Happy Halloween!

In the Shop: "I Must Dash" Cross Stitch Pattern

I'm in the process of making some different cross stitch patterns for my Etsy shop, and I've officially listed my first one!

Clever pun combined with a mustache reference? What's not to love!

This is a super simple pattern and the finished product fits perfectly in a 5"x7" frame. And the best part? The pattern will only set you back two bucks!

Check my Etsy shop often as I have some awesome projects I'm working on that would be great Christmas gifts.

Best Sugar Cookie Dough Recipe EVER!

I've tried many, many sugar cookie dough recipes, but none compares to this recipe I found last year in the Thanksgiving Point December newsletter. So delicious! If you make these let me know how they turned out!

The Famous Emporium Kitchen Sugar Cookies

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract
1 egg
1/2 cup sour cream
3 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Directions:
Cream the butter and sugar together in a large mixer bowl set on medium speed. Add the egg, vanilla, almond extract and sour cream and continue mixing until blended well. Scrape the sides of the mixing bowl if necessary.

Add dry ingredients slowly to the cookie dough, mixing until thoroughly combined. Mixture should become a ball in the mixer. Wrap dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1-2 hours.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Roll dough out on a lightly floured surface. Roll until cookie dough is 1/4 inch thickness. Cut out cookies in with cookie cutters and place on parchment-lined cookie sheet. Cook for 8-10 minutes or until done. Remove from oven and allow the cookies to cool on a wire rack before frosting. Frost each cookie with thinned buttercream frosting.

Faking It

My husband Sean and I recently switched rooms with the boys to give them more space to play. What I thought would be a very simple task turned into a few weeks of slowly migrating things from one room to the other, organizing closets, and decorating. Our room is much smaller now, but we really don't need the extra space. The thing that did bother me as soon as we got our bed and side tables in place was this:

Anyone else's OCD alarm going off? That window is so sadly off-center and I just couldn't handle it. So how do you disguise a very unbalanced window? Fake it with draperies!

First I measured the wall to determine where the center of the wall was. Then I measured the drapery rod and determined where it needed to be mounted in order to center it on the wall.

I marked with pencil on the wall, in 1'7" on each side and down from the ceiling 6" (a great way to make sure your marks are level if you don't have a level is to measure down from the ceiling). Here you can see where my marks were made. And you can definitely see how off-center the window is. But don't worry, the drapes will cover them up!

I mounted the hardware on the wall (to be discussed in more detail in another post), put up the drapery rod and black drapes, and voila!

No more off-center window here! Doesn't it look so much better? Amazing what you can disguise with window treatments!

Welcome!

Welcome to {jill of all trades}

My name is Anne and I'm a wife, stay-at-home-mom, and wannabe artsy-fartsy woman living in Orem, Utah. The idea for this blog came from a conversation I had with my husband one night. After looking at a sewing blog with some really amazing projects, I sighed and said that I wished there was just one thing I was really, really good at. Instead, I'm forever doomed to be a Jill of all trades, master of none. "I know what you mean," he'd said, "but that's not so bad, is it?" The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it's actually really fun (and useful!) to have a bit of knowledge about many different topics, and I'd love to share the little tidbits of information I've learned with others!

This blog is for all of us fake-it-'til-you-make-it types who try our hardest to express our creative side while simultaneously having absolutely no idea what we're doing.

What you can expect from this blog: tips, tricks, and projects on everything from organization to cooking, interior design to crafting. Once a week I'll also have posts from guest bloggers so you don't get sick of hearing from me all the time.

Thanks for stopping by my little corner of the web! I hope you stay a while and return often!

If you'd like to contact me, please send an email to the following address:

shesajillofalltrades@gmail.com