This turned out to be a me-too project, in that I made one for a friends little girl who was turning two, and then both my girls said “me too! me too!”. So I made two more. They didn’t take very long.

The silhouette could use a little bit of work, I don’t like how it doesn’t mound roundly at the top, which has to do with how tightly I stuffed it to be sure that the candle would stick up, but I do like how the frosting sticks out over the edge of the cupcake base, which is partly the obvious increase and then decrease, but also that on the inside of the cupcake I stitched the bottom of the increase row loosely to the top of the decrease row to keep it from stretching too far up and loosing its shape. But, maybe I was being to smart for my own good with the internal stitching, and the shape would have been better without it? It would have kept that dip out of the frosting silhouette…

Also, I put cardboard in the bottom to keep it flat, but I should have added a weight also, because they are still tippy. Next time. But isn’t the flame cute? It would make a nice sparkler I think.

This year we did it, we built a rolling graham cracker car/train thing. It rolls! I had to slightly violate our 100% food rule, because I forgot to bring stick pretzels, so the only thing I could find to use for an axle was the stick for a cocktail umbrella… they were there for gingerbread house decorating, so it sorta counts, but I’d like to have a do-over with 100% food. Next time maybe. Although, I think I’ll move on to a counterweight trebuchet… But a car with a gravity weight drive… the belt would be tricky, I could use those sticky gummy ropes, does a candy necklace with elastic in the middle count as food?? Lollypop sticks would also make fine axles come to think of it… Oh, or large candy canes. Does custom pouring hard candy gears count as cheating?

(Direct Youtube video link)

Here is proof that it rolls! The wheels are made out of graham cracker plywood (2-ply) with a hole cut in the center (used a bento circle cutter designed for cutting out eyes from cheese and such) with a Good N’ Plenty stuffed in it, which the tooth-pick-like cocktail umbrella stick stuck into that. The toothpicks go straight through the body of the car. My original plan was to build box tubes under the car and run stick pretzel axels through them, this is cleaner and simpler, but disappointingly not 100% food based.

(Direct Youtube video link)

Here is Jesse’s micro car, with Necco wafer wheels and similar toothpick construction.

Previous years:
2010: Gingerbread Marble Run
2009: Gingerbread Castle

The verdict for this snack time was fuzzy got eaten. We did not do comparative taste tests.

Is it unseasonal to post this now? I should start pre-dating all my holiday activities a year in the future so people see them at ‘appropriate’ times. Whatever. When my kids are older I’ll magically become more organized…

Also, there is no gingerbread or actual marbles involved in this… it should be titled “Graham Cracker and Everlasting Gobbstopper Run”, but…

Every year (okay, maybe every other…) we build a gingerbread house, usually at a big party with our friends, which we used to host, but due to living in a tiny house this year Chris hosted it, which was AWESOME of her. This year we couldn’t get inspired over any particular architectural undertaking, although there are some awesome modern gingerbread houses, and super realistic ones, and, oh dear, prison yards and peep shows… But, gizmos are always good around here, so we went for the rolling candy castle. We ran out of time (carefully mitering gingerbread strips takes time!) to really decorate this, so it’s not very candylandish, but it does run! And that’s the important thing around here, or is it?

Proof (here’s the straight link if the embedding is being flakey…):

Hopefully that video link thing works for you.

Awesome? We think so. And I should clarify, we is me and my eternal partner in gizmology, my awesome husband Jesse.

Next year, unless we do something totally different which is probably what will happen, it would be cool to go for taller, add tunnels, and some ^ points where the ‘marbles’ can split directions. How about plinko? Perhaps a rolling car? So many possibilities once you get away from just ‘house’.

What do you do with a 5 gallon bucket of lemons? Make a whole lot of lemon juice ice cubes. I love having lemon juice ice cubes around, they are great for that quick fix of lemonade or adding to iced tea. Using the lemon juicer is also good for coordination and hand strength! No, she didn’t do the whole bucket.

What are we doing? Making cheese. The easy way – scald milk and add a little acid – lemon juice or vinegar. We got the idea from ‘The Toddlers Busy Book’, which I haven’t used much, but has a bunch of fun ideas. There is a good description of cheese making here, the bare bones section is basically what we did.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this is Rebecca will not eat cheese. I think she wants to like it, but she really doesn’t. She used to adore cottage cheese when she was really little, then no more. Although I think she’s starting to come around, we made this cheese about a month ago, (yes, I am working through my photo backlog, what gave you that idea? Good thing I ‘blog without apology’, or I’d be feeling guilty that I was ‘behind’.) and she ate an entire string cheese last week. I was really surprised.

Anyway, she was very excited to make cheese, and then she couldn’t eat it, too bad! She thought it was awful. But that’s okay, dad thought it was great! We used lemon juice, and it gave it a nice flavor. We did squeeze it much too hard in the cheese cloth though, it came out very dry. And we forgot to add the salt, oops. I think we should try again. It is cute though, isn’t it?

[Recently all my comments have started being flagged as spam by Akismet, so if I don't respond to your comment by email promptly, okay, it always takes me a couple days, but if it takes me a week, sorry, I forgot to check my spam comments again. Dunno what I broke...]

Want to practice your cranking? Rebecca is fascinated by both baby food and the food mill. She wants her own bowl of baby rice cereal at meal times. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, but here she is, working on grinding up a quarter of a peanut butter and jam sandwich… Mmmm… She ate that quarter and then ground another one. Whatever floats their boats, right? (Still old pre-move projects.)

Anyhow, here are some awful pictures of Rebecca’s sewing, from two months ago. The next several posts will all be things several months old, before moving took over my life!

Rebecca has been sewing felt recently. For Christmas D-Pa got her a stack of craft felt of her very own. This is a heart that one of us cut out, can’t remember. I think she cut it out… it was for Daddy, went something like: “This heart is for Daddy.” “You’re cutting a hole in it?” “Daddy has a hole in his heart and all the blood is coming out.” “Oh?” “Now I’m taping it up.” “Mom, make a needle for me, I want to sew it to my skirt.” “Oh sure, why not.” “Now Daddy’s heart is stuck to my skirt, and I’ll show everyone at school tomorrow.” Two months and it’s still on there.

Yes, the color on this is awful. We did this at Nenny & D-Pa’s house over winter vacation. Rebecca said she wanted to make a donut, so I cut out two teal circles for her. Yes, she chose the color. First she sewed around the ring in the middle, then she said she wanted to put strawberries on it. So I cut out some strawberries, and she randomly stitched everything together. Then she wanted to stuff it. Sweetie, that’s really the wrong order to do things in, but who’s fault is that really? Sigh. Okay. So I started forcing stuffing in between the front and back between the strawberry stitching, holding the edges shut so that Rebecca could whip stitch around the edges. It ended up plumping up reasonably, luckily she wasn’t very thorough about sewing down the strawberries, because Mama’s always have to make these things work out, right?

By next week maybe I will have unpacked her felt and she can get back to work again. Actually, the biggest stumbling block to that right now: I bought a second hand wood bookcase for craft supplies, sight unseen, or in this case un-sniffed. It reeks of either perfume, incense or ill conceived fake teak scent. Any ideas how to get rid of it? I’m afraid the scent is somehow embedded in the finish and I’m very upset about the whole thing. It looks very nice, but the smell is making my throat raw.

Notice the haircut? That was a christmas morning present. She’s been wanting that consistently for quite a while, and now that it’s done I like it too, surprisingly enough! (I’m firmly in the long hair camp myself.) She slouched quite a lot when I was cutting off her ponytail, when it was off and she straightened up I was rather shocked at how short she had managed to get it without my noticing! Chin length in front, but up above her hairline in back. And so she ended up with a reverse bob, because that was what happened, and it was practically instantly exactly the haircut that she should have had, no getting used to it period, no who’s child are you? And I would have had no idea how to get there if it hadn’t happened by accident!

This is a carrot. Carrot leaves look nothing like that in reality, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a soft carrot with a realistic top. Only plastic ones.

This carrot is a basic cone pattern, with velcro patches holding it together. I’d really like to get some colored velcro for projects like this, and making sushi rolls, I’ve seen some really cute patterns that use colored velcro. I used random orange fabric patches to make the pieces I cut the cone sections out of, which I like. The construction is pretty messy though! I tried to get away with sewing the tiny circles on with the sewing machine. That never works…