Craft: Earring Holder

Hello! Hope you all are doing well! Recently I have made an earring holder that I saw examples of on Pinterest and just thought I would share the steps with you all in case you were interested in making one yourself! So, here we go:

You will need any picture frame you prefer, material to hold your earrings: I've used burlap but I've also seen others use lace and doilies, super glue or your preferred glue, and anything you'd like to use to decorate your frame more.

On a side note, I used this foldable frame because I travel back and forth a lot and it's easier to pack up. But any frame that seems most accessible when it comes to taking your earrings off and putting them back on is best!

The first thing you're gonna do is remove the back of the frame, the glass, anything in the frame. 

The next thing I did was unscrew these things I do not know the name of that hold the back of the frame in. You don't have to do this, but you also won't be needing them!

For my source of burlap, I bought this little burlap envelope to use.

I cut this in half so that I could cut squares out to attach to the frame. 

Cut it to fit into the frame the best you can!

Now, here's where the super glue comes in! I bought this gel control super glue which lets you control how much glue is coming out by squeezing the sides harder.

And now you glue your piece of burlap or whatever material you chose into the frame like this!

I bought these little burlap flowers to decorate the frame a bit. I glued them onto the burlap on the inside itself and also on the actual frame as you can see. So, anything you'd like to use to add a little something to your earring holder, you can most likely glue on.

And this is the finished product! As you can see, I have a lot of earrings and I was having to carry them loosely in a box back and forth which became aggravating. If you've been having a similar situation, I highly recommend doing this! It's very easy and fun to do, and I don't see why this wouldn't last you a while! I'm really excited about it and hope this influences some of you to make your own! I would love to see your outcomes! Thank you so much for reading! :)

The Eggplant Experiment

So, last week, my boyfriend and I tried to cook eggplant and I'm just now getting around to telling you about it. We love getting dishes with eggplant at a couple of restaurants and they are always so good that my boyfriend started to wonder how you go about cooking eggplant. The dishes we like include fried eggplant, but we wanted to try baking it. He has been really interested in trying new stuff when it comes to cooking and he wanted to try baking something with crushed up Nilla Wafers as the breading, so that's what we did. If it sounds a little weird to you, it sounded odd to me at first too, but it really wasn't that noticeable, just a tad bit sweet. Anyways, here are the steps we took for making this. 

The first thing you do is cut your eggplant up into slices. They can be large slices because you will be draining the eggplant after this which will make the slices a lot thinner.

Now, onto the most time consuming part of making eggplant: draining! We covered each piece with salt, stacked them like this in between two plates, and put something heavy on top (we ended up placing a hammer on top because this was unstable after awhile). We let them drain for about 30 minutes, but the eggplant turned out very very strong. Some people online recommend anywhere from an hour to over night, so it's really up to you, but if we do this again, I would probably let it drain for about 2 hours. Also, if we do this again, we would probably drain them more evenly. Instead of stacking them like this, maybe laying them flat on a sheet.

And now we have nice thin slices of drained eggplant! To get some of the excess juice out, I squeezed them in between the palms of my hands over the sink. If you think you may need to do this, it helps!

Now, take those Nilla Wafers and crush them up!

It helps to crush them in between two plates if mashing them up with your hands isn't doing the trick.

For mine, I mixed in some of these regular Italian style bread crumbs. We bought them just in case the Nilla Wafers didn't work out, but I used both just to get a little more coverage on the eggplant patties.

The next thing you want to do is put some flour on a plate like this.

And then pour some milk into a container like this. We used almond milk, so if you also want to use almond milk, it works!

Now we start to bread the eggplant! First, place a patty in the flour and cover.

Then dip it into the milk. 

And stick the bread crumbs on trying to get as much coverage as you would like!

Just continue to do this with all of your eggplant patties.

Once that is done, bake them at 425 degrees F for 10 minutes on each side and that's it!

Now, you can do whatever you would like to do with your eggplant patties. We decided to make an eggplant sandwich, so we bought some hamburger buns to put them between. 

We also got this delicious feta cheese to put on our sandwiches!

And here it is! It really wasn't too bad, I just wish the eggplant wouldn't have been as strong as it was. It was a little overpowering. But I still wanted to share what we did so that anyone can tweak it the way they want. Feel free to give feedback if you try it! I would love to know how others are cooking their eggplant!

Overall, this was a fun experience and I would really like to try this again and see how it turns out. Thanks for reading! :)