Harry Potter Inspired Recipe: Butterbeer

    Recently, I looked through the Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook, and it was very cool to see all of the recipes that come up in the Harry Potter books. Unfortunately, the cookbook didn't have butterbeer, the drink that Harry and his friends enjoy when they go into the Wizarding village of Hogsmeade. So instead, we decided to find a recipe for butterbeer online and make it. It turned out really well, so I wanted to share the recipe and how we made it, as well as how it turned out on this blog! 
    The recipe came off of delish.com and can be found here. It is not my recipe, we just decided to use it. So without further ado, here is the recipe and my review:

Ingredients Needed (makes four servings):

• 4 cans of cream soda (1 for each serving)
• 1/4 cup of butterscotch syrup 
• 1 cup of heavy cream
• 2 tablespoons of sugar
• 2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup of melted butter

Directions:

1) In a large bowl, combine the cream soda and butterscotch syrup and stir them together. (This is the drink part and is incredibly easy)

2) In a mixer/different bowl, beat the cream until stiff peaks form. Fold in the sugar and the vanilla, then the melted butter until no longer streaky. (This is the topping part and is a bit harder)

3) Pour the butterbeer into glasses and then put the cream mixture on top.

(The picture is my own)

    All in all, the butterbeer did not take that long to make, and the ingredients were pretty easy to obtain (except for the butterscotch syrup, but we ended up ordering it off of Amazon). The butterbeer looked amazing and tasted amazing too, although personally, I feel like it was really rich so you could actually divide it up into more than four servings because I didn't finish all of mine and it's pretty hard to save it. I would definitely recommend making this recipe if you or someone you know is a fan of Harry Potter!

DIY Bookmarks

    There are two types of people in the book world: people who use bookmarks, and people who don't. Now, a lot of people call people who don't use bookmarks monsters. I'm not going to go that far, because I used to be one of those people who didn't use bookmarks (I dog-eared pages and also tried to just remember the page number, which worked about as well as you'd think it would). However, sometimes a bookmark is just not available, so you use anything: a receipt, a Post-It note, an old gum wrapper, a piece of paper. And when you do have an actual bookmark, it feels like a luxury. However, I started making my own bookmarks a while ago, and it's surprisingly easy and fun. So naturally, I decided to make a post about how to do it on the blog.

Supplies Needed:

• Paper
• This could be cardstock or just any kind of paper, but stronger paper is better
• Paper cutter, or scissors if you don't have a paper cutter (a paper cutter provides a clean, straight cut)
• Pencil
• Eraser
• Some kind of pen, marker, etc for the design

Step One: Mark the dimensions of the bookmark on the paper
    The bookmark can really be as big or as small as you want. Since I've made bookmarks before, I know the dimensions that I want to use. My advice is to mark with a pencil the boundaries of the bookmark, as shown in the picture:

Step Two: Cut the Paper
    This is fairly self-explanatory, but I'll still include some pictures:

Step Three: Design!
    Before you start designing, you should probably erase the pencil marks just to make it look cleaner. After that, it's really up to you. You can make designs or write quotes from anything or just leave it blank. If you're writing anything, it's a good idea to write it in pencil and then go over it in pen or whatever you're using. I've even used watercolor paints on bookmarks before, but it was harder to do than just drawing:

As you can see, this is a very simple craft that doesn't require much time orf supplies and is a craft you can actually use! Did you end up making DIY bookmarks? Let me know in the comments!

How-To: Blackout Poetry

    If you've ever tried to write a poem, you know how hard it is. You have to come up with the right words, sometimes the correct number of syllables, stanzas, words per stanza, words that rhyme, etc. Now I'm not saying that poetry is bad. It's not. It's just a lot of work. However, I recently discovered this thing called blackout poetry and it is SO FUN! Because I enjoyed it so much, I'm putting up a tutorial on here.

Materials Needed:

• An old book or newspaper or magazine. Really anything that has words on it that you aren't using anymore. You should NOT use a book that was expensive, or that you're planning on using again. I'd recommend going to your local library or used bookstore and picking up one of those 25 cent paperbacks so you don't have to feel guilty about vandalizing a book. I'm using a book that was falling apart anyway, and that I have a double copy of. 
• A pencil (this is optional)
• A black marker or Sharpie. You can also use paint, which I'm not really sure how that works, but you could experiment with it. I'm using a calligraphy marker, because I happen to have one, but if you have a Sharpie laying around you can use that instead (be forewarned that Sharpies bleed through pages).
• That is literally it!

Step 1: Find a page in your book/newspaper/magazine.

    It can be a scene that you like, or just a random page. Make sure that you don't go right into blacking things out, because if you make a mistake and start blacking things out that you didn't mean to, you have ruined your poem (sorry to be harsh, but it's true!).

Step 2: Underline the words you want to use with a pencil

    It isn't completely necessary to do this, but I think that it's really helpful because then you know which words you want to save. 

    This part is probably the hardest part of the entire process, because you can't just add words you want to use. Your poem can make no sense ("remember that here we laugh at gophers") or be really metaphorical ("they had stopped blizzards to keep the fire going") (and yes, both examples are mine). A tip that I found useful is to black out some of the word but not all. For example, if you needed the word "is" and there is not an "is" where you need it to be but there is a "this," black out the "th" part and your problem is solved.

Step 4: Black out the unwanted words!

    This is the fun part! It can feel a little weird at first, because you are literally scribbling with a Sharpie all over a book, but it's all in the name of art. 

    Try different patterns: you can highlight the words you don't want, you can cover the whole page, you can draw designs on the page, you name it! I'm going to show a couple examples but since I have no drawing skills I will use one or two off of the Internet.

Step 5: Erase any pencil marks.
    This is important because it just makes your poem look nicer.

You're done!

Other examples:

https://www.lynnereeder.com/uploads/1/0/8/4/108411141/p71_orig.png

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/474x/96/66/cb/9666cb41984565e62dff526577acbe57.jpg

Have you ever tried blackout poetry? How did it turn out? Let me know in the comments!

How to Take A Library Book Jacket Off

    It's a fact of life that buying books are so much more efficient if you get them from library book sales. But they always have stickers on them and the library book jacket isn't very photogenic. So, having recently figured out how to take it off, I made a tutorial video showing how to do it. Enjoy!

TBR Jar: What it is & How to Create One

    A TBR Jar? you ask yourself. What on earth is that? (Or maybe not. Maybe you already know what it is) 
    Well, as you might have guessed already, that is what I am going to explain. 

What is a TBR Jar?

    Remember my post So, What Exactly is this TBR? (if you don't, no worries. Also, you can click the name of the post and it will take you to it.) Anyway, in that post, I mentioned that there is no right or wrong way to make a TBR. The TBR Jar is just a visually pleasing, creative way of doing it.

    To put it simply, a TBR Jar is a jar with pieces of paper in it. Each piece of paper has a book title in it (the titles will be ones you want to read (your TBR). When you need a new book to read, simply pick a piece of paper out of the TBR Jar. Add to the jar as needed.

    I stumbled upon this idea online and decided to create one, then thought: This would be a really cool blog post! So as I go through the steps of how to make a TBR Jar, there will be pictures of mine. 

Step 1: Obtain a jar

If you're like me, this shouldn't be very hard. I just used an old Mason jar (which can also be used for canning). If you'd like the jar to be visually pleasing, you can find it elsewhere.

Step 2: Label the jar (optional)

    I just taped a Post-It note with 'TBR Jar' written on it to the jar. If you don't feel the need to do this, don't (in fact, I might remove the label sometime).

Step 3: Consult your TBR and write down the titles

You can write it on pretty much anything. I thought of writing the titles and then folding them into origami cranes, but I decided to just write them on Post-It notes.

Step 4: Add them to the jar

Enough said.

Step 5: Mix up the titles and draw your first one!

    Unless you don't need a new book yet. The one I chose was These Broken Stars. And remember, you should probably keep the titles you've picked to read next out of your TBR Jar so you don't end up drawing them again.