Luke Judge

The first week of December is the perfect time to pull out those cookie recipes you have not made for a year. these next weeks are filled with school, office and neighborhood parties. the cookies will keep in airtight containers in a cool place. Be sure to store each recipe separately as soft cookies will make crisp cookies soft. made ahead, they will be ready to put onto trays or into gift boxes for sharing.

I enjoyed reading Diana Abu-Jaber’s essay “Sugar Fiend” in the December issue of Good Housekeeping magazine.

She tells how her grandmother delighted in sharing both the gift of labor and sweetness to bind children to her. I remember my own grandmother always had something sweet in her home. and our mother’s cookie jar, a wedding gift, was always full. Early on, my sister and I learned to make cookies. We still enjoy doing that, though I confess I rarely do more than a simple bar variety these days. We delighted in sharing cookies with friends, cousins and neighbors.

This time of year, many of us are getting out recipes and shopping for the ingredients we don’t usually stock in our pantry. if you don’t have favorites, just look at all the cookie recipes in current magazines on the newsstand. Or go on the Internet; my favorite site is northpole.com, where you will find more than 300 cookie recipes. I’ve found new ones and still have many favorites from years past. though we all love the standard sugar cookie cut into pretty shapes and decorated with sprinkles and frosting, others take a lot less time and also will be appreciated. when I found the world’s best cookie on the North Pole website, I realized it was one I had made for years. my original instructions, typed on my mother’s recipe card, simply said to mix, roll in balls, flatten and bake. Children love to help make these. Have a family cookie-baking session this weekend. Baking on parchment paper makes the process so easy.

WORLD’S BEST COOKIES

1 cup butter or margarine 

1 cup granulated sugar 

1 cup crushed corn flakes 

1 teaspoon baking soda 

1/2 cup shredded coconut 

1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

1/2 cup miniature chocolate pieces (optional)

In large bowl, use an electric mixer to cream butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in egg and then add oil and vanilla, and mix together. Add rolled oats and cornflakes. Mix, then add flour, baking soda and salt until well-blended. Fold in the coconut, nuts and chocolate chips. Form dough into 1-inch balls. place on ungreased or parchment-lined cookie sheet. Flatten with a fork that has been dipped in water. Bake at 325 degrees for 12 minutes or until golden in color.

Makes: 4 to 5 dozen

Julia Helvey, a longtime Columbia resident and professional home economist, has been cooking since childhood. Reach her via e-mail at editor@columbiatribune.com.

acid-free Card Stock cookie recipes, cousins, neighborhood parties, shopping, sweetness

Things are getting back to normal around here. My ankle is almost 100%, thankfully. This means that I am able to start doing all those fun summery things I’d planned for the kiddos. We have one month before school starts for both boys and I’m not ready. I hope to pack as much fun as possible into these next few weeks. 

My assignments for CHA show work ended the week before last and last week I took some much needed time off to get caught up on my real life, spending time with my family and working on organizing a school fund raiser event that happens this Fall. Tons of work, that second one. Tons! But, it’s really, really, important and I don’t regret it, despite the hard work and stress. 

The other wonderful thing about my ankle being healed is that I can start teaching, again. The ankle really threw me off my game, but I think it was someone telling me to slow down, so I’m choosing to see it as a blessing for the rest. At least, I’m trying really hard to view it that way.  

I have added my class schedule to the right sidebar. I didn’t realize how booked I am until I put it there. Ideally, I plan to teach one class a month after I’m caught up from canceling and rescheduling due to said ankle fun. 

This Saturday, I’m teaching By the Beautiful Sea. 

Scrapbook Island - 408-978-8900
Saturday, August 14th

10:00-1:00 p.m.

$33

The kit is packed full of product. You will definitely be bringing home extra goodies for any other creations you can think up. I tried really hard to keep the price low, yet fill the kit. I think I was able to accomplish that.

What you will need to bring (please call the store for any items you may need):

1. Black Pen
2. White Pen (I love the ranger white pen)
3. Strong Tape Runner
4. Clear, fast-drying, strong wet glue (I highly recommend Helmar Quick Dry 450 Adhesive) This is really important for doing the ribbon work on the spine.
5. Dark blue and teal ink pads (I use colorbox cats eye chalk inks because they dry fast and do not smear)
6. Personal Trimmer
7. Scissors
8. Your favorite border punch – I used EK Success’ Upper Crest punch and will bring mine.
9. Circle Cutter or Xlarge Circle punch (2.5 – 3″). I will bring mine.
10. Tweezers (If you have a hard time with little rhinestones)
11. Photos – I layer on top of and underneath my photos, so you will want to bring these to class. You will need six photos total. If you can print from home the size is 4.5″ x 3″ horizontal. If you purchase your photos, please bring 4″ x 6″ vertical photos and I’ll show you how to convert the page to fit your photos. 
12. Journaling – I used stickers for my journaling, but you may want to do more, so print your journaling onto 8.5″ x 11″ white cardstock with a space in between each line and we can cut them into strips.

Loolah Card Planner

I made this for myself because I’m terrible about getting cards in the mail on time. The pockets in the front hold cards and a book of stamps. A pen can be hung on the spiral spine. Inside is a monthly break down of anniversaries, birthdays, etc. And behind each monthly list are the addresses for those special people. Everything is here when I need it to send out cards. 

As a bonus for the kit, I made 4 cards and included cards and envelopes. I personally, however, do not make cards. My book will be filled with store bought cards. So, if you are not a card maker, this is still a great book to create. I have included over 20 of my favorite photographs in this planner. I put my favorites in there because it’s mine and I love getting to see them each month. 

We will be working with canvas, luminarte, gel bead medium, gesso, micro beads and more. I went technique heavy this time around. The book features the brand new Creative Imaginations IOD Loolah collection, shipping to stores soon, Christine Adolph Chipboard and Creative Cafe! We will, also, get to play with some of the gorgeous new bloomers ribbon from Webster’s Pages. 

Here are the class details:

Memories Live On - 408-446-9901
Saturday, August 14th
1:00-4:00 p.m.

• Supplies needed:
• Fabric Glue – Helmar 450 Quick Dry
• Personal Trimmer
• Tape runner
• Foam dots or squares
• Scissors
• Favorite Border Punch – I used Martha Stewart “Double Scallop”
• Red ink – Colorbox fluid chalk ink catseye “warm red” because it doesn’t smear and dries quickly.
• 2 Foam brushes
• Ranger Glossy Accents
• Skinny paintbrush (about ¼ inch)
• Black Sharpie extra/ultra fine pen
• White paint
• Sand paper or nail file
• Photos – twelve 4″x6″ horizontal and nine 3″x5″ horizontal or vertical. 

With Love, Mom & Dad (or in the case of this sample, Grandma)

Scrapbook Island - 408-978-8900
Saturday, September 11th
10:00-1:00 p.m.

This class is a paper bag class and you will be able to choose a girl or boy theme. The colors of the kit are pink, orange, green and blue and I will have samples of both in the store, as well as on my blog. Here is my explanation of the book: 

In 2004, Vanessa Reyes won the Chatterbox Make it Meaningful contest with her “If For Any Reason” album. When I saw her album, I cried. I knew I needed to make an album like this for my son. The album consists of letters to a child for all of the major moments in life, first house, first pregnancy, first love, first heartache, wedding day, feeling lonely, etc. Both Vanessa and her husband wrote letters to their daughter with words about these moments and tucked them lovingly into the album. The purpose of the book is that if for any reason one of them were to no longer be in their daughter’s life, she would still have their words to read and cherish.  

Each of the paper bags is turned into an envelop to contain the letters. This book can be for anyone you wish to leave letters to. It doesn’t have to be for children. 

I’ll have more details and images soon. 

Have a great weekend! 

acid-free Card Stock glue, inks, scrapbook, spending time

Photo sharing services are no longer used by a select few—for some Internet users, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums are the place to store and organize photos. But what happens if you decide to just pick up and go to another service? Perhaps Flickr’s terms of service got on your last nerve, or Picasa’s feature set just isn’t enough for you. Or, what if you’ve experienced a catastrophic crash at home and you have lost the locally stored copies of all your photos?

Backup lecture aside, there are numerous reasons for you to want to pull your photos down from the cloud. Some services make this task easier than others, but after finding out on Twitter that numerous readers of ours have wanted to get a mass download of their photos stored online, we figured it would be useful to give a brief how-to for Picasa and Flickr, two of the most popular photo sharing services.

Picasa Web Albums

Thanks to Google’s Data Liberation Front, getting a big dump of your photos out of Picasa Web Albums is a laughably easy task. If you use Picasa software on the desktop, just pull down the File menu to Import from Picasa Web Albums, and in the words of Steve Jobs: boom.

You can still access those photos through the Web, though, either individually or on a per-album basis. But if you want to download them an album at a time, you’ll still need Picasa on the desktop (go to the Download menu from your album and choose Download to Picasa).

Flickr

For the six years I have been a member of Flickr, I have been under the impression that paying users (that is, subscribers to Flickr Pro) were able to download all of their own photos from the service in case of an emergency. That is apparently not the case and has never been.

Of course, if you’re logged into Flicker on the Web, you can always download your photos one by one by clicking on the “All Sizes” button above each photo and downloading the high-res version to your desktop. Although we would really like for Flickr to offer a more consolidated way to do this, there are still a handful of third-party options that make life easier.

Order a backup CD

Flickr has a partnership with a company called Qoop that allows you to import your Flickr photos and create a number of photo-printed products, from greeting cards to mugs to wrapping paper. One of those products, though, actually has value to people besides your grandparents: the backup CD or DVD.

For either $14.99 or $19.99 per disc respectively, you can get a backup CD or DVD of your entire Flickr collection (though it should be noted that Qoop only backs up your photos, not videos or anything else you’ve uploaded to Flickr). Sure, it costs money, but if your wedding photos are stuck on Flickr with no backup, it could be worth the $20.

Flickery

Flickery is a Mac OS X application ($19.20 or 15-day free trial) that lets you do all manner of things with Flickr from your desktop. Once you authenticate Flickr to be used with Flickery, you can interact directly with your Flickr photos, sets, groups, and more without having to mess with things in iPhoto and re-sync.

One of the features of Flickery is that you can download your photos from Flickr to a folder on your desktop, iPhoto, or Aperture. You can do this one by one or en masse, making this a more preferable option than doing so one-by-one on the Web.

The downside is that you still can’t get one giant dump of all your photos at once, but we found that going from photo set to photo set was almost as good, if not a bit tedious. In a pinch, you can do this without having to pay (just use the free trial), but it turns out to Flickery is a decent enough application that we would consider keeping it around.

FlickrDown

Similarly, FlickrDown is a free application that runs under Windows (requires .NET 2.0) and that allows you to download photos to your desktop. Though it doesn’t look like it has been updated in a couple years, numerous Twitter followers of ours swear by FlickrDown as a reliable way to grab photos from the wWb in an emergency.

As you can see from the screenshot, users can choose from specific photo sets on Flickr or just select all photos in your stream (assuming they are public), including those that aren’t in a set, for downloading. Just choose a folder on your desktop for the dump and go grab a cup of coffee.

What solutions do you have?

Some readers have told us that they’ve written their own scripts to grab their photos from online, but we were wondering if any of you have employed other solutions that we could recommend.

acid-free Card Stock flicker, flickr, google, photos, six years