Pinterest Challenge: Felt Coasters

Young House Love and Bower Power issued another Pinterest Challenge last week, and I couldn't resist the chance to tackle another project on my ever-growing DIY inspiration board. (For my previous Pinterest Challenge project entry, click here. Or check out my Pinterest boards for more ideas).

My contribution to this season's challenge: modular felt coasters.

Originally Drew and I planned to tackle a mirror project we've been considering for months, but we opted to spend our weekend loafing about instead of stenciling mirrors, so I'll have to share that project another day.

Getting back to the felt coasters, though, I ran across this tutorial on How About Orange yesterday morning, and knew this was the perfect project. I've been considering making some felt coasters anyway, and these are a quick, no-sew project. Perfect!

The best part about this project is that the finished product looks so much more complicated than it really is, and everything comes together so quickly. Start to finish, I probably spent about 10 minutes making 4 coasters. These would be a great little gift or stocking stuffer since they're easy, quick and cheap to make but still look cute.

For this project, I only needed two sheets of felt to make four coasters. I chose hot pink and gray since we don't plan on using these coasters in our living room and I wanted something fun.

Using the template available on How About Orange, I used my new rotary cutter to cut out eight slotted pieces per coaster.

The pieces all interlock (similar to how you fold the sides of a box over to keep it shut), leaving this:

The final step is to cut each "arrow" at an angle for a cute finished product. See, I said this project was insanely simple!

Of course I can't end this post without a big thanks to How About Orange for the excellent tutorial and template (she also has a template for a larger version here).

So that's my Pinterest challenge project! Hopefully Drew and I will get around to those stenciled mirrors soon so I can have another fun DIY project to post.

Anyone else participate in the Pinterest challenge? What projects are on your to-do list?

Recipe Review: Broccoli-Cheese Soup

A couple weeks ago I made a batch of broccoli-cheese soup, using a recipe from The Pioneer Woman.

Drew and I have been craving broccoli-cheese soup for a while now, so I searched the internet for simple, delicious-looking recipes. I should have known the Pioneer Woman would deliver.

The recipe was super easy to follow and didn't take too long either. I followed her recipe exactly, except I used skim milk in place of whole, frozen broccoli instead of fresh and omitted the nutmeg (can you believe our giant spice rack we got as a wedding gift doesn't have nutmeg in it?).

The steps were pretty simple: chop up an onion, throw it in a pot with a bunch of dairy, add broccoli, simmer, add cheese and eat.

Three cups of cheese is... a lot of cheese.

Somewhere in between "add broccoli" and "eat" things got a little crazy. I don't know if it was the extra water from the skim milk and frozen broccoli, high heat or something else entirely, but the whole mixture just sort of separated. It was not attractive.

Not only that, but we just weren't getting the cheesy taste we wanted. I originally added three cups of cheese according to my measuring cup, but the soup just tasted like cream of broccoli so we doubled the amount of cheese.

According to a handy measurement converter magnet we have, the double amount of cheese was only two cups in ounces. So either we added twice as much cheese as the recipe called for, or not quite enough. Either way, the soup still wasn't as cheesy as we hoped it would be. Does anyone know if you're supposed to measure cheese in ounces or not? Why such a weird discrepancy in amounts?

After all that, we spooned the soup into our blender in batches to chop everything up a bit and try to remedy our separation problem. No such luck on binding things together better, but at least it looked a little nicer (although not nice enough for me to take a picture - I was pretty over this recipe at that point).

The verdict: While the soup still tasted fine (but not great), it looked absolutely disgusting even after blending. I wish I would've read the comments beforehand to see that many people experienced what I did: separated milk and not enough cheesy taste. Unfortunately this recipe is not a keeper for us.

I'll be honest, we're probably not going to eat all of this stuff (we have a bunch of it in our freezer right now). I'm not exactly sure what went wrong with the recipe, since plenty of other commenters said the soup came out perfectly for them. Maybe subbing skim milk for whole made that much of a difference? I don't know. Oh, well. I guess we're just going to have to go with store-bought the next time we want broccoli-cheese soup.

Has anyone else tried any new recipes lately? I need some ideas!