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.

Easter Eggs

I had a small person guest this weekend.  Weekends, it turns out, are really long when you have to entertain a small person guest.  We filled up some of the time making Easter eggs.  I didn't feel like boiling them, so I used hollow eggs.  Of course, to get hollow eggs, one has to make hollow eggs.

First, get a decent sized needle. (I made more eggs after an initial dyeing, which is why my fingers are stained.)

Use something to hammer the needle into the egg.  I used the handle of a knife.  Of course, be gentle.

You end up with a tiny hole.  You can do this on both sides, but it makes blowing out the egg quite difficult, so I chose an easier, slightly less aesthetic route.  The other hole will be bigger, so I put the little hole on the top (smaller portion) of the egg.

You can just use the same needle and make a larger hole on the bottom and blow out the contents.  I happen to have a meat injector, which I chose to use as an egg remover.  The needle of a flavor injector is significantly larger, so it's easy to make big cracks.

Again, use something to gently hammer it into the egg.

Very carefully pull up on the injector to remove a large portion of the egg.  You can put the injector back in, but that risks more cracking.  I decided to blow the remaining egg out.  It is probably horribly unsanitary to put your lips on egg shell, but I rinsed them off.

As you can see, the hole is much bigger, but it's not too bad.

Here's the thing about kids and dyeing eggs.  They have zero interest in keeping colors separate or keeping their fingers clean.  Fingers getting dyed is particularly a problem with hollow eggs, as they float.

Most of the eggs end up some sort of greenish brown shade, because the egg is indiscriminately dipped into all colors and everything gets mixed up.  The ones in the first row were completed before there was too much contamination.

We're Published, Y'all!

Sarah H. had a bridal shower this weekend and received lots and lots of cookbooks, including this awesome one. You might think from these pictures that it's from me, but it's not. It's from her law school friend. (Thanks, Ericka!)

I'm pretty tickled that we're, technically speaking, published authors now. Go us! Put it on the CV. Hope you enjoy, Sarah! Particularly those classics such as "How to Pour Cereal" and "Bad Day Meal." =)