angry chicken

pinwheel cookies and happy holidays!

It's been a whirlwind of activity with the girls around here, most of which was unexpected. There's been a few very sore throats, fevers, an emergency trip to the dentist to get a tooth pulled, a lovely solstice celebration last night (expect horrible tooth pain for one of my daughters) but we are all good! There are times I can just roll with it, deal with what comes up, and just be happy* and one way is to make cookies, so there you go.

This is a basic sugar cookie recipe that I formed into pinwheels. They are vanilla flavored, although mint would be nice. I got huge props from my daughters on how they turned out. They said the were instagram worthy.

I hope you all have a lovely holiday and new year! See you in 2016! Thank you so much for reading. It's been a long time I've been blogging now and it's meant so much to me. Thank you, thank you.

• Unrelated, I loved this story in the NYT about an art curator that in my mind, is the perfect Wes Anderson character that hasn't been created yet.

*This is also easier to do if I'm not having back pain, which I am not right now. So grateful about that.

Christmas candy boxes and using up my favorite supplies

I have been collecting vintage Christmas bits and bobs for a long time now. A few years ago, I tried on a new craft/art mantra— use it. I tend to squirrel away precious items and then I don't use them, don't see them, can't enjoy them, and although this sounds bad, I also can't justify buying/looking for more, because I have so much I'm not using. I now use my favorite fabrics, trims, stickers, mushrooms, all that. I make them as gifts or keep them, or think about selling them (?) but I get such joy using up my favorite supplies. Also, I had these unpainted cardboard boxes already, so no trips to the craft store needed. Resourceful or hoardy? Who's to say?

The idea for these started after seeing vintage ornaments I inherited from my great Aunt Mickey never really getting the love they deserved. I added the mica glitter, velvet ribbons, bottle brush trees, my precious angel candles, and made these boxes over the course of a few days. I just love working in 3D and I also love gluing stuff onto stuff. I had similar good creative vibes making these woodland centerpieces a few years ago.

These might get tucked away and given out next year, I'm not sure. That's another thing I have been doing the last few years, making gifts not knowing the recipient or the occasion. I figure it will be clear, and it always is. I do this with knitting a lot. I just knit scarves, hats, mittens, and don't worry about what I will do with them. I have a special box I keep them in, and then, sometimes 2 years later, give them as a gifts. It's so freeing know I don't have to "know" exactly the why, I can just make the thing.

more charms

I packed up some of the charms I made and tucked into gift boxes. Now I can't stop with the buckteeth. I'm trying to control myself. These designs were all from various tutorials online. So much fun. I did learn the hard way that you really do need to pull out the eye pin after baking, super-glue it, and stick it back in. Otherwise the charm will come off and that's pretty tragic.

The internet is still causing me to try new projects. There are some lovely ideas for gifts and free printables over on Almost Makes Perfect. I have to just accept that I normally relax after Christmas, not before. So my urge to make, bake, and research is something I'm not going to fight. I am, however, trying to stockplie books to read under a blanket when all this is over next weekend.

 

pot holders and matcha salt

Some holiday gift making has been completed around here. I always have about 4 crafts going one at once, just hoping I have time to complete them. Then I get excited by something else and add more. I made matcha salt (again) because it's so easy and a great gift to give to people who aren't super into sugar-type stuff. Like most ballet teachers, for example. I also sewed up some pot holders. I have a lot of fabric scrap that I wanted to use up. Grammie made this all come together by letting me pull from her jelly-roll stash for the bindings, which made me love these fabrics all over again. There is nothing like a happy, bright, patterned binding to give a project life.

We have been watching a lot of musicals around here, as part of a homeschool theme, and it has been met with some pretty funny reactions. The sensitivity to schmaltz has gotten pretty high with the older girls, so watching anyone break out into song is met with some snark. I get it. Singing in the Rain will always get a thumbs up, also Moulin Rouge! (by my 13 year old) and most of the classics although they were NOT smitten with Oklahoma the way I was. Grease, always good, and Grease 2 even better (what?) but a big thumbs down today to West Side Story. We had to skip a lot of it, but there was still much to discuss. All of which was pretty funny, even though it is a tragedy. They liked Bye Bye Birdie, which Pete was traumatized by. They LOVED Wicked when we saw it live a month ago, so there's that.

questionable cooking, part 2

So, these were made. They are coal cookies from nerdy nummies. I realize they look a lot more like cow pies than coal. These were just weird. They are basically a rice krispy treat but with crushed oreos (minus the cream middle) and melted marshmallows. They had a very soft texture. The surprising thing was how little flavor they had. I would have thought an oreo would taste more like something, but no, they were very tasteless. Maybe it because they were so dark, you expect more of a flavor? Some espresso powder would have helped, possibly, but that still wouldn't take care of the texture issues.

The internet provided the how-to. My two youngest daughters made these—it took up at least an hour of oreo scrapping and crushing and whatnot. They ended up not really eating them. But, after most of them were tossed, my eldest daughter was sad. She liked them! Quite a bit! So there you go.

Speaking of cookies, I attended the annual Low-Pressure Cookie Party this year. This is a pretty long tradition now of getting together with some very funny ladies and sharing cookies. You don't even have to bring any cookies to come, or they can store bought, or whatever. We have soup and salad and then eat the cookies and divide the left-overs. it's always so fun and laid back and full of crazy stories and much cursing. I made the cookies on that fantastic spotted platter (provided by the every-ready hostess), they are a Lofthouse style cookie, the pink ones with almond glaze and the orange with orange glaze. All the cookies were outstanding.

candy cane lollipops

We made these cute candy cane lollipops courtesy of pinterest and they were really fun and easy. I looked for candy canes that were more applicable to forming the heart shape. I did soften them in the oven first (for about 1 minute at 350°) to get them to hold together at the top and on the stick. We used melted chocolate chip to fill in. The girls loved making them. I have them wrapped up in little treat bags ready to give away.

More flooding! Portland is underwater. We personally are doing okay, but our neighborhood is pretty bad, lots of people with flooded basements and lakes for yards. Lots of sandbags. We are all trying to help each other move furniture.

Like always, I keep seeing items that I want for myself while buying and making for others. I informed Pete that he bought me a lovely pair of socks and a stellar Christmas ornament from Russia. I even had them wrapped. I also sent a link to this book for my brother to get me, Face Paint: The Story of Makeup. It looks fascinating—all about the history of make-up. And he didn't mock me! Yet.

stained glass with a glue gun and canvas

For homeschool art a few weeks back we busted out some canvases we had in the garage. I buy them in packs. They paint on them and then about a year later we gesso over them and use them again. Sometimes they want to keep them, but more often than not, they are ready move on. This is great because we have about 10 rotating at all times and it saves a ton of money. Canvases can seem so permanent, and sometimes they are, but it can be really freeing to just paint white over the whole thing and start fresh.

I was looking on pinterest and found a technique for a faux stained glass. This is sort of like that, but we didn't have any colored glue sticks. I had them lightly sketch in pencil a very simple design on canvas. We looked at some actual stained glass images for an example. Then they traced the lines with a glue gun, then painted the glue lines black. This looked really messy, but the acrylic paint applied afterwards covered the black messiness. After that dried, they painted in the shapes in solid colors and added chalk pastel for blending, which made a huge difference and really made these look magical. This all took a few stages, over two days. It was very fun.

We are in full holiday craft/cooking mode around here. We had a few curve balls last week—Pete working very long hours unexpectedly, the norovirus hitting all of us at the same time during the ballet shows the girls were in, and a very long and annoying power outage during our planned tree decorating, but we made it though! We were so sick, though, I had to throw out a rug, it was that bad.

questionable cooking, part 1

On the eve of Thanksgiving, many signs pointed me to the direction of the piecaken. The NY Times article, a random link to the same article from my brother, a sense of excitement and danger planning on making a last minute dessert to bring to Grammie's, being way too tired to be doing this (I started at 9:30pm)—you know, all the signs of greatness. This is a blackberry pie baked inside of a vanilla cake, with a chocolate espresso frosting. It was delicious. And took forever to cook. More than 2 hours.

I has some expert tips from from my go-to foodie resource and good friend Action Hero, who has made several of these. She warned me of the long cooking time, and suggested a pumpkin pie/spike cake combo, and advised me to avoid the fruit pie, but I threw caution to the wind. Pete reported from the store what was available for pies, we decided on blackberry, and he picked that up and two yellow box cake mixes, and I made the frosting. I think you need to decide your pie flavor first and go from there. This is so crazy I would not make it from scratch. That would make me sad and take the comedy out of it and replace it with swearing.

I know this photo is pretty unattractive, but you know, the whole thing is weird, so I'm not going to try and make it look pretty. The internet is full of this unholy, yet magical creation. It's really debatable if just a piece of cake and a piece of pie on a plate together would be better, but the drama of cutting into this was worth it.