DIY: Nature Wall Hanging

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I am so grateful for my roommates who put up with me and the endless things I put our apartment through. I clock in a lot of hours in the kitchen and do so in a hurricane like fashion, I rearrange things and never ask if they are okay with me doing so, and I constantly bring in sticks, leaves, and really anything on the ground. 

I had a bundle of sticks lying around since my fall semester and the other day I thought it would be so great to do something with them. I really do not have time to spare on things other than homework, but in true Jocelyne form, when I get an idea, that is all I can seem do. Plus, I have been living by this mantra, that we should all take time to rest in our passions. So I, now feeling better about how I spent my afternoon, give you this super simple wall hanging. 


What you will need:
  • Leaves or any kind of foliage that you wish to hang. Get a little wild and go climb a tree or dig around outside! 
  • Sticks! Really, go climb a tree, or snag some branches from a bush. Easy.
  • Some string. I used some cotton twine and some thread (pictured below).
  • Scissors

First tie the bundle of sticks together, tie a knot on one end and then tie a knot on the other end, be sure to leave enough twine between the knots to hang the piece up. 

Next tie the foliage to the sticks, you can tie them at any length. I did mine longest to shortest, but any order would look great!

Lastly, find a fun place to hang it! This is a really lite wall hanging, so any kind of hanging device should work. I cannot use nails here, so I used some wall putty, which from a distance looks like it could be a white tack. 

And that's it! Happy makings! 








Our Project

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One evening during my winter break my boyfriend asked me what we wanted to do for the night and one of the options that he gave me was to do crafts! Like, we can do crafts together??!!! YES boyfriend, let's do a craft! (Ladies, get a man that loves to make things with you!!) So he asked me what kind of craft I wanted to do, I acted like I did not know for a few minutes, but really, I knew what I wanted to do. I have been loving so many floral wallpapers lately and for a while had the dream to make one for my apartment, but I had not figured out what I wanted it to look like, all I had was an idea, and a rough vision. So, when Zac said crafts, all I could think about was this wallpaper dream. I wanted it to be portable and sturdy, so I can take it when I move out of my apartment. While he was searching his mind for craft ideas, I began to piece together mine. A large floral patterned tapestry all painted by hand. Then I blurted it out to him in a jumbled mess of excitement. He, being the sweet man that he is, said "Yes, let's do it!" 

We zipped over to the hardware store (my favorite kind of craft store!) and bought a large 6 x 9 foot sheet of painters drop cloth canvas, and hurried back home. I was ready to dive right in, but Zac, a real organized artist gathered some thick paper, an X-acto knife, and a cutting board and pronounced that he was going to make a stencil. I am so BLESSED--was all I kept thinking while he worked long and diligently to cut out all the flowers and leaves of our design (inspired by one of my favorite brands--Rifle Paper Company). The stencil was finally ready and we had time to paint one panel, so we did, and I fell in love. 





The pattern looked great and the colors were just what I had imagined! I wanted to finish the whole thing right away... but sleep... so it would have to wait. The next evening I went to Zac's and we continued to work on it. We finished a 3 x 3 section and were feeling proud of ourselves until we opened up the whole canvas and realized how much more we had left to do. My realistic Zac began to think of ways to make this process quicker, like painting the panels in a checkered pattern to cut the painting down by half, I gave him an ehhhhh kind of look, then he said, "what if all the blank panels were filled in with vines?" I nodded and pretended to really consider his idea knowing, however, that I really wanted it ALL painted--my stubbornness won out. I had more free time than him during the day (no school or anything) so I took the canvas home with me to work on and boy was Zac right to consider other options. Remember when I thought that the stencil took forever to make? Well that was nothing compared to the painting step. I loved it, but my goodness, it sucked a lot sometimes. About three weeks after we started--when I was back at school--I finished it all and just in time. Zac came to visit me last weekend to celebrate our Anniversary, and we were able to completely finish it by hanging it up in my kitchen. 

This huge painting makes me think of my last year with Zac; the start of it all being so exciting and the two of us imagining the final product with hopeful and moderately naive eyes. Then after a while realizing that it is a big task and that it is not going to be a fast or easy road to the finish; that it is going to be a lot of work, that sometimes we will feel the urge to cut corners and settle to make it easier for us to continue, and that our stenciled plans may clog up and make things blurry and alter our pattern. But, holding onto the feelings that we had in the beginning; the hopeful excitement when we imagined what it would look like when we finished, and remembering our purpose, made us able to push through the frustration and resist the short cuts that we really knew would not make the painting as beautiful as we imagined. When we hung up our project on our anniversary and took a step back we felt so much joy and accomplishment--WE DID IT! 

Alas, our real project goes on, and it will never be finished, but everyday we are adding a little bit more to our painting; making it more beautiful, and just as God intended. I love you very much, Zac, and I pray that we may never run out of paint.






Dinner Partying

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I love a good cupcake, so when my roommate decided that she wanted to relieve our friends from studying and papers by hosting a dinner party I quickly called making the dessert. I asked, what kind of cupcake I should make (already kind of knowing what I wanted to do--chocolate chocolate chocolate) My roommate yelled out "Salted Caramel!" she has a strong love for all things salted caramel! So with their encouragement (my last attempts at caramel all ended in a disaster), I gave in. Dark chocolate cupcake with cream cheese frosting and some salted caramel flair on top.

Dark Chocolate Cupcake:

1/2 cup fresh strong brewed coffee
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 cup unsalted butter
1/2 cup chocolate cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 tsp salt
2 eggs
2/3 cup sour cream

1. Preheat your oven to 350 F degrees and line your cupcake pans.
2. In a sauce pan melt butter on medium-low heat. Whisk in cocoa powder until all blended and smooth. Pour in the heavy cream, vanilla extract, and brewed coffee. Heat until just barely simmering, then remove from heat and set aside to cool.
3. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking soda and salt, then set aside.
4. In another medium bowl, whisk together the sour cream and eggs.
5. Slowly pour the chocolate mixture in the egg and sour cream mixture and whisk until smooth--be sure to do this slowly so the eggs do not cook.
6. Pour that into the large bowl with the flour mixture in three parts to make the mixing easier. After the batter is all incorporated, blend the mixture on medium for a minute.
7. Fill the cupcake liners 3/4 full with the batter then bake for 17-19 minutes (or until a toothpick comes out clean).
8. cool in pans for about five minutes the remove and place them on a wire wrack to cool completely.

Now for the salted caramel-- because I was failing so miserably when trying to make caramel before to fill some macarons, I found this easy recipe:

Salted Caramel Sauce

3/4 cup unsalted butter
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 tbsp cornstarch
1 1/2 tbsp salt

1. Melt the butter in a large saucepan
2. Whisk in the brown sugar, heavy cream, cornstarch, and lastly the salt.
3. Put in a heat safe package and refrigerate so cool down and solidify.

The Cream Cheese Frosting

1 cup cream cheese at room temperature
1 cup unsalted butter at room temperature
2 cups powdered sugar

1. Cream together the cream cheese and the butter, then slowly blend in the powdered sugar until it all incorporated.

Now just assemble! When the cupcakes are completely cooled pipe on the cream cheese frosting, and then add the salted caramel. I drizzled mine on top of the frosting in a spiral. Something else you can do is fill the cupcake with some of the caramel sauce then put the frosting on top of that. The Caramel sauce added some salty sweetness to otherwise more savory cupcake.


My roommate also wanted to make little party favors for our friends to take home, she elected for some hot chocolate stirring spoons.

She melted Dark Chocolate (the melting candy kind) mixed in some smashed up candy cane bits, scooped the mixture onto a plastic spoon (for take home purposes), and garnished the tops with mini marshmallows and candy cane. They cooled and hardened within minutes.



I of course cared more about the presentation than the actual favor, so I opted to make the wrapping for the favors. We bought little gift bags from our local Michaels Craft store, that I stamped with gold and wrote little holiday sayings then finished it off with a little bow.























After feasting on some great pasta, we all sat around our Yule Log fire and sang some Christmas carols. Such a sweet night and just the right amount of social interaction for this introvert!

*The cupcake recipe is from javacupcake.com

The Second Start

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I am the sister, and I have never blogged my words before. Typically I have just posted pictures, or beautiful quotes about love or becoming one with nature--here, have some.

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." -Robert A. Heinlein

"I will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air alive with closed eyes to dash against the darkness." E. E. Cummings

I am a Political Science major, and a lover of problem solving and figuring things out, I like to connect the dots--oh this event in history happened because of this, and all of that led to this and how people see that! But, I do not want to go to law school (which is always the second question after they ask about my major) I want to instead explore styling and design. While in church one Sunday this past fall I caught myself rolling around thoughts in my head; shoot, I need to get a job this summer, what should I do? I should do something that helps build my resume for my career. But, wait, what do I want my career to be? I do not want to work in an large company office behind a computer, I'm awful with computers! Ughhhhhh! Okay, what do I love to do? And then, it dawned on me, everyday while getting deep into Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, I would start squirming to get up and make things. I lacked a lot of typical craft things here in my apartment, so I would end up baking. My roommates would tell me that I love to bake, but I think that I just love to CREATE and that baking does the trick. In just an hour after I have begun, I have made something from hand fulls of little nothings.

So, for this blog I will most likely post things that I have built, or things that are beautiful and inspiring--if I was not so deep in the suburbs of Los Angeles I would love to flood this with nature and such, but that will mostly fall to my sweet sister who can be in it, snap it, and then tell you all about how it got there (geology). For me, I'll stick with God, food, crafts, cats, maybe some political science spewing, and on lucky occasion, nature.