Fudge

Simon's challenge this week is Food and/or Drink so I rummaged through my great Aunt Esther's recipe box. I found a yellowed slip of paper written with pen and ink (obviously quite old, she was born in 1893) and it prompted me to Google the history of fudge.

Unlike many of your other favorite candies and treats, fudge is a relatively new product, dating back to just the 1880s. In fact, one of the first recorded mentions of fudge was in a letter written by Emelyn Battersby Hartridge, a student at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1886.

The exact origin and inventor of this delicious confection are hotly debated. However, many believe the first batch of fudge was created by accident when American bakers “fudged” a batch of caramels. Hence the name “fudge.” (Wockenfuss Candies)

I used her recipe in the background for this tag along with some Tim Holtz paper. The "ingenue" was an image transfer and I clipped the text from an old book.

My aunt's recipe is really basic and oh-so-similiar to the earliest versions and, since a portion was covered up, here is the transcription if you'd like to try it. ☺

Melt one cup of milk with two squares of chocolate or four tbsp. cocoa. Add two and a half cups sugar and one heaping tbsp. of butter. Boil eight minutes until it forms a ball when dropped into water. Add one tsp. vanilla and beat.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

Just Because

This greeting card features the Mondo Succulent Pot stamp by Ellen Hutson. Back in January, I posted a similar card using this stamp with watercolors (link) and say again how much fun it is to color.

Large stamps make quick work of card making but this time I used a less conventional technique so it took longer. Here's what I did.

The background? It's a print off a Gelli Plate using Simon's Tiny Dots stencil. I "zhuzhed" it up a bit with Distress inks, water and some sanding.

My stamp impression wasn't that great (some lines were too light) so I went over all of them using India ink and a pen nib. It was a good save. ☺

I filled it in with diluted white paint to knock-back the background then used watercolor pencils, inks and regular colored pencils.

I mounted it on dark mulberry cardstock and trimmed it with Liquid Pearls. The text was embossed.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

Possibilities

I created a journal page using some new supplies--Carabelle Studio's Stitched Mixed Media Background, Simon's Floral Garden stamp and their Tiny Dots stencil.

I stamped the background first, stamped the flowers on top, then used white paint to fill-in the flowers and a watered down version of paint to knock-back the background. The color came from water-soluble oil pastels, inks and colored pencils.

The snail was stamped (Carabelle), cut-out, pasted on, filled-in with paint and tinted with inks. The text is from Tim Holtz (I peel the thick cardboard off the back). The border was hand drawn with a black fine-tip marker.

 

I'm linking up to Simon for this week's theme, Lazy Days of Summer.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.