Mix it Up Monday

It's Monday! Emilee mentioned in her last post about changing things up a little on Mondays. We thought it would be a good way to jump start each week and to add a few new little flavors to the blog without changing it completely. So today is our first Mix it Up Monday. What will we be featuring on these Mix it Up Mondays? 

• Full tutorials for projects we are frequently emailed. We can just sit and explain how to do something in a big obnoxious paragraph, but it always helps to have a visual of the whole process set-by-step. Some of the projects currently on the list are the bleached shirts, the hair bow, and Oreo pops. 
• Guest posts from various writers. We have our first few lined up and we're excited! 
• A man's point of view on Pinterest and Pinstrosity. Our dashing and daring husbands have agreed to jump in every now and then to give their perspective on life, pins, and projects. They even have a few Pinstrosities of their own to share. 
• We're thinking about doing a post every now and again with a Show and Tell of Pin Wins and Spins that we have been sent. We still encourage you to send your Pin Wins over to Pin-n-Tell, but we do occasionally get one sent to us. As Pin Wins aren't really the focus of this site we don't post them too often, but maybe an occasional show and tell would be fun. Yea or Nay?   
• Some Mondays we all just need a bit of cheer and motivation. Sometimes it may be an encouraging thought and a humorous photo we found on Pinterestt. Warning...we do have a quirky sense of humor.  We may even post up an old favorite...like this one that's fits today's post well: (just wait, you'll understand):



http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/04/06

• More of our personal Pinstrosities. We're not immune to having Pinstrosities by any means. We started this site to make fun of ourselves and all of our Pinstrosities and it has turned into such a fun community of Pinstrosipeeps. We love getting all your submissions and we try to feature them as much as we can; consequently we have tried to cut back on featuring our projects. But trust me, we still have Pinstrosities. Every does. Some just don't want to admit it. I'm sure Martha Stewart still has her share of things that don't work perfect the first time...but in her business it doesn't really sell well to show those ones. That's why we're here...to show it's normal. 

We have other ideas in the works, but that is what we're starting with for now. I'm excited and I hope you are too!

For the first Mix it Up Monday I was hoping to have something awesome all lined up and ready, but this weekend ended up kicking our butts (notice the lack of posts last week). The tutorial we were going to film just didn't happen. However, I did have an interesting weekend with a few "disasters" of my own. They weren't really disasters...one was a wardrobe malfunction and one was a Pinstrosity. I'll tell you about them.

So Thursday I got to work and was standing at the front of the store talking to my boss about what we needed to do that day when all the sudden I realized that my behiney felt quite breezy...and I wasn't wearing a skirt. While trying to stay engaged in the conversation I knew I needed to figure out what was going on. So I covertly smoothed out my shirt in front and went to smooth it out in back and discovered that the cheeks on either side of my nose were now not the only visible cheeks on my body. Visible cheek count was now up to 3. I think I made a weird noise or face because Judy stopped and looked at me funny. I couldn't help but laugh and I said, "I just found a rip in my pants." And so I turned around. She died laughing (so did I, so it's okay). I have NO idea when or where or how that happened. I'm really hoping that it happened after I took the tour of the childcare center that I will be taking school pictures for here in a month. Luckily I wore a long sweater today and tried to just pull the sweater down. It worked for about an hour, but the split started to grow down my leg and finally even the long sweater wouldn't cover it. So now I am the proud owner of a pair of gray Jeggings because WalMart was out of my size in all jeans (in our town...WalMart is just about it for choices...and I needed something cheap and fast). 

RIP favorite white pants. :( At least they died awesomely and with good humor. 

My Pinstrosity came the following day. Well, actually this one spans two days. It was one of those projects that seemed an awesome Pin Win at first and then it deteriorated. Let me show you what I was trying to do: 

The Original Pin

http://www.cakestudent.com/sweetheart-cherry-pies/

I saw that pin last week and instantly saved it. I love making pies and these looked so easy and pretty. A group of us were all getting together Friday night to dance (because how often do you get the chance to dress up and dance with your sweetheart once you leave high school? not often). We were trying to keep things as easy and cheap as possible so we just asked people to bring a small plate of finger food as their "entrance fee". That way we didn't have to spend a ton on refreshments, but there would still be some munchies at the dance. I decided that I wanted to make these little mini pies, but I didn't have fresh fruit or ricotta cheese so I knew I'd have to improvise. I did have a bag of frozen mixed berries in the freezer and I found we had a block of cream cheese on hand so I figured I would combine them to make a creamy center. 

The Pinstrosity

I whipped up my pie crust recipe (seriously, it's so easy and yummy...tastes way better than the frozen ones) and used a cookie cutter to cut out the hearts.

For the filling I mixed 4 oz. cream cheese, a spoonful of my grandma's awesome homemade Prickly Pear Jelly, about a cup of frozen berries and a small squirt of berry pomegranate MiO. The filling tasted amazing. I was so proud of myself. 

Doesn't that just look appetizing?

I know...my pans aren't beautiful. I need to test out that cleaning a cookie sheet pin I've seen all over the place. But really...it does the job stains or no stains, so I don't really care too much. 

I then placed half of the hearts on a cookie sheet and dropped a small amount of filling on each heart with a spoon. I wasn't sure how much the filling would spread, so I tried to keep it conservative-ish.  

I then carefully placed another crust heart on top, trying hard not to squeeze the filling out (but I didn't succeed with all of them as you see below).

I dipped my fingers in water and then carefully pushed the top layer of the mini pies down to join the two pieces. I was trying to seal the edges and give the heart more of a 3-D shape.

I threw them in the oven and baked them at 350 for about 8-10 minutes. When they were done I pulled them out and immediately sprinkled powdered sugar on them. 

The sides separated some, but I only had one ooze out bad. I was pretty excited. Cameron thought they were a little flavorless, but he eats a pie for the filling...I eat the pie for the crust! Next time I'll try and beef up the filling some, but it wasn't bad this time. This looked like a Pin Win to me. And they were...for an evening. People ate them and enjoyed them at the dance, but I did end up with a few left over. The following morning I had an early morning fundraising event with the girls from church so I figured I would bring the leftovers so I wouldn't eat all of them by myself. I had one that morning, and they seemed okay, but they didn't taste as good as the night before. I blamed it on having a dusty mouth from working outside that morning. Fast forward to that evening...we finally got home after a long day and I brought everything in out of the car. I pulled one of these out of the bag and started chomping down and stopped mid chew. It was disgusting. I thought it must just be a weird one with maybe a bad berry or something, so I threw it in the trash and grabbed another one. Same disgusting taste. It tasted like a bug died in my mouth. Cameron tried one and he said that one was gross. So we threw them all away. I don't know what happened between the dance and the following evening, but it wasn't good. The only thing I can think is that they should have been refrigerated because of the cream cheese, but I've made cream cheese filled cookies before and they were fine out of the fridge for 3 days (couldn't tell you any longer after that because they were all gone).  I definitely want to try this again and try the original filling recipe and then see if I can get mine to work right. 

You know...sitting here typing up the mini-pie story really makes my mouth water for a good meat pie. Maybe I'll go experiment with making mini-meat pies...that sounds so yummy. Oooh, and I even have shredded chicken in the freezer. Done. Mini Pie Experiment #2 coming up...