Gift Giving- Dog Treats

I again had to make dog treats for the family dogs!  We can't leave them out of the holiday celebrations!  Zoey went crazy while I was making these.  She just somehow knows when I'm making stuff for her...

Our doggie loves her technology... playing Xbox and using the Kindle at the same time! 

Doggie Treats

Earlier this month I made Zoey some more dog treats.  I like to make my own since they are way cheaper and I know exactly what is going into them.  Zoey has a pretty sensitive stomach so I'd rather not chance anything... She always loves getting food from us, but I've never seen her go so crazy for treats before!  She is crazy about these!

Peanut Butter and Chicken Dog Treats


1/2 cup of peanut butter
1/4 cup honey
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup oats
2 cup whole wheat flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Whisk together peanut butter, honey, oil and chicken broth.

In a separate bowl, combine flours and oatmeal.

Mix dry ingredients into wet ingredients. Place dough on flour dusted surface. Roll or press dough out to about 1/4” inch thick. Use a small bone cookie cutter to cut out cookies. Roll out leftover scraps and cut out as many as possible.

Put cut out cookies on a parchment lined baking sheet. Bake for 14-16 minutes. Transfer to a cooling rack.

 Here's Zoey going crazy for them!!!

She's sad they are all gone!

Day 10- Use Your Neighborhood for Inspiration

Today you should look around where you live and find inspiration in your neighborhood.  Maybe you live right by the water so you're going to cook up a big fish dinner, or you live in a city so you're going to make a city out of staples... I've seen this... it's cool.


Day 9- Pets
I made Zoey a new toy for today's challenge.  I cut up a couple of my husbands old t-shirts that we were going to throw away anyways and braided them together.  Ta-da!  New dog toy!  And it sort of smells like Alex too so Zoey is even happier.  I'm not sure how long it will last since the material isn't very strong, but it didn't cost us anything and they are easy enough to make too!

Zoey Post!

Here's a post just for Zoey because she's been pretty cute lately. 

 Here she is trying to help me with my sewing.  What a real help she is!

 Sometimes she thinks she's a person and will sit and watch TV as such.

 She just got a new chew toy.  He's missing his shirt right now, but she still looks pretty happy.

 And now she's got a buddy to snuggle with at night.

I'm not sure what she's doing now, but she kept it up for a while!

Puppy!!!

This is since I haven't been posting too much... cuteness for you.  Oh and I hit double digits in followers on the blog!  Thanks everyone! 

Hopefully next week I can get back to crafting more often.  I have a couple posts in the making that I just need to take some photos for them!

Zoey, Our Flower Girl/Ring Bearer

Zoey, as long as the weather cooperates, is going to be in our wedding.  I didn’t want to have her wearing one of those weird dresses for dogs because they just look uncomfortable and unnatural. 

I planned on making her some flowers to wear out of the same fabric that the bridesmaids dresses are.  While I was at the fabric store, I saw some really nice deep orange fabric that was the same material as the bridesmaids’ dresses.  I bought 1/3 of a yard of it to make her a little corsage to wear.  It’s really easy to do and they look fantastic. 

How to Make Fabric Flowers:

1. Cut your material into ovals the size that you would like your petals to be.

2. Heat the edges over a flame, such as a tea candle.  Make sure to not allow it to catch on fire.  The edges will turn black and curl a bit.

3. Sew the petals together to make a flower.  

4.  Add beads to the center of the flower.  I used pearls and rhinestone beads.

5. Sew the flowers together to make a bouquet.

Zoey's Anniversary Cakes!

This weekend commemorates Zoey’s one year anniversary with us.  We’re not sure if she’s two and a half or three so we’ve never known how to celebrate a birthday.  We decided the best way to celebrate having her would be to celebrate her anniversary instead of a made up birthday.  And this is the weekend!  It really doesn’t seem like we’ve only had her for one year, it seems so much longer.

She thought it'd be a good idea to help me with the cooking... by sleeping...

I’ve made her homemade dog treats before, the last time being around Christmas.  I thought she needed something extra special for her birthday so I found a recipe for a dog cake.  Not a cake shaped like a dog, but a cake made for dogs.  You can buy them in the dog boutiques around here, but they always seemed kind of gross because they’re really hard (I’m guessing so they can keep awhile).  I found a recipe that has all stuff that is good for dogs, including peanut butter, carrots, whole wheat flour, and some honey for added sweetness.  The icing is banana and cream cheese.  Pretty much this is the best thing ever that she could eat.  All of her favorites.

And here are some photos of her greatly enjoying that cake... She kept trying to eat it all in one bite.  This is why we give her small pieces and don't plop the whole cake in front of her.

I'm giving her the sign for "leave it."  She surprisingly knows that very well.  Even though she doesn't like to do it.

 And.....  nom. nom. nom.

The adults get a black forest gateau.  Sort of like a cake, but it’s French or something like that.  It tastes just as good to me.  This one had lots of steps to it, baking the cake, putting a ganache frosting on it, making the filling and icing, and then putting those on too.  This cake is not healthy in any way shape or form, but aren’t those the best?

I love how whipping cream can go from this...

...to this, in just a few minutes.

And the assembly... start with one cake.  Put some ganache on top of it.  Top with frosting.

Top with cherries.

Top with another layer.  Finish frosting and decorating!

I also made some dark chocolate trees to add to the cake.  They looked nice for awhile, but the apartment was warm so they slowly thawed.  We ended up having a few fallen trees on our cake.

This cake is definitely a keeper.  Really fantastic, but you can only have small slices at a time since it is so rich.



Zoey Bear Beantona

Here is Zoey.

She worries about us....

She is our adorable white, deaf boxer that we adopted just about a year ago.  It will be one year next weekend.  Since we don’t know her birthday, she’s somewhere around 2 ½ or 3, we’re going to celebrate her anniversary with us.  I’ll probably bake some cookies for her… check back to see how that goes.  Her name, Zoey Bear Beantona, combines the name the rescue gave her, the middle name we gave her (so she can chase us around the apartment and we can be "Exit Pursued by a Bear"... Shakespeare joke...), and a combination of my last name and my fiance's. 

Anyways, she is the goofiest dog and having her around has given me a chance to branch out with my crafting. 

And I never get tired of taking photos of her.... though I'm sure everyone on Facebook does.

The first project I did for her was making her a dog bed.  When I was looking at beds, they were insanely expensive!  I don’t want to spend a $100 on a bed for her, when she’d rather just hang out in ours!  So I went to sewing her one!  I stopped at the store and bought some fleece fabric and trim.  The expensive part would have been the inside of it, but I had a memory foam topper on my twin bed from college that I didn’t need anymore.  Fold that thing in half and it’s perfect!  I even sewed a zipper in it so we could wash the outside periodically.  The bed turned out fantastically, but like I said before… she has a nicer bed than me, with memory foam and everything, but she’d still rather snuggle in bed with my fiancé and me.

The next project I undertook was for a winter coat for her.  She’s a short haired dog who grew up in South Carolina so this past year was her first winter!  Again, coats for dogs are really expensive and they are usually just for looks.  So I bought a man’s coat from Goodwill and styled it into one for her.   It has Velcro and snap closures to keep it fitted to her.  It has a pocket on the side in case she needs to carry anything with her… I’m not sure what she’d need, but we’d put treats in their occasionally.  And the best part is that it was lined with fleece to keep her warm and the outside was waterproof so only her head would get soaked in the rain.  She was a very stylish puppy this winter around Chicago.

And here's the puppy wearing it!

And the latest craft is probably the strangest one.  She used to hate going into her crate.  She still sort of does, but she is getting better with it.  I knew that she loved to burrow under blankets, with most winter nights sleeping at our feet completely under 3 or 4 layers of sheet and comforters.  So I wondered if she would like it if her crate reminded her more of that.  I went out and bought some more fleece and covered the sides with it.  I tied it up like you do those no-sew blankets, so I could move it easily if needed.  And it actually seems to have helped a great deal!  She’ll now go in there of her own free will and just hang out.  Though I have to guess that people think I’m really strange whenever they see it in the corner of the room.  Oh, and you can see her blanket in there that I knitted out of boredom.  It started as a scarf, then became a blanket, and then I ran out of matching yarn, so it became her blanket.

I’m thinking of doing a general wedding crafting post next or maybe I’ll take some photos of my latest sewing adventures.  Do you make weird craft projects for your pets?