Posts Tagged ‘food’

Soft Car Pattern

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Car Pattern

Finally finally finally! This is what I’ve been working on for the last month besides my 2007 photo book. And suddenly I find I have nothing to say… I think the pattern came out nicely though, this time I decided to illustrate it instead of photographing it. I like how it looks, it isn’t overloaded with pictures for each tiny step, and I think the illustrations are easier to understand. I wanted to get this done further before the holidays, but it’s pretty easy to make, so maybe I’ll get some adventurous takers.

pinned-bottom

I think finding wheels is a little intimidating, so I put some sets of those up for sale in my shop too, although I really don’t want to get into the business of selling wheels. If I was a business major I’m sure I’d think it was great and call it something like horizontal productization or leveraged diversification or something, but there’s a reason I’m not a business major, and I don’t run a store. Because I want to make things, not resell them. Except, now I have a store. Hrm.

On a separate note, Thanksgiving was really low key at our house this year. We were going to go over to a friends for a group shindig, but Rebecca got sick Tuesday night. Thursday it got to be time to cook dinner, well, 20 minutes until dinner is supposed to be ready is a little late to start, and I felt lame that we didn’t have anything Thanksgiving-ish. So in 40 minutes I managed to cook elbow noodles (Rebecca survives half on whole wheat noodles and half on milk and fruit), sour cranberry relish, biscuit wrapped chicken sausage bits, and roasted chestnuts. And the biscuits didn’t come out of a pop-tube either. We opened a bottle of wine, and had the chocolate cream pie Jesse made for the party for dessert ourselves. I was quite pleased with my adrenaline fueled speed cooking session. :-) It brought back the days when we used to have Iron Chef cooking parties at our house.

I should probably have some kind of giveaway now, shouldn’t I? Maybe tomorrow.

Spice Painting

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

SpicePainting

I got this idea from MaryAnn Kohl’s Math Arts, although I think the math connection is pretty weak it sounded like fun from a sensory perspective. The version in the book was more involved, but what we did was paint with glue and then sprinkle spices over the glue. Then there was a lot of spice layering, and then we were making ‘mudge’ according to Rebecca. Mudge being a paste of white glue and aromatic spices apparently. Although I was not deemed competent to make mudge, maybe someday if I practiced enough, but I was just making spudge. Which was fine with me. I don’t care what you call an art activity if it lasts for almost two hours, which this did!

So find those five year old spices in the back of your pantry, put them in jars with shaker tops if they aren’t already, and some paint brushes and watered down white glue. It may look like, uh, awful, but it smells really nice. Ours is hanging on the kitchen wall for Rebecca to sniff. I think we’ll do this with our artfriends on Friday.

mudge

Lollipop Tutorial

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

lollipops

Felt lollipops for Halloween, or anytime you need play-sweets. Start your own lollipop sweet shop with dolls (you can even twist the pipe cleaners around their hands so they can hold them if you make them long enough), or engage in some trick-or-treat play drama, or maybe you just need something cute for the middle of your table. These are so simple you don’t need a tutorial, but the dimensions and pictures are useful, right? :-)

Materials:
Half a pipe cleaner,
two 1.5″ circles of felt,
embroidery floss,
2″ wide packing tape or clear contact paper.

(I used wool felt, but craft felt should work fine.)

bend pipe

Twist one end of the pipe cleaner up in a spiral that is a little smaller than one of the felt circles. Fold about half an inch of the bottom end up so that the wires at the bottom won’t poke anyone.

lollipop

Stitch around the edge of the circle with contrasting (or matching) embroidery floss, trapping the pipe cleaner inside. I used all six strands because I wanted the stitching to really stand out. To make it easier to sew with six strands you can divide it into three strands, thread it onto your needle, pull all six of the ends together and knot them. Then you aren’t trying to pull twelve strands of floss through the felt with each stitch.

Cut three pieces of packing tape or contact paper:
* One 1.5″x3.25″ piece for the inside of the wrapper, cutting this without getting it to stick to itself is a little tricky!
* Two about 2″x3″ pieces for the outside. Don’t worry about the exact size – just big enough to cover the inside wrapper and hang over the edge by at least 1/2″, but more is fine.

inside tape

Take the narrow piece of tape and fold it over the top of the lollipop, sticky side out – you don’t want the tape to stick to the felt. The folded tape should be just a tiny bit bigger than the lollipop.

outside tape

Place the larger pieces horizontally and sticky side in on the front and back, lining up the bottom edges as best you can and letting the other sides hang over. Press it all together and smooth it out with your fingers.

wrapper off

You should now have a wrapper that slides on and off. Take it off and trim up the edges. You can cut them all flat or cut some of the edges with pinking sheers – for a traditional lollipops from a roll look trim the top and bottom edges flat and the left and right edges crinkly. I decided to pink mine around the top three edges, because crinkly is cute!

lollipops

These are really fast, so make a bunch! Time for play!


Kid Empowerment

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

faucet extention

We try to make our house as child accessible as possible, but the kitchen sink faucet has been slow coming – she can always walk over to the bathroom, but sometimes that isn’t such a good idea, say when her hands are dripping paint. Because as much as you tell a three year old not to touch anything on their way to the bathroom, their concentration isn’t always there.

So now with a four inch piece of wood and some rubber bands Rebecca can turn on the kitchen sink too. As long as the lever is pointing forwards, and isn’t completely inaccessible off to the side. It’s an improvement anyway, we’ll see if it’s as successful as the dowel-and-plastic-tubing enhanced light switch in the bathroom.

So, hurrah, I made something today. :-) And yesterday I made pizza (including the crust), signaling the end of my I’m-not-cooking-I-have-a-baby period I guess. Really it was fueled by my growing frustration that even living in California, the land of hippy food, I can’t order a pizza around here with a whole wheat crust, and hey, one quarter no cheese for my picky daughter.

Sweet Dollhouse Treats

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Treats

Things have been a little slower around here since pennyloaf came along, but I have been working on some tiny felt dollhouse food. I’m planning on sugary treats and a farmers market basket full of vegetables. I’d like to draw up a pattern and instructions for them and possibly sell patterns or kits on Etsy, but I’ve had similar goals before. This time for sure! Always an optimist. :-)

So far I’ve made ice cream cones and an ice cream cone holder that looks sort of cake-ish, and a cake (with, um, a cupcake embroidered on it…) and a cupcake and some cupcake tops that need bottoms. Lots of tiny hand stitching, and since it’s dollhouse scale (the cake is an inch across) it’s easy to carry around to the playground.

I’d like to add some plates and cookies and a box for the cupcakes. Then of course there’s lots of photos and instructions before I can call the project ‘done’. We’ll see.

Dancing Snake Cake

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Snakes 1

Shortly after Rebecca’s second birthday we got the book “The Monster Show: Everything You Never Knew About Monsters” by Charise Mericle Harper out of the library. Ever since then Rebecca has wanted singing snakes on her three year birthday cake, and we would talk about how it was hard to find the sorts of stores that monsters shopped at to get things like singing snakes.

Singing Snakes

Most monsters like to have singing snakes on their birthday cakes instead of candles.

We had to buy the book when it had to go back to the library. I think she was starting to forget about it, a year later, but I didn’t forget about it. I thought it was a great and suitably crazy idea. Besides, my husband and I had been daydreaming about how to get it to work off and on all year, we had to do something with all that built up creative thought.

We didn’t actually manage the singing part, which is funny, because sticking an iPod with speakers into the box would have been the easy part. But starting with the hard part is always a good idea, right? We did manage spinning snakes. Here’s a YouTube video, proof!

The original plan called for the snakes to be made out of parachute silk and have a straw with air blowing through them for animation, and sound. What we actually ended up with were cotton snakes on bent pipe cleaners that spun around. There are drinking straws lined up with holes in the tinfoil and cardboard base that feed the pipe cleaners through the cake and down to the mechanism, where they are twisted through axle pivot bits, if that makes any sense. You can see a top and side view of the inside mechanism below. The straws mostly kept the pipe cleaners from getting stuck and icky in the cake and frosting, and we only ended up with minimal cake-crumb-rain down into the gears. The pipe cleaners were great for bending the snakes up and giving them different poses.

Top Mechanism

The original gear train that I built powered an ambitious 12 snakes, but the motor was loaded enough with six. Overloaded really, on the test cake on Rebecca’s ‘real’ birthday, two of the snakes failed, and we were only using six of them. So my husband and I rebuilt it to be more robust with less backlash. He’s good at over-engineering things, and I’m good at under-engineering them. (I also got Jesse to build the cardboard base and get all the holes lined up, all the icky here is the top and here is the bottom, please build the middle so that it all fits together magically please work.)

Mechanism Side View

From the side view you can see the feet on the bottom and supports on the top that hold the top of the box, and the cake, up. Part of Jesse’s (necessary) over-engineering of the project, I would have been content with the cardboard box holding everything up, and it probably would have sagged and locked the gears. But it would have worked beautifully for at least 30 seconds. Optimism is not so great in engineering. :-)

Snakes 2

Next year perhaps we will have a wooden box with built in speakers, and party hats for the snakes (I can’t believe I forgot the tiny party hats!) or maybe we will have moved on to something else. I bet a merry-go-round with fairies riding up and down on cupcakes would be pretty cool too…