plenty to share! She cut out hearts in varying sizes with my pinking shears and then layered them and sewed them together, leaving a pocket at the top.

7) Produce Sticker Heart: This one might be a bit of a stretch, but for those health-conscious sweethearts in your life, why not craft a produce sticker heart valentine? It was a cathartic exercise, for me, because those plastic stickers to announce that we’ve bought organic produce bother me greatly. No tutorial necessary, right?

Send in a picture of your own homemade valentines. We’d love to share them with all our sweethearts.

Swiss Chard Is Two Veggies In One

February 10, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 14 Comments

Don’t throw those swiss chard stalks out! We’ve discovered a delicious thing or 3 to do with them.

I’m ashamed to say our swiss chard has been languishing in the garden because our family just hadn’t taken to these easy-to-grow greens, until now…

First, separate your chard leaves from the stalks and cut your stalks into 4″ long pieces. Save them in a bowl. Aren’t they pretty?

Spicy Swiss Chard Chips:

We all know what kale chips are. Well, try making chips with your swiss chard, too. They’re a delicious and nutritious substitute for potato chips. By adding a little garlic powder, salt, and some chili powder, you won’t be able to eat just one.

Turn your oven to 275 degrees. Place your chard pieces on a baking sheet or glass baking pan. Add a tablespoon of olive oil per baking pan and toss the chard leaves with equal amounts of sea salt and garlic powder and chili powder. That’s it! Add your spice to taste and be sure to not make it too salty.

Bake for 20 minutes and then turn the leaves over and bake another 10 minutes if needed. Your bake time depends on your baking dish.

Enjoy!

Chard Stalk Pickles:

Now take your stalks and if you have a bottle of Claussen pickle juice waiting for something delicious to throw in, just stuff a few of your raw stalks in the bottle and within a few hours you’ll have delicious chard stalk pickles. My kids love them.

I found another recipe for delicious pickled swish chard stalks at Cookistry. But if you want to read my entertaining version with home-grown photography, here we go:

Blanch your stalks in boiling salted water for about 3-4 minutes. You want them to stay crunchy so be sure to not overcook them. Drain the stalks and try a few at this stage. Aren’t they delicious? We loved the slightly salted cooked stalks so much we saved a few and had them as a side dish with dinner.

Find a mason jar or 2 and put your stalks in them.

Then, bring the following ingredients to a boil and make sure everything is completely dissolved:

2 cups water
3/4 cup white vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 1/2 teaspoons sugar

Pour your water into your mason jars with chard stalks in them and screw the tops on. Put them in the refrigerator when they’ve cooled and you can enjoy these pickles for a few weeks.

Do you have a favorite chard stalk recipe? I was so excited to find a way to save them from the compost bin or chicken yard I’d love to learn of other chard stalk rescue recipes.

Force Winter Twigs For Indoor Spring Color

February 9, 2016February 9, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 8 Comments

Yesterday, while the birds were gossiping with spring chatter on one of our first days above 50 degrees in weeks, I noticed some pruned wisteria sticks were still in our perennial garden, left over from when my husband had pruned the flowering wisteria last fall. It’s been an extremely wet winter, and I was surprised to find that the wisteria sticks had buds on them. The moisture of the winter rains sustained the cuttings, so they were still alive!

Inspired by Cathy’s “In a Vase on Monday” series, where she puts whatever might be green, even in the dead of winter, into a vase and writes about it, I looked at those wisteria sticks and thought perhaps I could force them for early blooms. And then this post, at Frogend Dweller’s Blog, rocked my Monday, with the reminder that we can collect many different flowering twigs, place them in a vase filled with water, and watch them open over the course of late winter and early spring. I promptly walked around our property and found that there were plenty of twigs barely hanging onto some of our flowering shrubs and trees, having been blown down by winter winds. I grabbed my sharpest pruning shears and gathered what I could:

The varying colors of the stems are stunning in the mid-winter light. From left to right my budding twig offerings are as follows:

Hydrangea

Asian Plum

A Rose of Some Sort (Oh gosh! I just don’t know what kind it is!)

Wisteria

Alder (yes?)

And…um…well….er…I just don’t know what the last one is on the right. Another variety of alder?

Ok, so I don’t know all of my trees and shrubs, but 50% isn’t bad. And then Willa caught wind of the spring fever and wanted to pretend she was one of the sticks, too.

I love how the plum branches have a little moss on them. Did I mention how wet our winters are here?

The twigs were arranged in the nearest watering pot and placed in one of our favorite windows, under the grape pergola with the twists of vine shadows playing with the mid-day light that floods our dining area.

The children and I can’t wait to see what blooms we’ll get from our forced twigs. Be sure to get outside, in the upcoming days, to clip a few flowering twigs of your own to bring some spring leaves and blossoms indoors while you wait out the chills of winter to come.

Special thanks to Frogend Dwellers Blog and Rambling in the Garden for your inspiration. You’ve taken the bite out of winter. I’ve been enjoying your writings immensely.

Oh, and if anyone can help me identify the 3 varietals of twigs I missed, please comment below!

DIY Cat Scratching Post

February 8, 2016February 8, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 7 Comments

Give your kitty what she wants and make a real-tree natural cat scratching post! My theory is that your average carpet-remnant cat scratch tree only encourages your furball to scratch up your carpet or upholstery. If you give your cat what she wants, an actual tree branch to sharpen her nails on, she’ll leave your furniture alone. That’s what our cat does…mostly.

So, we went out to our brush pile and found the perfect curving fat tree limb with two Y branches growing from it so our kitty could have a few spots to climb to. I found a piece of particle board to screw the sawed-off limb onto. It was as simple as that. This scratching post has lasted 4 years and our cat still uses it happily.

We often attach bits of string with fun things for our kitty to bat at, to make it a fun playspace for her.

She loves her real tree cat scratch tree.

But here’s the best thing about this cat gym: When we’re done with it, we can break it down and burn it in our fireplace. No issues about waste here.

Do you have a DIY cat scratching post you can share here?

Olive Oil Tin Turned Celery Container

February 6, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 2 Comments

I love olive oil tins. They’re reminiscent of the Old World where reuse of large tins is commonplace. When I think of how I’ve seen olive oil tins reused, I imagine geraniums on a sunny step in colorful olive oil planters in Italy or hammered out oil tins used as roofing or wall siding in Nepal.

I saved a couple of tins this year and other than using them as a flower vase, I couldn’t think if anything special to do with them. And then my son started having a celery craving. I hate storing celery (or anything) in plastic bags in the refrigerator, so we started storing it in large mason jars with a a couple inches of water for the stalks to stay fresh. And then the idea hit me: Turn an olive oil tin into a refrigerator celery container. It holds 2 large celery bunches perfectly!

You’ll need a Swiss Army-style jack knife with a can opener to remove the oil tin lid. And if that doesn’t work, get out the tin snips. Make sure you bend and file down all rough and sharp edges.

Be sure to put a few inches of water in your tin to keep the celery crisp and fresh. Then, throw it in the fridge! Our celery lasts weeks in this custom-made tin crisper.

Gone are the days of limp celery in the vegetable drawer.

Yarn Scraps Are For The Birds

February 5, 2016February 5, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 7 Comments

Spring is in the air! Save some scraps and bits to offer to your songbirds for spring nest-building. An old suet feeder will do the trick. At this time of year our feathered friends need all the help they can get.

Here are some great items that you can include:

Natural fiber yarn

String

Horsetail Hair

Shredded Paper

Feathers

Hay

Straw

Wool

Small Fabric Scraps

Cotton Balls

Cotton Wadding from Aspirin Bottles

Dried Moss

Twigs

Leaf Stems

Dog Hair

Cat Hair

So, don’t throw your yarn scraps and other bits away. Save them for the birds! In Paonia, Colorado, one spring, my son found the most unique birds nest, made entirely of yarns, hay, polyfibers, human hair, horsetail, and string.

A Wood-Foraging Workout

February 3, 2016February 3, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 8 Comments

It occurred to me, last winter, when high winds blew down so many trees, that I could help clear the trails, rather than just hike them. The added benefit was wood.

Rather than carrying a backpack filled with random items to give me added weight for a pre-expedition workout, I realized the resource I could gather on my hikes was right at my feet. My friend, Yangin Sherpa, walks 5 miles a day to collect wood where she lives. Why couldn’t I?

We heat our home with wood and our property provides most of what we need. But I realized that every day, during the storm season, I was picking up and throwing aside big chunks of wood that had come down the day before onto the trails we hike on our hill.

I bring an empty pack after a windstorm and load it with large chunks blocking the trail that I would otherwise throw aside. There’s so much wood out there, areas where blow-downs outnumber the trees standing. I figure a small payment for my clearing of the trails are the few pieces I can gather to add weight to my gait, to give greater resistance to my uphill climb so I can prepare for the high passes and cliffside traverses we do each summer in the Himalaya.

I find joy in knowing what it feels like to walk 5 miles for a bundle of wood that will keep my family warm for one more day.

What are your simple pleasures?

DIY Bamboo or Stick Fence

February 2, 2016February 2, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 9 Comments

This bamboo fence, in Kalopani, Nepal, is one of my favorite garden fences I’ve come across while traveling. It’s a simple construction of bamboo sticks and woven electrical cord to hold the whole structure together. Here, people use what they have at hand to create beauty in an unforgiving alpine environment at 7,500 feet.

Several 1-foot-high sticks are placed vertically in the ground about 5 inches apart and a long bamboo stick is split down the middle and placed horizontally across the vertical sticks, all woven together by an old electrical cord tied and knotted at the corner of the fence.

It’s a simple construction and quite attractive for a high altitude flower garden at the base of Dhaulagiri, the world’s 7th highest mountain.

If you’re looking for some more interesting ideas for fencing materials, we might have what you’re looking for in our Trash Backwards app.

Click Through for More Fence-Building Ideas

What have you used for fencing?

Wine Cork Pot Lid Grips

February 1, 2016February 1, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 9 Comments

Wine Cork Pot Lid Grips: Lift off hot pot lids with your fingers! Simple wine cork-stuffed handles mean no need for pot holders around the stove. Cram the corks tightly into the handle of your pot lid and you’ll never need to remove them again.