3 uses for your old mascara wand

Before tossing a dried up tube of mascara, make sure to salvage your wand. After a good cleaning, an old mascara wand is a perfect tool for cleaning, primping and crafting.

1. Beauty Tool

Your mascara wand can make you look your best long after your mascara has dried up. Use it to brush your eyebrows, separate clumped eyelashes and clean under your nails.

2. Cleaning Tool

These little wonders are perfect for cleaning jewelry, hair dryer vents, computer key boards, car vents and a variety of other cracks and crevices.

3. Craft Tool

When a craft project requires the precise placement of a dab of glue or detailed painting, turn to an old mascara wand for help.

This post is linked here:

Root Beer Birthday

A special someone recently turned 30.



We had a pretty simple get together with friends and family the weekend prior to his birthday.

On the actual day of Blake's birthday, I wanted to make something special. Blake loves root beer, so I found a couple of ways to work that into his celebration.

First, there was the 30-bottle root beer sampler pack that I put together.



Then, I actually found a way to use root beer in the main course!



Root Beer BBQ
2 lbs. pork loin
1 20 oz. bottle of root beer
1 bottle honey BBQ sauce

Place the pork and root beer in a crock pot. Cook on low heat for 8 hours. Remove the pork from the crock pot, shred it and cover with BBQ sauce.

This post linked here:

St. Patrick's Day Love Notes

I wanted to do something sweet for Blake after he spent Saturday night cleaning up the mess I made by clogging the sink. I printed out shamrocks from clip art, wrote things I liked about him on each one and put them in an envelope that read "Reasons I'm Lucky to Have You."

This post has appeared here:

Guinness Chocolate Sauce

 

Last night Blake and I were in charge of babysitting Pete at Blake's dad's house. 

We took the opportunity to have a little St. Patrick's Day feast. I made shepherd's pie and Irish soda bread for dinner followed with ice cream covered with Guinness chocolate sauce. My first thought was why ruin a good thing (chocolate) with Guinness. But I was looking for a challenge. I combined the Guinness recipe with a traditional chocolate sauce recipe and I'm glad I did. It was delicious!

 
Guinness Chocolate Sauce
1 cup Guinness stout beer
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder
3 Tbsp. butter diced
1/4 tsp. vanilla

Combine beer, sugar and cocoa in a sauce. Bring to a boil over medium heat and let simmer until syrupy (appx. 30 minutes). Remove from heat and whisk in butter and vanilla. Let cool, and serve over ice cream.


Pete kept an eye on the cooking, but he apparently didn't do a very good job because I ended up clogging the sink with potato peels. We worked on it all night, including two trips to the home improvement store, with no luck. A friend of Blake's dad finally had to come over this afternoon with a heavy-duty plumbing snake to take care of the issue.

St. Patrick's Day Care Package

St. Patrick's Day was the theme for Ben's latest care package. Instead of some over-sized shamrock sunglasses or flashing beer mug, I wanted to include some practical items. The package included:

1. Lucky Charms
2. Potatoes
3. Granola bars, candy and gum with green packaging
4. McDonald's gift card for a shamrock shake

Engagement Photo Guest Book

My soon-to-be sister-in-law had a great idea for her guest book. She had her engagement photos made into a photo book that will be at the wedding for guests to sign with a silver marker.

There is plenty of black space around the images for guests to leave messages.

It is such a great way to make use of engagement photos, which often get forgotten after the big day.

I plan to reuse her idea, but I think this would also be a great idea for a birthday party or wedding anniversary.