How To: Clean a Mirror with Water

When one thinks of cleaning glass, I’m sure most people would think of a person armed with paper towels or newspapers and an ammonia-based spray, often colored blue.

Maybe it’s because I love simple ways of doing things or maybe because I don’t like buying single-use products or maybe because I don’t like using chemicals when they’re not absolutely necessary, I found a better way (at least in my opinion) of cleaning a mirror. I specify mirrors because if you can clean a mirror and don’t leave spots or streaks, you can most likely clean any glass successfully.

Here’s what you need:

• 1 microfiber towel, wet, wrung out
• 1 hand towel, dry

Here’s what to do:

1. Wipe a section of the mirror with the slightly damp microfiber towel, cleaning toothpaste splatters, smudges, smears as you go.
2. While that section is still wet, dry with the dry hand towel.
3. Repeat to remaining sections.

There. Done. Simple as pie and no chemicals. Oh, and I never have flecks or smears either, just a super-clean mirror. You’re welcome.

Yarn Baseball

So we had a baseball mitt, something of a bat, but nothing in the line of a ball. My darling children made a ball from yarn and a plastic bag (complete with huge piece of gravel inside! ), but when it hurt my daughter’s knee, I told them I’d make them a ball. The rock idea, as it turns out, wasn’t half bad, but I knew it would need to be well padded. Here is what you’ll need if you want to make your own yarn baseball:

Small rock or stone for center weight

Newspaper to coat the rock (remember rock, paper, scissors? … paper wraps the rock, lol)

Polyfill

Yarn

Yarn needle

Baseball stitching pattern (optional)

Begin by wrapping the stone(s) with newspaper, then cover the newspaper with a layer of polyfill or quilt batting. Wrap snugly with yarn and keep wrapping, turning the ball constantly to keep the shape nice and round until you reach the desired size. To keep the yarn from unwinding, string some of the yarn onto the needle and sew in and out all around the ball to anchor the layers of yarn. Optionally, you can print out a baseball stitching pattern and stitch along that to make it look a little more authentic looking.

The kids love their new ball. It’s a little bouncy (but not overly), it is a good size for playing catch, and it’s soft enough that it won’t cause any injuries to inexperienced ball players. Mission accomplished.

Unconcatenizing a Publisher booklet

I’m pretty sure I did this once before, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to do it this time around. I had made a document in Publisher in booklet format (eg. pages 4 & 1 on one side, pages 2 & 3 on the other side of a single sheet of paper for a 4-page booklet) awhile back and needed it optimized for my tablet (only one page viewable at a time, not a 2-page per sheet spread as in booklet form). I searched and searched before I finally settled on this way to do it:

1) In Publisher, print document with a pdf printer (i.e. CutePDF) and choose Statement for paper size and Portrait for page orientation. Under 2-sided printing options, set it to Single-sided and print.

2) Open unconcatenized file in PDFScissors and choose separate odd and even pages.

Select regions for each odd and even page. Click File, Crop & Save or Ctrl+S to crop and safe as new file.

The margins might not be perfectly even all around, but they will be narrow enough to not take up too much screen real estate from your view of the book.

ETA:

I also tried it in Briss and liked the results even better as it told me the exact dimensions of each page (evens and odds) so I won’t have any discrepancies in page size in the final product.

Extract audio from .flv using VLC media player

 

Since it took me so long to figure this out (with a little help from other tutorials which were imo more laborious than my method, at least the ones I saw), I thought I’d share my way for extracting audio from flash (.flv) files. I saved a bunch of Restoration International videos to my computer using Orbit downloader, then used this method to isolate the sound so I could listen to the talks on my mp3 player.

First, open VLC player. I have version 2.0.6 Twoflower

Ctrl+R opens the Convert/Save window. Click Add… to find the .flv file you wish to manipulate.

Tell VLC where you would like to save the file; name your file.  I do like I do, you’ll select the same .flv file and manually change the .flv to .mp3, click Save.

Click on the drop-down window in the Settings/Profile section and select Audio – MP3, then click start.

You should see a progress bar that looks like this:

When it is finished, you’re good to go!

My “This Can’t Be Sourdough Bread” Recipe

Since I started my sourdough journey on March 12 when a friend of mine showed up at a church social with a jar of starter for me (not something I had asked for, but I’m so glad she did!), it’s been a bumpy ride. At first it just sat in my fridge waiting for its weekly feed. One week I thought for sure I’d killed it because I let it go longer than a week between feeds, but I started feeding it again and it came right back to life. I’ve since learned that wild yeast isn’t that easy to kill and I could have neglected it for a few weeks and it probably, with some coaxing, would still have returned to its former glory.

I finally got brave enough to attempt a loaf of sourdough and used the recipe from S. John Ross’ Sourdough Baking – The Basics website. I actually did make some fairly decent bread to begin with and then the urge for more sourdough experimentation took over and I started trying other recipes and techniques (like baking inside my deep cast iron skillet with a lid on to trap steam), but either the taste (too sour), or the crust/crumb (too tough) weren’t just right and I started to feel downright deflated. My kids were pining for the fleshpots of commercial yeast bread . Also, my starter started to look a little peaked and I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. It wasn’t doubling in 4 hours like I thought it should, it was starting to separate which didn’t look like the Google pictures that I had seen of lovely, vital sourdough starter.

But, I’m not one to give up a fight easily. I had read some interesting reports on the nutritional value of sourdough bread over commercial yeasted breads and I wasn’t wanting to throw in the towel yet. I tried adding a little pineapple juice to my starter which did help some, I also ordered a food scale which, as soon as I started using it, seemed to have an amazing effect on my starter. I realized that I hadn’t been keeping my starter at 100% hydration like I thought, more like 120% or more. When I mixed equal weights of water and flour, the result was more like a wet dough, much less like a thick batter. It was almost hard to stir.

Finally my starter was doing better and I was now on the search for a non-sour (or mildly sour), soft, thin/light crusted sourdough. I tweaked John’s recipe to include an egg (lecithin), milk (dough conditioner), and baking soda (acid neutralization). I also took his advice of lower temps as I’d been baking at much higher temps and the crusts were always so crusty.

I’ve made this recipe a few times now and my kids have stopped wishing for the “old” bread and are quite happy with Mommy’s new wild yeast bread. Geo even got so into things that he’s started his own starter (we’re calling it a science experiment, lol). So, without further ado, here’s my 50%+ WW TCBS bread recipe:

2 c. (500 g.) 100% hydration starter (mine is almost 100% white)

3 c. (400 g.) whole wheat flour

1/4 c. (80 g.) honey (or molasses)

1 egg + milk = 2/3 c. (1 egg + milk = 160 g.)

Autolyze (rest dough) for 30 minutes, then add:

1-1/2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking soda

1 Tbsp. oil

Add more bread flour if needed.

Mix in bread mixer for 5-8 minutes or knead by hand for 8-10 minutes (ok, guessing here, lol).

Place in a greased bowl, coat both sides, cover with plastic wrap (or a plastic shower cap) and let it rest in a warm place (i.e. in the oven with the light on) for 30 minutes to an hour. Punch dough down, knead in bowl till dough firms up a bit. Cover and let rest again. Aim for 3 or 4 punch ‘n’ kneads (or stretch and folds) during the first 4-5 hours. Then turn dough out onto greased surface. Cut dough into half. Place one half back into bowl, take other half, cut side down, on your work surface. Roll out with rolling pin into a long, semi-rectangular shape. Flip bread over so cut side is now facing up. Begin rolling bread at top, rolling toward you all the way to the bottom. Pinch seams. Place seam side down into greased bread pan. Repeat with other 1/2 of dough. Place shower cap (or plastic wrap) on top of each bread pan. Let them rise in a warm place for 2-3 hours, till top of dough is at least 1 inch above top of pan. With a sharp knife or razor blade, slash top of bread in whatever designs you would like. Heat oven to 350°F and bake for 20 minutes. Let bread cool before slicing. Store any bread that’s left in plastic bags like these to keep the bread moist for a few days (if it lasts that long). If you don’t like heels and no one else wants them, they make great breadcrumbs after they’ve been dried.

Note: I aim to have my bread in a pre-cooked dough state for at least 7 hours to give the phytates in the wheat time to neutralize. I personally don’t like my bread to go much longer than 12 hours before baking as that increases the sour taste and we’re not fans of that at this point. I generally aim for 7 hours total dough time, but lately, with the weather being as unseasonably cool as it has been, my bread has inched up closer to the 12 hour mark. Unfortunately for me, the light in my oven is blown. Lately I’ve been mixing the dough first thing in the morning (around 8 a.m.) and then into the loaf pans around 12 or 1 and bake around 3 or 4. It would also work to mix it up before going to bed in the evening, then shaping into loaves in the morning and bake 2-3 hours later, but you’d have to do without any punching down of the dough which I think helps develop the gluten strands.

Diapers from flannel shirts

Here's how I recycle a flannel shirt (this one was 50 cents from a local thrift store) and turn it into a cloth diaper (Rita's Rump Pocket in this tutorial).

1) Cut sleeves off of shirt.






2) Cut collar off and cut along seam between neck and shoulder.






3) Cut front panels off from back section.






4) Sew front halves together where they were cut from back piece (to make outside piece). Or (in the case of this shirt which happened to be huge, I was able to align and sew one of the front panels on to the back after I carefully lined up the stripes. I 3-step zig-zagged them together, then zig-zagged the seam flat to the back of the diaper.

Cut out pieces; If there is a wrong and a right side, make sure that the prints are facing the right way.






5) Sew up diaper.






I'll be placing the seam on the outside of Missy so as to minimize chance of irritation.

Fleece Mittens tutorial

My kids needed some mittens and I figured I could make them some from some fleece scraps I had "lying around." I found another tutorial online for fleece mittens and I really liked them. But I looked at a pair of store bought fleece mittens that I had and I liked the way they were constructed a little better so I altered their pattern to work the way the store bought mittens did and I really like the results.

You don't have to use this pattern, but it will give you an idea of what it's supposed to look like. I actually made patterns for my 3 older ones by tracing their hands, drawing an upside-down U about 1/2" all the way around their hand (fingers together, not spread out), marked where their wrist was (for the elastic placing), and finished the pattern using this as a guide.

The original tutorial said to enlarge the patterns till the grid was 1 inch square (for adult size), maybe 3/4 inch square for a child's hand. Play around with the sizing, find what works for you.

I trace the hand 1/2 inch in from the fold (on a piece of paper folded lenghtwise), make the upside-down U, fold it in half again and cut the rounded part off the top (to make sure it's nice and even on both sides). Then I fold the thumb side in half to the middle fold to get the thumb width. Fold the paper in half from top to bottom to find out how far the cutting line for the thumb should go. Then about 1/2-way from the top of the thumb cutting line to the bottom of the mittens, start drawing the curve for the thumb-tip. Fold the paper in half again from edge to thumb cutting line and cut the curve for the rounded thumb-tip. Fold the thumb part up and make the pattern piece for the thumb. Make it a little longer than it calls for, then cut down if need be. I discovered that the thumb pattern piece runs a bit short.

To cut out the pieces, fold over a piece of fleece, line the pattern up on the fold, and cut the rest out. Then open the fleece, lay the opened pattern on top of it and cut out the thumb flap. If there is a right side and a wrong side to the fleece, make sure to flip the pattern over when cutting out the other thumb flap.

To sew, line up the thumb pattern piece with the thumb flap, sew from the notch around to the other side of the thumb. Stop. Line up the long edge of the thumb piece with the long part of the main mitten piece, and sew together. Sew some elastic to the wrong side where the pattern indicates (or where you noted the location of the wrist). Place right sides of mitten together and sew mitten together. Hem the edge. Turn inside out, enjoy :)