Rainbow Party Project #6: Rainbow Cakes Aplenty

Rainbow cake has basically been a week-long project. But yes, I am pleased to tell you that tonight, the night before Rainbow Party Day, the dream has been achieved.

Tonight, on top of the stove, rests a seven-layer cake waiting to be frosted and decorated with M&Ms on the morrow. Its layers, from top to bottom: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Y'all, the rainbow cake is REAL!

But no, you can't see it yet. That would spoil the birthday party surprise!

A LOT of thought went into Rainbow Cake. I toyed with the idea of a straight-on rainbow cake, and was VERY inspired by the rainbow birthday cake over at ChocolateSuze, and her awesome rainbow Mario mushroon cake. But I really, really wanted a rainbow layer cake, and I just almost made the 20-layer rainbow cake, also at ChocolateSuze (I am still ABSOLUTELY going to make that one, just another time...).

Most of the 20-layer cakes that people post online are done with crepes, or otherwise very thin layers. So then I planned to just slice each layer in half horizontally, saving one half of each for a later date, but a very smart mom-friend of mine suggested that instead, I pour a small amount of batter into a regular 8" round pan and just watch it carefully to see when it was done. Done and DONE!

And that's how the rainbow cake was built: plain box of cake mix (on Manager's Special for 86 cents!), one cup of batter taken out and colored and spread into the bottom of an 8" round cake pan, cooked for 15 minutes. Perfect.

The girls, of course, were pillars of strength and sources of unending aid, and they also talked me into making an entire batch--24 cupcakes!--of rainbow cupcakes earlier this week just for them to eat. I'm still not sure what that was all about, but it certainly has not spoiled their taste for rainbow cake any, so it's all good.

And how nice to be able to rest my arm for a few of the 450 strokes called for in the recipe:

She learned to do silly voices while stirring from me.

The food coloring that we used is CRAP for your body--seriously, it's made entirely from high fructose corn syrup and those D&C dyes that make kids super-wild--but it's amazingly vivid, and we love it. And how many times have I told the children NOT to put it into straight into their mouths?

Many times. I have asked them not to do this many times.

We did do old-school rainbow for the cupcakes--yes, it's crazy, I baked a seven-layer rainbow cake and then two dozen rainbow cupcakes (well, I ate three, so 21 rainbow cupcakes), because I INVITE TOO MANY PEOPLE TO PARTIES. I need to feel loved, or something. Sydney helped with the cupcakes, in the most excrutiating manner imaginable:

Seriously, multiply that by seven colors and 24 cupcakes. My soul died an hour before we were done, but the child was filled with bliss, what can you do?

I love the randomness of the color when the cakes are ready to bake:

If we don't have our fill of rainbow edibles by the time this party is over tomorrow, it will NOT be for lack of trying on my part.

One of Many Uses for an Overhead Projector

It's old-school, I know. The overhead projector, as a tool of classroom technology, is so old-school that Matt actually scored this one for free from campus, and I heard a nasty rumor that our local public school district, which is going broke and therefore firing librarians and teachers and cutting world languages and music and nature education, etc., dumped off all its overhead projectors during the city's recent day for free electronic waste disposal.

However, we of this house are THRILLED to have an overhead projector. It is crucial to my future plans to write neatly on the walls in Sharpie (stay tuned), and the kids thoroughly enjoy themselves with transparencies, markers, and huge newsprint pages taped to the wall for muralizing. See thusly:

I use my scanner and inkjet transparency film for my part of the enterprise, and the kids use their awesomeness in telling me what they want me to make for them. So far, in addition to the horse skeleton, we have a map of the spread of horses throughout the world, a United States outline, an outline of the 13 original colonies (I love you, Megamaps!!!), and later tonight I promised to make a transparency of the Greek alphabet.

I know, no rainbow project today! But don't worry--the big kid's rainbow party shorts are waiting for me to add a waistband and bias in purple flannel, and in the stove are rainbow cake layers orange and yellow, while the red layer finishes cooling on the counter before being laid in the freezer. And also?

I found the Hawaiian dude's cover of "Somewhere over the Rainbow." This party is going to be AWESOME!

Rainbow Party Project #4: The Rainbow Party Dress

You might think that a party wouldn't necessarily call for a brand-new, handmade, thematically appropriate dress.

You'd be wrong. Seriously, you're talking to the woman who made the children matching outfits for Music Day, and they didn't even perform!

It just so happens that I happened to have in my stash (and I have it because the children begged for it who knows how long ago when we were at Joann's, and it was cheap and also on sale) three yards of sickeningly pink, sickeningly rainbow and hearts flannel fabric. I don't sew with flannel so much anymore, so I have been busy turning all my novelty flannel prints into colored pencil rolls, but pink? And rainbows? It was meant to be.

Here's what it was meant to be:

It was meant to be hers.

The dress is sewn from a vintage children's pattern, the same one that I used to sew Willow's crochet dress--both those dresses are a size 3, incidentally, but you can tell that the crochet material has WAAAAY more stretch. This one is a perfect fit for my almost-four-year-old, in length and width, and it has a terrific fit to it, too, I think, which you don't always find in children's clothing:

The entire dress is trimmed in purple flannel bias--

--and the closures are done in mismatched (but matching) buttons, the buttonholes of which it took TWO sewing machines, and a lot of swears, to sew:

I'd say that the baby looks like an angel in her sweet new dress, but I don't know...

She's the kind of kid who can look awfully naughty just sitting on the couch, you know what I mean?

P.S. Check out my tutorial for back-to-front blanket binding over at Crafting a Green World. Ooh, and in my post about Waldorf dolls, the public is amusingly already up in arms that I so much as mentioned Waldorf's foundation in anthroposophy. It is what it is, people.

Rainbow Project #3: Rainbow Party Playlist

Rainy weekend! Instead of a lot of gardening, I did a lot of sewing:

Notice that the dinosaur quilt has finally reached the binding stage--what has it been...a month now? And after MUCH swearing, I broke out my newer sewing machine (thanks, Grandma Bangle!) to sew some buttonholes, acknowledging that the presser foot plate on my older, and constantly used, sewing machine is too thrashed to do a zigzag stitch without fraying up the thread. I totally got Matt up in there to see if he could rig some sort of repair, but after HE swore a few swores, I have made peace in my head with the fact that I will just use two sewing machines from now on. Nothing wrong with that.

Instead of a lot of goofing around outside and going to the park to goof around and maybe taking the two-wheeler pedal bike out for a spin, Willow did a lot of computer games and painting and puzzles:

I really, really, REALLY love this puzzle, scored from the Montessori Garage Sale, entitled "Industries of Europe." I have a serious weakness for geography puzzles in which the pieces are shaped by geographic boundaries. That, and it cracks me up to watch Willow trying to fit France all sorts of places--Soviet Union, Egypt, Iceland...hmmn.

The biggest weekend project, however, has been to create the most crucial component of Sydney's upcoming rainbow party---The Rainbow Party Playlist. I love a good party playlist, ask anyone. Seriously, anyone.

The playlist's theme is, of course, the rainbow, and all the songs are about rainbows, or at least prominently feature a rainbow metaphor. I have some jiggering to do--there are a LOT of sappy rainbow songs out there, which is bringing down the middle of my playlist, and I still have to score the original Judy Garland "Somewhere over the Rainbow" and an unmixed version of that Hawaiian dude's cover of the same, but here it is in essence:

1. "The Colors of the Rainbow in English" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

2. "Rainbow" by Colbie Caillat, from Breakthrough

3. "Rainbow Colors" by The Wiggles, from Racing to the Rainbow. Have you ever read the Wikipedia entry on the Wiggles? Fascinating.

4. "She's a Rainbow" by The Rolling Stones. I'm gambling that the young partygoers, who will range in age from infancy to six years or so, aren't going to get the metaphor in this one, so it's cool.

5. "Arco Iris" by Sol Y Canto, from El Doble De Amigos

6. "The Colors of the Rainbow in Spanish" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

7. "True Colors," from...ahem...Glee, the Music, Volume 2 (thanks, Kimberly!!!)

8. "The Colors of the Rainbow in Dutch" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

9. "Rainbow" by Paul Lippert, from Rainbow in the Sky

10. "The Colors of the Rainbow in Japanese" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

11. "Look to the Rainbow" from Finian's Rainbow

12. "The Colors of the Rainbow in French" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

13. "Rainbow Connection" covered by Willie Nelson

14. "That Terrific Rainbow" from Pal Joey

15. "The Colors of the Rainbow in Italian" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

16. "Roy G. Biv" by They Might be Giants from Here Come Science

17. "The Colors of the Rainbow in German" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

18. "Eat Like a Rainbow" by Jay Mankita from Putumayo Kids

19. "Rainbow Connection" covered by Jason Mraz from For the Kids Too

20. "The Colors of the Rainbow in Farsi" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

21. "Rainbow Connection" by Kermit the Frog

Later this week, I suppose, I'll deal with the less important details of the upcoming party--plates, silverware, napkins, mowing the lawn--you know, the minor details.

P.S. Check out my review of Making Waldorf Dolls over at Crafting a Green World. As soon as local, happy sheeps get sheared, I'm making myself--I mean, the girls, ahem--a hard-core, true-to-life Waldorf doll.

Rainbow Party Project #2: Rainbow Party Invitations, and a Wet-on-Wet Watercolor Tutorial

The rainbow party projects are going to start showing up fast and furious, with one week to go--and pouring rain coming down, which Matt says means that it DEFINITELY won't rain NEXT Saturday. Okay, sweetie...

So while the rain poured down, the kiddos and I sat down at the big wooden table in the living room and painted ourselves a summer's full of rainbows. Last night, I even dreamed about rainbows, we painted so many rainbows. I cut one huuuuuge piece of Strathmore watercolor paper into 14 4"x5" postcards, although I don't think we'll actually end up having to mail any invitations this year. Still, postcard size is a good size for an invitation.

Wet-on-wet watercolor is just a different way to watercolor, and I don't even necessarily think that the results are that better--just a little different. With wet-on-wet watercolor, the watercolor paper is also wet, and so the paint spreads more, and saturates the paper more easily, and you get that spread, saturated look that always screams "Waldorf!" to me--wet-on-wet watercolor is one of the trademarks of Steiner education.

There are different methods to achieve wet-on-wet, but when we do wet-on-wet watercolor, I give the kids a thick pad of newspaper to work on, which will absorb all the excess water produced during the activity, and then I soak the watercolor paper in a big bowl of water for several minutes, until it's completely saturated:

If you're doing this with larger pieces of watercolor paper, you'll likely need a tub, or the sink, to soak the paper in, and I can't even imagine that you'd want to do this at all with the largest pieces of paper--unless you got several people to crouch around the same piece of paper and all paint at once, a really large piece of paper would dry out before you were done with it. You can also see why you need professional artist's paper for this. It takes a nice paper to still be usable after you drown it.

After the paper is totally saturated, lift it out of the water and, depending on how big the piece is, either just shake the excess water off, like I did with these postcards, or blot the excess water off with a clean towel. The paper will still be wet, of course, but you don't want big drops of water on the surface, because that will dilute the paint.

Then, you paint...

And since these are invitations, I glued the actual invitation that Matt designed onto the back of each one, and there you have it:

A rainbow invitation to a rainbow party.

I can't wait for you to see the ridiculous dress that I'm sewing for the birthday kid to wear.

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Last Thing That I Ever Buy from Chronicle Books

You know that feeling that you get, that powerless feeling when a company tricks you out of your hard-earned money and then treats you unfairly and acts like a jerk in the process? You totally know that feeling, right?

I hate that feeling. I should never have bought from Chronicle Books the second time.

The first time that they screwed me out of my money, I thought it was a fluke. I made a big book purchase from Chronicle as a birthday present to myself, using a coupon code for 30% off my purchase plus free shipping. But the Chronicle web site did this thing, where it showed me the coupon code discount and the free shipping to process my order, but when it emailed me my receipt, it showed me that it actually charged me the FULL price plus shipping!?!

Oh, man, and have you had to deal with any big company's customer service lately? Matt sent those emails that you're supposed to send to the Chronicle Books customer service email address, and NEVER got a response. What's up with that, by the way? Shouldn't you at least get back a form or something? And then he battled the phone tree, over and over again, and NEVER got to an actual human. NEVER. It's like they didn't have any actual human employees working that summer. And we didn't want to just return the stuff and have to battle to not pay return shipping. We NEVER got our money back. Never! And it was a ridiculous amount--something like seventy dollars. Who gets screwed out of seventy dollars by a book company?

So yes, I should never, EVER have gone near Chronicle Books again, never should have ordered from them again, never even should have looked at their site again. And yet I really want an 18-month planner that starts in July, and Moleskine makes one, and Chronicle has such a good selection of Moleskine, and, oh, look! a coupon code for 30% off my total purchase and free shipping!

You guessed it. The shopping cart showed me my discount and free shipping and processed my order with that total, but guess what my emailed receipt looked like?

This time Matt was finally able to get ahold of an actual human, eventually--I think he might have sold his soul at a crossroads in the middle of the night to do it, but he did it. And I won't even tell you how awful it was to have to talk to customer service--how my story seemed to be doubted, how last summer's order was deemed to old to correct, how my request to just cancel the order for that one little planner if the amount that I was charged couldn't be corrected was denied because it was going to ship later today, how I betrayed my own dignity by shouting at the customer service person--but I will tell you that eventually, finally, somehow Chronicle managed to refund the extra charges on that one little planner purchase.

The sick thing, though, is how one incident can make you angry all over again about the incident before. So yay, I got back this money that they were never supposed to charge me in the first place, but I'm still furious, and I still feel victimized. And it's gross how powerless you can feel in the face of personal injustice--they should never have overcharged me last summer, and yet I'm never going to get that money back, and there's nothing that I can do about it.

Fool me twice, shame on me, indeed.

UPDATE: I received an automated email from Chronicle today with the order number for last summer's large purchase in the subject line. The text of the email read, "per Joseph, credit for 174.68." $174.68 was the total of that order. Is Joseph my savior, a deus ex machina who has swooped in with an extremely generous compensation for my troubles? If so, I am now infused with happiness and gratitude and other good feelings evocative of one's power in the world, and thank you, Joseph! Or, since my credit card company hasn't actually noted any credit to my account yet, is it just more administrative weirdness? Time will tell, and I'll keep you updated.

WIP Wednesday: Less Talk, More Craft

I've been in the spring cleaning spirit lately, one of those moods in which I feel like getting rid of all of my stuff, preferably by crafting it into other stuff. Here's what I've been up to, in my flurry-ish of activity:

Patternmaking:

Quilting:

Party planning:

Working in the garden (thinning seedlings requires much consumption of radish sprouts and kale microgreens, as everyone knows):

And, of course, playing with a new toy:

Trust me, we have LOTS of plans for that new item.

And, of course, I've also been parenting and taking lots of walks and eating sandwiches and watching season 2 of Supernatural. You know, important stuff like that.

P.S. Check out my weekend posts at Crafting a Green World--a tutorial for making those paper chains that I've been going on and on about, and a review of Ecofont, which is my new favorite font because it rules.

On the Wall

It has taken, literally, YEARS to figure this out, with lots of bad ideas and a huge stack of all kinds of photo frames set aside for our garage sale later this spring, but I have finally achieved wall art perfection:

So I didn't like the photo frames because I could never get their placement measured out perfectly (me and my math...sigh) and they always hung a little crooked and our walls are crap, I mean CRAP. They're plaster over metal lathe, and can you imagine a more nightmarish scenario for trying to hang something from a wall? Half the time you hit the steel, and the other half of the time a huge chunk of plaster falls out. And poor Matt, who has the primary responsibility shelf-making in the house--he has uttered swears that I have never heard before, and I have heard a lot of swears.

Anyway, inspired by these Photojojo vinyl wall frames that just stick right to the wall (vinyl decals are way trendy right now, because, I don't know, people need more vinyl in their houses?), I first tried to make my own removable frames with Velcro for re-stick-ability. Cardboard record album covers were a bust because they curled, especially if I tried to decorate them with wallpaper or collage, but even thicker corrugated cardboard tended to curl, and EVEN mat board curled, as well.

So I brought out the big guns. Foamcore, baby. Never gonna bend.

The photos themselves I laminated to make them sturdy to be on the wall without a glass cover over them. My plan is also to swap out the photos and other artwork fairly often, so I needed something quick and dirty. Here's my VERY dirty application method:

Pushpins through the laminate and into the foamcore hold everything nice and secure, doesn't leave much of a mark, and makes it a cinch to swap stuff out.

Now if only a person didn't pretty much have to donate plasma to afford new ink cartridges.

To Partially Explain the Clown Feet

In case you happen to see me around town and it makes you wonder:

Preschool mani-pedi, my friends.

A Temporary Flower Installation

The little girls were very offended that I mowed the lawn yesterday. We have beautiful little wild violets, you see, and beautiful dandelions and other weedy flowers. And yes, I'm very fond of them, as well, but I would like this spring to go down in the books as the first spring in which the city has not posted a warning on my door to mow my lawn or face a fine.

So I mowed, and the little girls scurried ahead of me and rescued all the beautiful little flowers in my path by pulling them up and stuffing them into a bucket. And when I was finished, they presented me with the bucket, and I thought, "What DOES one do with a gift such as this?"

One gathers one's girls, is what one does, and one throws down a large, pretty mat board into a shady spot in the backyard, and everyone works together to lay out a masterpiece:

It was as fun to photograph as it was to create:

Here are the dandelions:

And violets, and some lilac, which was not in the way of the mower:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that bulb flower would have been safe, too, kiddos:

And clearly by this point the girls have just lost their heads, because here's some phlox, as well:

I don't know what that flower with the green leaves is, but I WOULD have mown that down:

So far this spring we've eaten our weight in dandelions, painted with them, and created an art installation that speaks to the ephemerality, and also the eternality, of youth. We haven't eaten the violets yet, but we will, and we may even make dandelion and/or violet jelly, although I'm still not sold on the idea--SO sugar-heavy! But it is still spring, and there is still much foraging to come.

An April's Worth of Paper

Well, we like what we like. That may be about all I can say about it.

For some reason, between the girls and me, what started out as just a simple paper chain to count down the days until the baby's birthday has...um, snowballed?

We make paper chains every day now.

I think the girls are pleased by the novelty of the new form--the strips of paper are fun to draw on and otherwise decorate, and it's fun, especially, for a three-year-old to see how her efforts add up into something concrete and hangable, and in one dark incident, it was discovered that a sister tearing up her sister's paper chain in secret can launch a day-long appetite for vengeance. Good times.

As for me, I think I'm mostly attracted to the paper chain's ability to mindlessly entertain. Often, while keeping the girls company in the work that they choose to do at the big table--pictures to draw, encyclopedias to page through, snacks to eat, dots to connect, random stuff to paint, etc., etc.,--I need something to do that is more interesting than just conversating (sorry, kids, but sometimes your conversation is boring, although I do agree, some dogs ARE brown, and yep, it IS weird that you can put a sock on either foot) and less interesting than writing a book proposal, or editing photos, or listing stuff in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, none of which will allow me to continue uninterrupted in the mindless conversating.

And that's why the living room has a little more bling, courtesy of a collaboration of scrapbook papers in blues:

And the bedroom has the more intellectual model, done with several pages torn from an old dictionary (we have better ones, I assure you, ones that are descriptive and not prescriptive, yuck):

I even posted some by-the-yard paper chainage in my pumpkinbear etsy shop:

You should totally check out that listing, by the way, because I discovered, in the process, how gloriously these paper chains photograph, and so my listing is stuffed with all these awesome close-ups and artsy takes on the subject "Paper Chain."

And EVEN THOUGH I started a paper chain cut from comic book pages today (I know--SQUEE!!!), with my excuse being that I HAD to watch those last two episodes from the first season of Supernatural because it was due back at the IU media library today, I have to put my toys aside for the rest of the week, I fear...

Remember the last dinosaur quilt? With the last panel to be pieced right here on my work table? And a tutorial on back-to-front blanket binding, intended to be photographed using this quilt, scheduled for Crafting a Green World this weekend?

Turns out that those things don't tend to sew, photograph, write about, or sell themselves. Huh, who knew?