Freedom Giveaway Hop

Giveaway Is Closed


Happy Cananda Day

AND

Happy Independence Day!

I have a wonderful treat 

for all my dear readers

to celebrate!

The Freedom Giveaway Hop 

is a blog hop giveaway

that is 

200 blogs strong!

Hosted by

I am A Reader Not a Writer

AND

Simply Stacie

This giveaway features 200 bloggers

all giving away something book related.
Please go check out all the 
participating blogs
 here!

So this is what I 
have for you dear readers:

One copy of 

Simple Stitches Crochet

by Carol Meldrum

This book is perfect for the novice

crocheter. 

The patterns are clear and

easy to follow and the projects are 

SO

pretty!

This book retails for $17.95

and you can have it

for 

FREE!

Here are the details:

Open to US and Canadian 

mailing address only

1. Follow NekoKnits via GFC

2. "Like" NekoKnits on Facebook

Fill out the form below for 

EACH 

entry!

Winner will be

announced on 

July 8th!

  

          

Proud to Be Canadian

Hello readers!

Happy Birthday 

to 

Canada

A day early,

but there is a reason for it!

Since I have been on a Scrabble Pendant
kick lately.

I decided to make a few to celebrate

July 1st.

What do you think?

These are

already sized down to 

fit on a scrabble tile.

Maybe you will

grab them and

make a few to

celebrate!

As always

I am happy to share,

but please

give credit where credit 

is due.

Happy Canada Day, eh! 

These images are for personal use only,

(Unless you want to cut me in in the profit!)

Kitty

My First Scrabble Tile Pendant

I have been obsessed with 

Scrabble tile pendants as I am

sure you are all well aware of.

But

I just HAD to show this one 

off to all of you dear readers.

I love how this turned out!

The blues are so pretty, 

and the crow is a little

different.

Not the worlds best picture,

but I think it gives you the

right idea.

The bails are super easy to put on.

Just a drop of Super Glue

and it is on there forever!

If you look close on this angle there

is a small air bubble.

But it's hard to see when wearing it.

I'm putting one up in the 

Etsy Store

Hang tight for a tutorial,

I'll share what I learned with you!

But in the mean time,

what do you think?

Korean Style Beef Ribs

I don't usually buy beef ribs.

For one thing they usually come in 

HUGE

family sized packages

and 

being part Korean, 

I prefer beef short ribs

or galbi

as we call it.

But this weekend climbed to 113 here in Phoenix!

There was no way the 

Mr or I wanted to cook in the kitchen 

so 

barbecue was the only other option.

At the grocery store 

I notice beef ribs were on 

for a great price.

And there was a package of smallish ribs.

We haven't had galbi in ages because of 

the outrageous price of short ribs.

So, 

I grabbed the ribs, 

took them home and made them up 

gabli style!

YUM!

These are super easy to make,

and I haven't met anyone who doesn't

like them.

Grandma's Galbi Marinade:

(This amount makes roughly 1 pound of beef ribs)

4 tablespoons of Soy Sauce 

6 tablespoons of Mirin (Japanese rice wine)

1/2 a Kiwi (ripe as possible)

2 stalks of Green Onion chopped

1-2 teaspoons of Garlic Powder

1-2 teaspoons of Sugar

a few drops of Sesame Seed Oil

Mash the kiwi in a bowl until mush.

Add Soy Sauce and Mirin and whisk together.

Add sugar to taste, the amount usually depends on how sweet your kiwi is.

Add Garlic Powder to taste, if you like you can substitute fresh garlic and whisk well.

Add Green Onion and Sesame seed oil.

Pour over beef ribs and allow to marinate over night, then grill!

  This recipe is done in approximate measurements. This is the on recipe my grandma was able to teach me growing up and I learned in watching and tasting. Grandma's English wasn't very good but she could tell me if it tasted right. 

  

  Taste the marinade before pouring over your meat, if you like it go for it, if not play until it tastes right. I will tell you that the kiwi is key. It adds flavor AND tenderizes your meat.

I hope you like it,

it is my favorite recipe that 

grandma used to make.

And my husband swears it's the

reason he married me!

Karmacrochet Winners!

Happy Monday 

dear readers!

As promised 

here are the winners

of the Karmacrochet 

Giveaway!

Random Integer Generator

Here are your random numbers:

22	94

Timestamp: 2011-06-28 00:38:54 UTC

Which means,

the winner of the 

Scrabble tile pendant 

is

Entry #22

Christine!

The winner of a choice of 

magnet or pinback set 

is

Entry #94

Francine Enger!

Ladies congratulations

and a huge thank you to

Patricia 

at 

Karmacrochet

for 

sponsoring this giveaway.

Improvising

I love trying new crafts,

but that usually means having 

to buy all the supplies needed.

And

as you all know it's really hard

to do that on a students budget.

Yesterday I found this 

beautiful fabric

Only $1.99 for the quarter.

Perfect for kanzashi flowers.

I could really use a

 nice fabric cutting board so 

my squares come 

out with straight edges

But, 

I can't afford one.

So, 

what is a gal to do?

Improvise 

of course!

So this is how I cut my little

fabric squares for kanzashi flowers

Remember that Scrabble game I got

from a friend at work?

The grid pattern is very useful for

lining up your fabric edge.

I used a the bound edge of a 

magazine to line up my markings

and draw a line on my fabric

The squares came out darn near 

perfect!

Now I need some 

little rounds of felt.

A water bottle cap is 

the perfect size. 

And I LOVE these mini

Sharpies!

I have a ton 

of left over squares.

And

one very 

pretty hair clip.

Who says you need

all sorts of fancy

equipment to craft?

The hair clip is up

for sale on my Etsy Store.

The first 3 pople 

to leave a comment

will get a discount code 

from me

for 20% off 

anything 

in the store.

Image Cropping: Dissection vs Trimming

Since I'm stuck in bed here at the

hospital I have had a lot of time on

my hands to play with images on my 

laptop for my pendants.

I have noticed that cropping can be

a very important tool in the image 

refining process.

There are basically two ways you 

can use image cropping.

The first,

is to use cropping as a way to get 

a new image from a much larger one.

Essentially dissecting out a part 

of the image.

Take this image for example:

It's a really pretty picture and I 

can actually cut it to get a couple

smaller images.

This is from the top right 

segment.

And this is from the 

top left segment.

This is what it looks like

when you are done.

Sometime you have an image you want

but you need to trim it down to make it fit.

Like this image:

I picked this one for a friend who

loves Alice in Wonderland. 

I love the vintage image.

When I shrunk the whole image down it 

looked like this:

Even with some cleaning up

I lost alot of the detail 

and focus of the image

So I cropped the image in closer

concentrating on the important part

of the picture, being the face and upper body.

And trimmed away the excess.

See how much nicer that

image is?

And you didn't really lose anything.

The finished product looks pretty good

except for a tiny air bubble.

Does anyone else make their own pedants?

Turn Around is Fair Play

Hello dear readers!

I'm coming to you from a hospital bed!

But don't worry,

I'm perfectly healthy.

I volunteered to be part of a

dry run for a new hospital 

that is opening on Monday.

They wanted their staff to have 

a shot at moving real patients around

the hospital before the real patients got.

So I have had a pretend broken wrist 

and pretend surgery.

And now I am pretend recovering in my pretty

private room.

I'll have some crafty

fun to reveal to you later,

but I'm due for my pretend meds now!

Bye bye!

How To Make Images for Scrabble Tile Pendants

Scrabble tile pendants,

they seem to be all the rage right now.

My husband thinks they are a waste

 of a perfectly good Scrabble game.

But, he loves to play.

I think he likes it because he always wins!

A friend of mine was doing

some cleaning and wanted to get 

rid of her Scrabble game.

So I volunteered to "adopt" it.

Now that I had the tiles I needed images.

There are a ton of people on Etsy and other

places that are offering to sell you files 

or pre-made images. 

Don't be tempted!

It's really very easy to shrink 

down an image of your choice.

I mean isn't that the point of this craft?

To make personalized jewelry?

Alright, 

lets start with an image.

I happen to really like this one,

and since it is so famous and old no one

will be hounding me about copyright

infringement.

Use whatever photo editor your chose,

for my purposes I will use Picasa.

Now crop it into a roughly 

rectangular shape

Try to focus on one large image

that doesn't have a lot of detail.

Now shrink the image 

using the "Resize" function 

to approximately the same size 

as your scrabble tile.

I found that the best size was

65 to 70 pixels across.

I shrunk this one to 70 x 81

Notice that you have lost 

image clarity when it gets this 

little.

To fix this issue

use the "Sharpen" function 

and boost it way up.

Notice how much clearer the

image has become.

Then go into the "Color" function 

and up the saturation. 

After that use the "Exposure" function

and bump up the contrast of your image.

Trust me you want a little extra

color in the picture to make it pop.

I tried three images last night,

this is how it turned out after I glazed them.

Some tips:

• Use images with bright colors, you get better results
• Try to limit white space, pictures with color show up better
• Don't use a highly detailed image, the detail gets lost
• Experiment with where you crop a larger image, you may be able to use part of the image in a way you didn't see before.

I hope this was helpful,

later this week I'll post 

other How To's on how to 

make these pendants.

Stay tuned....