Thanksgiving Crafts & Craft Beers

Posted by Jennifer Sendrow

On yesterday's Thanksgiving edition of "Crafting with Dudes," we invited Rob Banning (right), manager for marketing and promotions and Steve Gonzalez (left), Sirius XM engineer, to join us on Whole Living to make Pomegranate Turkey placecards with help from Crafternoon author Maura Madden. Terri didn't make a craft this time, but we let her in the photo anyway since she's the host of the show.

We try to make crafts that involve no waste by recycling things we already have. All you really need to do this project Whole Living-style is the turkey template downloaded from our website, a pomegranate or other round fruit, sturdy paper in autumnal colors, scissors, and paper clips.

Rather than buying cardstock, we recycled used office folders in bright autumnal colors. You can either trace your turkey template and cut the shapes out with scissors as Steve and Rob did, or simply lay it over your paper and cut out with a craft knife.

The men worked fast, cutting out their cardboard head and tail pieces.

The turkey's head piece can tuck right into the navel of the pomegranate. The tail piece attaches to the back with toothpicks or even a bent paper clip. Just straighten one part of the paper clip to spear into the fruit, and use the curled end to prop up paper.

To use the turkey as a placecard, just write guests' names on the tail before attaching them to the fruit. The finished turkeys looked pretty good!

After the dudes made their crafts, the conversation turned to craft beers! Our guest was Jimmy Carbone, owner of Jimmy's No. 43 and a passionate advocate for fresh, seasonal food and drinks. First he shared his favorite less-traditional sides for the Thanksgiving table -- think spicy bok choy and stuffing made with navy beans with farro and spelt -- and then he taught us about pairing specialty and craft beers with the meal. He told us that lagers tend to go well with all foods, but that we can pair different beers with each course just as we would with wine.

If you're thinking of doing beer pairings, you'll definitely want to pick up a mix of lagers and ales. Here are the beers Jimmy recommended especially for Thanksgiving dinner, from left to right: the light and fruity Maredsous (a Belgian blonde ale), the creamy St. Bernardus Prior 8 (a Belgian brown ale), the nutty Six Point Brownstone (a brown ale), the smooth Köstritzer Schwarzbier (a German black lager), and the very hoppy Green Flash Brewning Company West Coast IPA.

Etsy’s Holiday Gift Recs

Posted by Mario Bosquez

The "Living Today" Holiday Gift Guide (a weekly segment on air) features the handmade, handcrafted, artisanal gifts that are available just in time for the holidays. Adam Brown of Etsy, came by the studios to share his gift guide recs. Adam also told us that the meaning behind Etsy remains a mystery that’s yet to be revealed! We’ll keep you posted when the name gets revealed. In the meantime, below are Etsy-approved gift suggestions. Etsy specializes in presenting arts and crafts items that include candles, crocheting, ceramics, and pottery; a whole range of handcrafted items!

A gift idea for under $25 is a sun and moon mason jar that is made of mostly recyclable items, battery-operated, and features frosted glass.

This handbound leather journal sells for under $50 and works great for pencil, pen, and even pastels. The pages are hand-stitched into the leather.

If you want to surprise someone with an unusual gift you might consider this trio of beer soaps; made with actual beer! They feature Corona beer soap with lime essential oils, Fort Collins Shocolate Stout with cocoa butter and Goose Island Oatmeal Stout with natural oatmeal and honey. They go for $7 each.

Another suggestion from Etsy is a handmade wreath that is perfect for the holidays but also appropriate for the rest of the winter season as well. The wreath is priced at around $30.

Happy Holidays and look for more Living Today Holiday Gift Guides on this blog!

Need Halloween decorating ideas? Read this blog post.

Posted by Jennifer Sendrow

Today, our company's merchandise marketing guru Alex Peruzzi stopped by Morning Living to show off our latest Halloween crafts and decor and we asked our listeners to share their favorite decoration ideas. Here are some of the best!

- Karen in Michigan shines a light for local trick-or-treaters by setting out candles and stoking a small bonfire in the yard. No time to craft? Try Martha's spooky pumpkin luminarias.

- Annette in Maryland sets out straw, old clothes, and other materials so that Halloween visitors can help her family build scarecrows. Get inspired by this frightfully fun version!

- Linda in New Jersey wows her party guests by serving her signature chicken pot pie in a hollowed out pumpkin. For a sweet alternative, check out these cute mini-pumpkin soufflés.

- Spider webs stretch across the porches of Leslie in Florida and Laurie in Ohio. You can build your own with rope or twine, and deck the walls with these creepy crawlers.

- Annemarie in Florida helps her kids make plywood ghosts to haunt her house. You can customize the look of these graveyard ghouls to make them friendly or frightful.

Here's an array of cool Martha Stewart Halloween crafts. The glittered crafts are available through Grandin Road and the other crafts are sold at Michaels.

Tell us the things that make you go "Boo!" by posting your comments!

Crafting with Dudes and T-shirts!

Posted by Jennifer Sendrow

This month's installment of Whole Living's "Crafting with Dudes" series presented a real challenge: could Marketing Manager Rob Banning (left) and Morning Living engineer Steve Gonzalez (right) recycle their old t-shirts into something new, useful, and aesthetically pleasing? With help from Generation-T author Megan Nicolay (center), they succeeded by making a braided belt, a throw pillow, and an decorated shirt.

Megan wore a shirt of her own design she calls "Back in Action."

Steve made this no-sew pillow by cutting a large square from an oversized shirt, slicing the edges into strips, then tying up the strips to seal the sides. The stuffing is...t-shirt scraps!

Steve also created this rockin' Bob Ross-bedecked shirt with no sewing at all. He simply cut out the design from a too-tight old tee and attached it to a new black shirt using fabric glue. Megan deemed the results pro-quality!

This sassy cowl neck halter only requires an oversized t-shirt, a pair of scissors, a measuring tape, a needle and thread, and very minimal sewing skills. I transformed my Sirius logo shirt in 15 minutes flat: took measurements, made just three cuts in the fabric, then sewed up two small sections with a running stitch.

If you want to try one of Megan's projects yourself, here are her instructions for creating a funky halter top with barely any sewing required.

The Morning Living Debate: Home Ec. vs Shop Class

Posted by Alexis Tirado

Today Morning Living's producer Jennifer and engineer Steve put on their boxing gloves and duked it out in a very back-to-school debate: Which class is more important? Home Economics or Shop? What do you think? Vote in the poll below and read their arguments!

Home Ec Is Where my Heart Is
Jennifer Sendrow, producer for "Morning Living" and "Whole Living"

Since it’s Back-to-School week, here’s a history lesson: Home Economics classes come from a social movement in the late 19th century that aimed to elevate domestic work to valued professional status and apply modern science to perfect its methods. True to those progressive roots, today’s Home Ec classes are designed to produce men and women equally able to do the everyday work of cooking, sewing, and laundry as well as performing basic first aid and creating a household budget. Teaching practical skills and enlightened attitudes about gender roles is what Home Ec is all about. Shop is about…simulating factory work?

Many parents are willing and able to teach domestic skills to their children, but there are a great many that can’t, don’t, or only think to teach such skills to daughters. While people usually get by just fine without learning to sew or becoming experts in stain removal (after all, they can just go to marthastewart.com!), learning to cook is not just a useful skill, it could save your life. It is no coincidence that as Americans started dining out more often and relying on pre-packaged foods that our childhood obesity rates have tripled to match the current adult rate of 1 in 5, triggering an unprecedented health crisis. Doctors, nutritionists, and seasonal eating advocates like Martha Stewart all agree on a cure: make food yourself, and make it fresh. You could learn to cook by watching Martha, but a formal class in the formative years would surely be a great help.

Home Ec is not just a class, it’s a movement. It empowers you to become a creator, not just a consumer. It encourages you to be thrifty and resourceful, a self-sufficient person with no need to hire housecleaners, tailors, and repairmen for every household task. We all have to keep house and get food on the table, but most of us are perfectly happy to leave wood crafting to skilled artisans (or maybe to Ikea). It’s time to close up Shop, and go Home Ec!

You can't top shop!
Steve Gonzalez, engineer for "Morning Living" and "Whole Living"

Shop Class, or classified today as Industrial Arts, expose children to the basics of home repair, manual craftsmanship and machine safety. Offering them something we all need: life skills! Skills that come in handy as a homeowner and propel students into careers such as plumbing, engineering, and architecture.

These programs offer students a window into something other than algebra and single-file rows of desk all day long. With the evolution of technology “Shop” classes no longer just teach how to change oil or hammer out a dent, students use computer diagnostic equipment to fix cars, and learn the green technologies of hybrid vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells. Today’s classes incorporate a range of abilities widely promoted as “21st-century skills”, involving technology, communication and collaboration. Courses range from ornamental horticulture and graphic arts to welding and even old-fashioned auto shop. These types of programs reach out to students that may have lost their way in traditional classes.

Shop class not only provides children with skills for their personal lives, but aims to give students job training, exposure to new technologies, and windows into different careers. If your oven or sewing machine breaks, you won’t know how to fix it. Who will? Someone who took shop! And the “blue collar” industry -- which includes careers as an electrician and plumber as well as a police officer and fireman -- are in demand. These careers are shown as really a good, viable option with good benefits.

We can’t afford to leave any students unprepared. Without showing younger generations how to work with their hands, we are creating a generation that is incapable of doing anything for themselves. You would be amazed at how many kids are challenged by problem-solving and figuring things out for themselves. Can they figure out how to reach the next level in a video game? Absolutely! But ask them to change a tire or fix a bike chain and their response is to get a new bike. While shop class can make a better more well rounded individual, it can also be a path to a well-paid profession.

Career Advice with Maggie: Dealing with fashion and first impressions.

Posted by Maggie Mistal

Every other week, Maggie Mistal our radio channel's career consultant AND host of "Making a Living," will answer all your burning job and career related questions! To ask Maggie a question, email her at coaching@maggiemistal.com or ask your question in the comments section below.

Dear Maggie, 

I have a job interview next week and I want to look very stylish but professional. What do you suggest I wear to the interview? I find suits to be very boring but I want to look polished. Also, I heard you have to wear pantyhose during an interview even during the summer? Is this true?

Thanks,
Clothes Call

GET MAGGIE'S ANSWER AFTER THE JUMP

We visit a Spacecraft (of sorts).

Posted by Jennifer Sendrow

If you like to craft but never seem to have the right supplies on hand, lack the space to set everything up, or just loathe cleaning up after a glitter glue disaster, Spacecraft is your Shangri-La. Co-owners Cristina Dodd and Stella Metzner have a well-curated craft supply shop up front and a crafting area in the back where customers can drop in anytime to make any project off their menu. They're on hand to offer expert advice or just friendly banter as you work on anything from assembling a simple birthday card to etching a set of wine glasses. Why aren't there Spacecrafts on every corner in town instead of Starbucks? We can dream.

Christina and Stella celebrated Martha's birthday this week with several crafting events, and even hung a handmade stenciled sign on their door.

They have options fit for crafters of all ages and skills, from preschool students to professional artists.

Morning Living producer Maureen McMurray and I studied our options before deciding to make decoupage picture frames. We started off with rectangles of unfinished wood.

SEE MORE CRAFTY PHOTOS

Two Guys, One Craft, and “60 Days of Summer”

Posted by Jennifer Sendrow

Why does Whole Living ask the guys in the office to come and craft with us? Because if the average dude can do it, so can you! This week we got inspired by all the great ideas posted for "60 Days of Summer" and decided to have a crafting party with Morning Living engineer Steve Gonzalez, Crafternoon author Maura Madden, Whole Living host Terri Trespicio, and Martha Stewart TV Show producer Geoff Rosen. Check them out in the photo below, grinning like a bunch of Cheshire cats!

Everyone loves a festive cocktail, so we decided to make tiki-style drink umbrellas that the guys can use to impress the guests at their summer parties. To make these adorable decorations all you need are toothpicks or bamboo skewers and some colorful paper, and the tools required are simply scissors, a pencil, glue, tape, and a soup can.

With glasses of orange punch in hand, the guys dove right in and got crafting.

CHECK OUT THE PHOTOS & VIDEOS AFTER THE JUMP

Crafting with a Dude -- Take One

Posted by Terri Trespicio

We have long been intrigued by Steve Gonzales’s (engineer for "Whole Living") propensity toward crafting. So we thought, why not invite him, and some other dudes, to craft with us on the air. Crafting certainly isn’t gender-specific, and so why not have our own crafting party with one of our favorite crafters, Maura Madden. Throw some potatoes, cookie cutters, and poster dye in a room, and we got ourselves a co-ed crafting party with potato stamping as the activity du jour. Stay tuned on "Whole Living" for MORE crafting with more dudes.

Here I am, taking listeners through the first-ever "Crafting with a Dude" (or in this case, dudes) segment in which we showed that crafting isn't a chick thing.

SEE OUR PHOTOS

101 Uses for a Ball Jar!

Posted by Maureen McMurrary

Yesterday on Morning Living, Kim and Betsy talked about the Ball Jar because it's celebrating its 125th Anniversary this year. Morning Living reached out to the audience for 101 uses of the Ball Jar and you guys delivered! Some uses are standard while others are quite eccentric. Thank you for calling in and enjoy the list!

101 Uses for the Bell Jar

1. Homemade humidifier for cigars
2. Tobacco holder
3. Tea bags
4. Cotton ball and Q-tips
5. Ant farm
6. Spices
7. Rose bud collector
8. To hold bits of thread
9. Game jar--keep jacks and dice in it
10. Pen holder
11. Coffee grounds
12. Screws
13. Make cocktails in it
14. Lemonade
15. Put peanuts in it
16. Ribbons
17. Put your change in it (bank)
18. Make homemade candles in it
19. Potpurri jar
20. Turn them into Christmas decorations
21. Make preserves in it.
22. Sewing kit
23. Potpourri
24. Dog treat holder
25. Snow globes

READ 75 MORE USES FOR THE BALL JAR