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Peppers

Look! Food! On a food blog!  ..... Well, sort of. Really it's more fun with Paper by 53.

In progress:

Paper by 53 App Is Amazing

I have discovered a new app called Paper by 53, and I love it very much. The app itself is free, but the only tool you get is a pencil. I paid $7 to get the brush, pens, and a marker, and I have spent enough time playing with it that it's already worth the price.

This is a picture I created today based on this photo in the Atlantic. If you click on the link, you'll see that my talents for drawing a likeness are non-existent, but I feel compelled to link to the original photo. There are lots of little things that are wrong with the picture, but it was really fun to 'paint' it. And the erase feature really improves one's ability. =)

Just for funsies, below is a gif showing my progress as I went along.

Mother's Day Crafting

Pepper and I decided to celebrate mother's day by having a craft extravaganza. We brought the craft table up from the basement and laid out our possibilities.

Starting from the lower left corner and going clockwise: The B is for Pepper (spoiler alert-her name's not Pepper). She's going decorate it & take it to college (see below); Wine bottle for wine bottle art (did not get used); Little shelf/organizers we picked up at a yard sale to paint (in progress; pictures to come later); blown out eggs we never dyed from Easter (not used); wool roving (not used); old photos (not used); popsicle sticks (Pepper LOVES popsicle crafting - her house is in progress); broken slate (see below); bird house (see below); wood scrap that I was going to paint with wax paints (not used).

Here's the birdhouse, painted by me, color supervision by Pepper. I hope to post pictures of a little birdie using it.

Painted B for college! Her roommates will undoubtedly be jealous.

First, I put the broken slate pieces back together and then painted a setting sun-type deal.

Then I painted a white tree, separated the pieces back out and hot-glued them on a picture frame.  The end! (For now.)

Mother's Day Gift

My kid made me this for Mother's Day. She was all sneaky about it & pretty much everyone else knew but me. Very very sneaky. =)

Completed wine bottle art

I finally finished the wine bottle art I started 5 months ago. Actually, it's beer bottle art, but whatever. Here it is:

I meant for the elephant to be bigger, so that the trunk would go up the neck of the bottle. Ah well.

Wine Poached Pears

Wine poached pears are really delicious, and I don't even like pears all that much. They are extremely easy to make. You can also save the extra cooked-down sauce, and it's like wine jam. So yummy.

Craft Time #2

Craft time take 2! Complete with a Maggie!

We played with my wax paints. None of us are particularly gifted at the wax arts, but it was quite fun.

Maggie completed two craft projects. A tree (that ended up with a sky) and a painted representation of their newest cat, Twitch.  Twitch is very twitchy.

I didn't take a picture of mine in progress -- this is Shana's base color.

Here is Pepper's in progress.

And the final product (mine is the top one) that is now hanging on Pepper's wall.

The End!

Craft Time

Pepper* and I finally had a craft day with the Nissen Bomb, although Maggie was sadly absent. We decided to make some bottle art, and we each picked a beer bottle.

Miss Niss fretted initially over what to paint, but after some googling, she stuck her tongue out and got to work.

Pepper painted blackbirds and clouds.  I don't have a final picture, but there was also a moon.  I asked her what she wanted to say about doing bottle art on the blog, and she reports, "It was amazing."  There you go.

This is my work in progress.  The wine bottle below is what I worked on by myself earlier.  I haven't actually finished the beer bottle one.  I am thinking about trying to paint an elephant rearing up, with its trunk in the neck of the bottle.  I have serious doubts about my ability to accomplish such a thing, though.  The tree thing was a random block of scrap wood that I painted with the extra bottle paint & then drew a tree on it.

This was my initial wine bottle fun times.  I got the idea for wine bottle art from some stuff we saw at Lowe Mill over Christmas.  Those had bright, oddly shaped buildings, but I didn't think that I could pull that off. So I roamed around Etsy looking at pictures/paintings of dancers.

And this is where I put my scrap tree.

Here are the instructions we used.  I recommend this project!

*Although Pepper is 18, she's still in the foster system, and I'm not supposed to post pictures of her or put her name on the interwebs. I sometimes call her chili pepper (children -> chilluns -> chilis -> chili pepper), so that's the name we're going with.