Grateful

It's been an extremely cold week here in the Upper Midwest.  But the mercury has risen a full 60 degrees higher than where it was just a few days ago.  It's a balmy 35 degrees Fahrenheit right now, and foggy and drizzly.  

A perfect day for baking. 

I just tried a new recipe for carrot banana muffins and it was AMAZING.  You can find the recipe (and much better pictures) HERE.  I've eaten two fresh from the oven, and think I'm going to need to have my husband hide the rest from me.  They're that good.

And the house smells wonderful, wafted with the scent of warm cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger baked goodness.

As I was grating the carrots for this recipe, I remembered a crafty project I had done back in the fall (when I was on a break from blogging).  It was a creative idea for repurposing a kitchen grater from Carlene at Organized Clutter (link to the how-to).

How many vintage graters have I walked past at the thrift stores over the years?  And now that I'd found a sweet little crafty use for them, do you think I could find one?  Of course not.  Thankfully, there was eBay, where the best deal happened to be on a two-fer.  If one is good, two is "grater", right?

Instead of chalk paint, as the tutorial mentions, I enlisted the help of my hubby who is pretty good with a can of spray paint.  He hung them from the clothesline on a nice day and gave them a good going over with some cream colored Rustoleum we had sitting on a basement shelf.

Then I gave them a little shabbying up with a bit of sandpaper and used some brown wax, otherwise known as shoe polish, to further distress them.  Then went over the whole thing with clear wax and buffed with a soft cloth.

I thought I'd probably find the label holders in the scrapbook section at JoAnn, but that was a bust.  I found them instead on Amazon.  

I had fun creating the magnets from old buttons, a metal bobbin, and a dab of hot glue.

That's me and my grandma, the one I had mentioned in the last post.  She had come from Louisiana to visit us back in the 1960s.  While she was here, we drove to Door County, Wisconsin to pick cherries.  From the look on my face, they must have been a little sour.

And that's my dad when he was a young teenager, having picked a bag of garden lettuce on the family truck farm.

I initially thought of these as Thanksgiving decor, but I still have them out on display.  Being grateful is always in season!