I have an old belt that was very worn around the holes and seemed to be on the verge of tearing. I was going to throw it out, but it seemed such a shame to waste the rest of it, which is quite nice. I realised I could make wrist cuffs out of it!

I found a tutorial at The Project Spot, which gave me the idea for the snap fasteners and reassured me that they weren’t too difficult to use. It took me a while to find the snaps at the shops: there’s a dearth of craft shops around here, but I found some good ones at a fabric shop and away I went!

Here’s the result!

The belt has a nice pattern on it that you can’t see in the photo from my iPhone, but it’s there. As you can see, I added some rivets to the second one, for a bit more flare.

Tomorrow holds a lunch for my husband’s grandmother’s birthday and we’re on pasta salad. I thought it would be a good chance to try making pesto again. Last time I made pesto it was okay — it dried out a bit — but I barely remember that recipe, except that it used low fat ricotta for creaminess and moisture, without the fat content that the usual oils provide.

I threw together this concoction this afternoon and hoped for the best! I haven’t put the pasta salad together yet, but the pesto tastes good!

Ingredients

• 1 bunch basil (mine was approx. 3 cups of medium packed leaves)
• 0.5 cup low fat ricotta
• 2 tbs almonds (I used sliced because I had them in the cupboard, but I don’t think it matters — blanched or roasted would give different flavours)
• 1.5 tbs apple sauce (no added sugar)
• 1 dash each salt, pepper & garlic salt
• 2 dashes cayenne pepper

Method

Combine all ingredients in a food processor and blend until smooth. That’s it! Although, I did have to process the basil before adding the other ingredients so that it would all fit in my little processor. Also, I added just one dash of cayenne pepper at first, but I found the pesto was still a bit sweet from the apple sauce, so I added another dash.

You could also add some parmesan cheese (1 tbs would probably be about right). I intended to add parmesan, but I forgot to use it until after I’d already put my pesto in a jar. You could exchange some of the cayenne pepper for parmesan, which should counteract some of the sweetness of the apple sauce (which is in there as a low fat alternative to oil and helps keep the pesto moist).

If you try this recipe or some variation of it, or if you have a favourite low fat pesto recipe, let me know in the comments!

I have a $3 notebook from Office Works that is great! It has heavy, creamy pages, an elastic band to keep the cover closed and a pen holder that fits my fountain pen nicely. Then I have a 2012 diary that is almost great: it has a beautiful cover, lovely pages and typography, but no pen holder… I didn’t realise how much I valued a pen holder on my notebooks and diaries until I had an excellent one on my notebook and none on my diary.

So, I cut the elastic off a 2011 diary that I barely used and used a craft brad and a little glue to secure it to my 2012 diary. Problem solved!

Thanks to Twitter I caught wind of Fitarella’s 12 in 12. Not only does Jacqueline have a cool screen name, she also has a great idea for this year!

The rules for 12 in 12 are that you do something every day for each month of 2012, at the end of each month you decide whether to continue with what you have been doing and choose a new thing to do every day for the next month. The “thing” can be pretty much anything: exercise, giving up a food or activity, trying a new food or activity.

12 in 12 is a great opportunity to try new things, build new habits, practice activities that you haven’t made time to practice in the past. I like the idea because it’s a measurable goal, it’s good for developing discipline, and you can make it as easy or difficult on yourself as you like.

For January I am doing 3 sets of abdominal crunches when I get up each morning. I haven’t decided on any challenges for future months, but I have got a list of ideas. You’re welcome to draw from this list if you want to take up the challenge too!

• pushups
• squats
• lunges
• walk up & down stairs
• no coffee
• no chocolate
• dark chocolate instead of milk
• eat at least 3 greens
• cook a new recipe
• wake up earlier
• don’t take a daytime nap
• read at least 1 Christian (or topic of your choice) article
• play guitar
• play flute
• learn to play piano
• write a blog post
• write a letter

What new thing are you hoping to do this year?

I hate new year resolutions!

At least I have for quite a long time. I think they’re cliché, they’re too often setting yourself up for failure — people don’t realise that change and improvement usually don’t happen in a linear fashion — and if you really want to make a change, or want to achieve something, just do it! You don’t have to wait for new year to better yourself or achieve goals.

That said, this last week or so has been pretty chilled for me, and a good opportunity to think, review and plan. It is actually a nice chance to think about what to work on and how to approach it. One of the things I hate about new year resolutions is the lack of follow through: people say they want something to happen, but do nothing to make it happen. And it’s a failing of my own as well: too often I think about doing something, but don’t do it. So, the how to approach it stage is a grand step towards actually taking action.

Some tips for successful change

• Don’t just think, do
• Change usually doesn’t happen overnight, nor is it consistent — there will be ups and downs
• If you fall off the wagon, you haven’t failed (or if you have, your goal might have been too ambitious), just get back on at the first available opportunity

What changes do I want to make?

Well, unfortunately, due to a lack of exercise and possibly too much take away food, I’ve put back on a fair bit of the weight I lost. I’m super keen to lose that and keep it off. One of the methods to achieve this is to practice my karate kata at home every weekday, or close to it. I’ll need more exercise than that, but it’s a start.

I want to make more Thesis skins and plugins. It was my hope to do that last year, and while I made a couple of free plugins and one paid child theme, I want to do more.

I want to make a series of video tutorials about making websites (I think the series will be called Websites Back to Front). These will involve using FTP, HTML, CSS, WordPress and Thesis. I believe there are good videos and tutorials out there, but I think I’m in a good position to reach some keen beans that those other tutorials haven’t reached yet.

There is much more I want to do, but I don’t want to set myself up for failure by listing too many of them here (and I don’t mind if some of them happen in years to come).

Happy new year everyone!

Good luck, or if you believe in him, happy God’s providence to you.

My copy All Mankind’s new album Simple Desire came in the post a couple of weeks ago. I love it more and more every time I listen to it!

I love the energy of Can You Hear Me? and Break the Spell, and I really enjoyed the peaceful vibe of Lay Me Down while I was driving this morning.

You can:

• Listen to Simple Desire
• Buy a signed copy
• Buy it on iTunes
• Check out their music videos on YouTube

I haven’t used ad-blockers for a very long time… partly because I haven’t used Firefox (regularly) for a long time, and I’ve been slow to adopt Chrome plugins. Also, I’m a little conflicted about denying site-owners potential income by blocking their ads. So, I’m not an expert on ad-blocking by any means, but I ran into an interesting issue with a client this week that I thought deserved sharing.

My client had chosen to use thumbnails in the Thesis teasers that were 300×250 pixels. Personally I prefer something slightly more “widescreen”, like 300x200px, but it is a food blog, so I think they’d like to show as much of the dishes as they can. We had just finished implementing the design on the website — I had written a little script that grabs the first image uploaded to the post and displays the thumbnail version of that image, if there is no Thesis Thumbnail designated for the post — and the client told me that Adblock Plus was blocking the thumbnails.

Since I don’t use ad-blockers and haven’t used this specific image size much, I’d never encountered this issue, but with the help of Perishable Press and my client we figured it out! The images have -300x250 at the end of their URL (WordPress adds the dimensions to all images it generates), and Adblock Plus was blocking images with -300x250 in their file name. 300×250 is one of the standard ad sizes… So assuming that Adblock Plus only blocks the standard ad sizes, the way to fix this issue in WordPress is to change your image size to something slightly different to 300×250, even if it is just by one or two pixels.

If you need to change all the thumbnails on your site Regenerate Thumbnails is a very effective plugin for regenerating the images after you change the size settings.

In July there was a long weekend, and hubby and I got to go away with his friends from work and their partners. We rented a catamaran on which we ate, drank, slept, played games and sailed a bit too. While we were out there was quite a bit of rain, so the charter company gave us a couple of free days on the boat, so we’re going out again this weekend!

Here’s some photos from last time…

I baked these yesterday and they were great!

The recipe is adapted from recipes on Proud Italian Cook and Masterchef Australia.

Ingredients

• 2 sheets shortcrust pastry
• 1 cup ricotta cheese
• 1/3 cup cream cheese
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 tbs vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 1 punnet strawberries
• 1-2 tsp berry jam

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 180ºC
2. Cut pastry into rounds and place in a shallow patty pan tray
3. Mix ricotta, cream cheese and sugar with electric beaters; add eggs one at a time and beat until smooth. Stir in vanilla.
4. Put about 1/2 tbs of mixture into each pastry case and top with sliced strawberries.
5. Bake in the centre of the oven for 20 mins, or until edges puff and skewer comes out clean.
6. Melt jam on stove or in microwave (about 15 sec) and glaze warm tarts.
7. Serve at room temperature or refrigerated.

Makes 24

Above are the standard ingredients, but I used low fat/sugar versions: reduced fat shortcrust pastry, low fat ricotta and cream cheese and Equal Baking instead of sugar. I didn’t make my own pastry, but you can of course use your favourite pastry recipe if you want to.

The mixture can make about 30 tarts, but if cut right 2 sheets of pastry makes exactly 24 tarts. The mixture can be kept in the fridge in a sealed container for a day or two if you want to make it in advance, or if you don’t want to cook it all at once.

Hope you enjoy these as much as I do!

I’ve finished the move of kristarella.com to a new server (well, that happened a while ago, but I’ve made more progress since then)!

The improvements to WordPress (WP) over the last couple of years have been great! The integration of WordPressMU with the main WP stream into WP networks was a good move for any one interested in multiple WordPress sites, and custom post types and taxonomies are pretty sweet. So now I have all of those things working over my network, and more. The network is still in progress, some designs and functions are not finished yet, but you’re still welcome to check them out.

• The original kristarella.com blog
• My photoblog now has its own domain
• 365 project blog, which is way behind! but I’ll get there
• Kristarella Studios also has its own site with my portfolio, free skins, and (hopefully) soon paid skins

I need to create a master nav menu to link the sites together and add more content to all of them, but I’m glad that they’re all up and running now.

I’m using Thesis child themes on all of them, which I’m finding very convenient for customising each separately while all using the latest version of Thesis.

I have high hopes of updating these all more regularly— wish me luck! And feel free to take this opportunity to ask me about my sites, Thesis or whatever you fancy.