Pinterest Picks 3

Here are our newest experiments:

Crockpot Lemon Chicken
What's not to love about a recipe with a total of 4 ingredients that's cooked in a crockpot? This is one of those pins that drives me crazy...if you click it, it doesn't take you where you're expecting to go. However, it's kind of hard to mess up and the description gives you enough info to make the recipe without having an actual recipe. I wish I had made extra so we could have had leftovers!

Creamy Cheesy Potatoes
There are so many good things in this recipe! Cheese! Cream Cheese! Sour Cream! I mean how can you go wrong? The recipe says to use 6 potatoes. I only had 5, but they were on the large side and I think it was maybe one too many potatoes (my preference is to have more sauce). It turned out well, but I think in the future I would skip using real garlic and use garlic powder instead. I don't like the weird crunch that garlic has when the rest of the dish is kind of smushy. What made this dish even better was adding a little ranch dressing to it. Yum!

I also decided to use the homemade cream of chicken soup recipe from the same source as the Creamy Cheesy Potatoes recipe. I went ahead and pinned it here:

Homemade Cream of Chicken Soup
This was so easy and the final product looked and smelled just like I would expect of the condensed version you buy in a can, but without the weird mystery ingredients. I don't always have chicken broth on hand, so that's the only thing that would keep me from just making my own from now on.

Crescent Roll Casserole
It really sounded like a good idea, but we didn't like the texture of the finished product. It's a good idea in theory, but the rolls stayed gooey from cooking in the soup.

One Pot Mac & Cheese
I have made this several times and it's so easy and only dirties up one pot! I usually add a little browned hamburger meat to it and it's like Hamburger Helper, but way better! This time, my helper accidentally added a TABLESPOON of salt instead of a TEASPOON. Whoops! :) I wouldn't suggest doing that.

These (and all of my previous pinterest trials) are saved here: Tried and True Recipes

Linking up here:

Homemaking Party at Hope in Every Season

Shabby Shadowbox

I've really been wanting to do a little project with a bird nest to tie in the decor of the second master bath to the bedroom.

I already shared some artwork that's in the bedroom, so I thought a nest would work well without being too matchy-matchy.

It started with this shadow box. I really wanted a white one, but the only ones that Hobby Lobby had that would be deep enough for this project were black.



Luckily, I just happened to have some white acrylic paint. :)

I did a quick little paint job on it. I didn't want it to look too perfect, so I left it at the point where some of the background was still showing through. It would look nice with a solid white too or a complementary color, but it's all about personal preference.

To complete the project, I gathered the cast of characters below, plus a hot glue gun. (What would we do without hot glue guns?!)



The shadowbox was 8X10, but when I cut the paper down to that size, it was a little too snug, so I trimmed it down a little. I actually trimmed it a little too much, but thank goodness I wasn't trying to make it look perfect.

After I trimmed the paper down, I hot glued it to the backing of the shadowbox. Here are my helpful hot glue gun hints for this project:

1. Have extra glue sticks within reach
2. Don't try to glue the whole surface at once. Line up your paper like you want it and start in one corner, pressing it down as you glue it.

In other words, learn from my mistakes.

Here's the final product:



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