Ugly sweaters and cookies

Today's post brings you some UGLY sweaters!  The girls from work all got together for a cookie exchange and decided to wear our ugly Christmas sweaters, too!  I had a hard time finding one as I got rid of all of mine, brought them all to Goodwill, a long time ago.  I ended up buying one at Walmart.  As I checked out, the clerk asked if I needed a gift receipt.  After answering that I did not, she asked if I was treating myself!?!  I started laughing and said that I was buying it to wear to an ugly sweater party.  She must have liked it much more than I did as she didn't find the humor in it!  Oh well, I truly remember wearing these things years ago.  If only I'd have known, I could have kept them and had a good use for them now.  LOL!

Here is the invitation I made for the girls.  The only problem with it is that after I gave them out, I won tickets to Disney On Ice in the Andersen Suite at the Xcel Energy Center.  Kinzie and I had a great time there last week :)  The girls and I just postponed our cookie exchange for a week.  All is good in the world.

Here we are in all our ugly sweater glory.  Aren't we adorable?  Really, we don't even look that bad!

Barb was our big winner so she won the prize - a snowman in an ugly sweater!

Take a look at some of the treats we had.  Yeah, this was just a small sampling of our goodies.  We all went away with a lot of baked goods.

I made the homemade caramels you can see on the left side of the photo.  They are soooo yummy!  I will even give you the recipe here.  Thanks go out to "Gator" at work for sharing his wife's recipe.  They turned out great :)

Butter Caramels

2 1/4 cups brown sugar
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1/2 pound butter
1 cup light corn syrup
1 tsp. vanilla

In a heavy saucepot, cook butter, sugar, milk, and corn syrup until it reaches 245-250 degrees (approximately 13 minutes).  Remove from heat and add vanilla.  Pour into a buttered 9x13 pan.  Let cool and cut into strips then into 1" pieces.  Wrap each piece in wax paper.

**I did double the recipe and put it in a jelly roll pan and it worked great :)

Happy Scrappin'