Best favourite thing this week — home­made ice cream with­out a machine, with­out shak­ing, but with con­densed milk! Con­densed milk has got to be one of my favourite foods. My friend Annie point­ed me to the recipe on Kevin and Aman­da and I can’t wait to try it :D

 

Sec­ond best thing I came across this week — home­made “Febreze”! Made with fab­ric soft­en­er and bak­ing soda, plus water. Also a must-try! From Fake-It-Fru­gal.

 

Aren’t these adorable? Per­fect for a back-to-school gift. How-to on Scis­sors Paper Wok.

 

Oooh look! A sim­i­lar method of image trans­fer as my recy­cling bin kalei­do­scope, but used on glass votive hold­ers, with old pho­tos! How-to on Inspired Ideas.

 

Anoth­er styl­ish men shirt refash­ion from Cot­ton & Curls. I actu­al­ly have this one cut out already, with one of Mike’s old white dress shirt, will post results once I get around to sewing it togeth­er! :D

 

This is bril­liant! And pret­ty self-explana­to­ry. Make mini pom poms with a fork from The Bak­er’s Twine. (But of course one could just use reg­u­lar yarn.)

 

Came across some great ways to reuse mason jars this week. One that I like very much is the mason jar herb gar­den from Weep­ing Cher­ries. Like a ter­rar­i­um, and edi­ble! :D

 

This would be great for a young per­son going off to col­lege, I think! Mason jar sewing kit, from Say Yes! to Hobo­ken.

 

Very cool-look­ing way to turn mason jars into porce­lain-like con­tain­ers — with hot glue and spray paint! From Pure & Noble.

 

Very com­pre­hen­sive tuto­ri­als to make dif­fer­ent flow­ers with crepe paper from the Martha web­site — it demon­strates how to make every­thing from petals to sta­mens to leaves! In the pho­to­graph they look so realistic!

 

This is very neat — fold an enve­lope with a heart-shape piece of paper! Per­fect for dai­ly love notes to hide in lunch bags. From Forty Weeks and then Some.

 

I’ve been look­ing for this for the favourite things posts, and final­ly spot­ted it on Pin­ter­est. I know that I first saw it in a Martha Stew­art Liv­ing mag­a­zine, but I can’t seem to find any link for it. But any­way, the pho­tos explains very well how it works, and the cab­bage prints look quite amaz­ing! Some­thing to try one day.

 

A dain­ty lace hair­pin from McLaugh­lin Designs. I love the colour of the one pictured.

 

The way that this archi­tect uses space is inspir­ing. He actu­al­ly looks pret­ty com­fort­able in his 78 square-foot apart­ment — check out the video tour on Cur­bly! And I kind of envy how he does­n’t have a lot of stuff. Even the thought of mov­ing now would make me cringe, because we’ve got so much stuff… not so much stuff we buy, but gifts, things I make, things I col­lect from the beach or the park. But before I got mar­ried my pos­ses­sions were pret­ty stream­lined too because of lack of space. My first apart­ment was about 100 square-feet. It did have a bath­room, and a clos­et, but no kitchen, just a microwave and a bar fridge. I had a pull-out couch which takes up pret­ty much all of the apart­ment when fold­ed out into a bed. I would have to fold it back into a couch every morn­ing. It was also on the top floor of a 3‑story build­ing with­out an air con­di­tion­er so it got real­ly, real­ly hot in the sum­mer. I lived there dur­ing the heat wave of 2005, and I moved out after a year. Not real­ly because of the size of the place (I actu­al­ly quite liked it; in my sis­ter’s words, it was rather quaint), but most­ly because the heat was pret­ty unbear­able and it was kind of lone­ly to live by myself. Any­way, I digress…

 

Final­ly, thank you very much for all the feed­back about the favourite things posts! I ini­tial­ly start­ed record­ing my favourite things so I can keep track of projects I want to try one day, or ideas that inspire me. But I’m real­ly hap­py that vis­i­tors to this blog enjoy these posts as much as I do, and that they feel inspired by these ideas and find them help­ful too! Thank you so much for your encour­age­ment and kind words!

Have a great week­end, every­one! :D