Rather, I can afford it on the younger kid's birthday, and after her ballet recital. Maybe on Mother's Day, but definitely not as often as the kid would like to drink bubble tea, which is daily.
Seriously, Friends, bubble tea is something like $4.50 here! It's not a steak dinner, sure, but I have a hard time paying that for a beverage, especially one per person because friends don't let friends get bubble tea alone, ahem. I don't buy steak dinners, either.
You know what's cheap, though? I'll tell you what's cheap:
None of those ingredients are even close to $4.50 a serving, and what's better is that I don't have to get out of my pajamas to turn them into bubble tea!
All the credit goes to the kid for this experimental process. Back in the spring she requested tapioca pearls, and I helped her play around with them some, mostly putting them into cold-brew coffee spiked with chocolate milk, which I let her drink, because whatever.
But the kid wanted more the restaurant-quality, $4.50 per serving type of bubble tea, and what we were making wasn't nearly cutting it, so off and on over the past few months, she's kept experimenting. And finally, just this week, she's nailed it, and now we can make ourselves absolutely delicious matcha bubble tea whenever we want.
I get to be in charge of the tapioca pearls. They're super easy to make, which is good because they don't keep AT ALL, so you have to make them fresh whenever you want them. You just follow the instructions on the bag, but instead of scooping them into simple syrup when they're done, I stir a whopping spoonful of honey into them and that makes them perfect and delicious.
Since we have a Vitamix (I remember having an anxiety attack about the cost of that blender once upon a time, but I've had it by now for well over a decade, and the only thing that's ever gone wrong with it is the pitcher cracking back in April, and I'm almost positive that happened when I accidentally blended the plastic cap a little bit, oops), the kid uses this recipe from the Vitamix website, but I know for a fact that she doesn't bother with blooming the matcha. She says she can't taste the difference, and I sure as heck don't care!
When the separate ingredients are ready, she divides the tapioca pearls between our cups, then adds the matcha milk, and our matcha milk tea is DELICIOUS.
We've had these exact metal straws since May (and I LOVE them), and they're the perfect diameter for slurping up boba. If we didn't own them, though, I wouldn't be above taking my store-bought boba tea straw home and washing it out for this.
Right now, my partner in the other room giving the kids a lesson on how to use Powerpoint (I'm eavesdropping, which is how I know that he's assigned them to create a presentation about tacos to prove their mastery), and I am just about to fall asleep in my chair, but I'm toughing it out, because as soon as he's done the younger and I have HUGE plans.
We're going to jammy up, make a double batch of matcha bubble tea, and then settle into my bed to watch the 1976 version of Carrie, which the kid has been longing to see since October. It's a cheap date, and one that I am very, very, very excited about.
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
One of my favorite things to do on stay-at-home holiday days is explore new art supplies and craft projects with the kids. Over Thanksgiving break, we did several hours of origami, for instance, and ahead of us on this peaceful holiday vacation is latch hooking using the supplies that I splurged on this morning (and yes, I DID go to both the big-box craft stores so that I could use both of my 50%-off coupons, mwa-ha-ha!).
We did this even when we traveled for every holiday--I vividly remember introducing the kids to homemade modeling beeswax during one summer visit with my Pappaw, and dyeing dried pasta vivid colors during another Christmas visit a full decade ago. I'd happily give several years off my own life to have Pappaw back, but I will say that it is very, very, very nice to stay home for the entire Christmas holiday now. It's absolutely my favorite thing about Christmas.
On an earlier trip to both big-box craft stores to use another set of 50%-off coupons (Will also needed metallic embroidery floss for her recent obsession with making friendship bracelets, showing that my holiday-break-equals-new-craft-project tradition is passing itself down quite nicely!), I bought a small set of alcohol ink, and then I hit up Amazon for a small pad of Yupo paper, all recommended by this book, Creative Alcohol Inks, sent to me by a publicist:
The day after Christmas, while Will was off reconnecting with her best friend, the public library, after two entire days of it being closed, and Matt was at the gym, Syd and I sat down with a billion supplies and tried to recreate some of the techniques from Creative Alcohol Inks.
Just as with Sharpies and rubbing alcohol, alcohol ink, itself, is a fun process-oriented supply. The Yupo paper, too, is very forgiving, and I was able to goof around with the alcohol ink on a single piece of Yupo paper, then saturate it with rubbing alcohol and essentially wash all the ink off before doing it all again.
At one point Syd looked over at me and said, "Wow, that piece of paper has been through a LOT." Thanks, Kid.
When I was done messing around, I made one of the suggested projects from Creative Alcohol Inks, an embellished porcelain ornament:
My ornament isn't actually porcelain, but a clear plastic ornament coated on the inside with white acrylic paint. Pro tip: that makes it look like porcelain!
While I was playing around, though, Syd was steadily mastering everything about alcohol ink:
We had one mishap associated with the Yupo paper; it's technically a plastic paper, and apparently shouldn't be combined with long blasts from the heat gun that we were using to dry the alcohol ink (because I'm the kind of person who knows where her heat gun is but not her blow dryer #nOtLiKeOtHeRgIrLs).
You can see in the below photo how the corner of Syd's paper is warped from the heat gun--oops! Fortunately, short blasts worked fine, so I did not, in fact, have to go hunt down the blow dryer:
I have a new phone, which was my Christmas present from Matt (OT Question: How many presents do you and your partner exchange? Is it one? Is it five or more? I'm more of a multiple present person and Matt's more of a one-present person, but frankly, I always love my one present from him way more than I'm pretty sure he mildly likes his multiple presents from me. Dude is DIFFICULT to find presents for!), and this phone is amazing! And does time lapse videos! And from now on every one of my blog posts is going to include a time lapse!
So here's a time lapse of Syd's process creating something awesome from alcohol ink, Yupo paper, and paint pens:
How cool is that?!? Please ignore the fact that all of y'all have probably been able to do this on your phones for a decade by now and tell me it's super cool.
I'm really eager for Syd to scan in some of her alcohol ink creations and then embellish them in Photoshop using her Wacom tablet, but on this evening she was was more into hand-drawing on top of them.
Hey, do you want to know that looks like?
OMG, you DO?!?
Okay, here's a time lapse!
You're welcome!
And, fine, here are some still shots, as well, because having a fancy new camera on my fancy new phone doesn't mean that I'm not still obsessed with my behemoth single-lens manual camera:
Here's my finished product, hanging up happily on our Christmas tree:
And here are Syd's favorite two masterpieces!
You might remember that we had some trouble figuring out a good way to seal our tile art creations without desaturating the Sharpies, so I was super excited to see that Creative Alcohol Inks includes the specific supplies and techniques that you need to seal these creations.
Including yet another mention of resin, which I have been seeing mentioned EVERYWHERE lately, and it's making me more and more invested in the idea of buying some and playing around with it.
Perhaps a project for New Year's Day?
I received a free copy of Creative Alcohol Inks, because I can't write about a book until it's inspired me to spend an afternoon low-key sniffing rubbing alcohol and hanging out with my kid.
Origami isn't one of our enduring passions, but it IS super fun, and I'm always stoked whenever something randomly reminds me that, "Hey! We like origami! I should get a bunch of how-to books from the library and make an evening of it!"
This time, it was reading the leader manual for the Girl Scout Cadette Designing Robots badge, and noticing that origami is one of the suggested starting activities for Step 1: Pick a challenge.
Hey! We like origami! I should get a bunch of how-to books from the library and make an evening of it!
Which, with the addition of the first season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (on DVD, also from the library), is exactly what we did:
I busied myself make the stars from Hello Origami, trying to get the folds even and then making myself an entire rainbow. Later, Syd sneaked them onto the Christmas tree for me!
The folds are for sure not even, but whatever.
Will is our origami champion, though. She made the Compass from Modern Kudusuma Origami and made us our tree topper!
We have a nine-foot tree this year, so that star is HUGE!
And speaking of sealing... previously, we've experimented with sealing origami designs with beeswax. The five billion coats of polyurethane sealant that I just put on my lap desk, however, had made me wonder if we could also seal origami that way. I don't know what the benefits of it would be, though, as our origami paper is already pretty archival--perhaps it would stiffen it and make it even more workable as an ornament or in a garland?
Stay tuned!
Here are the origami how-to books that we still have on our shelves:
I want to make the folded box and the lazy Susan. Will wants to make the dragon.
I think the Christmas tree and Santa would make good embellishments for the front of a greeting card. And the Star of David looks super easy!
I am seriously going to try the gift tags before I wrap the last of my Christmas gifts, because I've really been needing a DIY gift tag!
Honestly, we're not going to make anything from this book, but I'm keeping it on our shelves until it's due so that I can pretend like we are. I SUPER want a giant paper sphere made of origami octagons folded as edges!
I thought that Syd was going to go nuts for this origami book all about folding miniature articles of clothing, but she's not into it. Nevertheless, *I* want to fold a couple of the skirts and then see if she'll draw me a person to match.
Okay, we are legitimately going to make EVERY SINGLE THING in this book. It's got a ton of geometric solids, and then interesting extensions of them, and creative embellishments... I'll be fine having this be our weekly math enrichment activity for the rest of the school year.
I think we've got enough to keep us occupied on all of our long, cold winter nights!
Here's Will writing a letter to Uncle Mac in 2012. He's since died, which is almost the worst thing that has ever happened, and I'm so pleased that I have a picture of this letter to him.
If, you know, the "ground" consists of plywood and a pillow form...
This particular lap desk is surely at least a decade old, and I know for a fact that when I bought it a decade ago, I bought it from a yard sale, and because I also know myself I'm also taking it as near-enough to a fact that I wouldn't have paid more than a quarter for it.
It used to be grey on top, with a grey fabric pillow underneath. Over the last year, though, that grey top started to peel away from the plywood base, and the fabric holding the pillow also began to peel away. When I finally got fed up with it I helped it all along until I ended up with this!
That's a plain plywood top, and somewhere off-camera, probably on the floor, is a plain pillow form.
Just as basic as I am!
Speaking of basic, how long has it been since I've decoupaged comic book pages all over something?
The answer, ALWAYS, is "Too long!"
That photo above represents the exact moment that, looking through the camera lens, I realized that I was decoupaging the comic book pages upside-down.
Eh, whatever. I'm not covering up that Dr. McCoy pic!
I used a 1:1 solution of Elmer's white glue/water to decoupage the comic book pages to the plywood desk top, but when it was completed and dry, I painted on a LOT of coats of water-based polyurethane sealant.
Like, a LOT of coats. I don't want to find myself rebuilding this lap desk again within the next decade!
I don't have a picture of the process of putting the pillow form back on, and covering it with new fabric, because just to get that job done I needed about fourteen more hands than I actually had. I'm pretty stoked about the fabric that I used, though--it's a little more of that beautiful batik on canvas that used to be our bedroom curtains back in our old house.
There's a LOT to be said for being a hoarder!
Lacking any other elegant solutions in my mind, I simply hot glued the snot out of it. That part might need to be rebuilt within the next decade, but fortunately, hot glue is cheap.
And now I LOVE my new-again lap desk!
I think it looks quite fine on top of my Star Wars quilt, and it holds a book and a glass of wine handily:
P.S. Here's how we built our headboard, which is just about the only other interesting thing in our bedroom.
I don't have a "before photo," so just imagine that prior to building our DIY wooden headboard, our bed was basically consisted of a mattress on top of a platform.
Super classy, right?
I really like the look of a giant, rustic, wooden headboard, but I don't have access to antique barnwood or other salvaged wood, I'm not comfortable with keeping pallet wood that close to my head, even if it's well sanded and well sealed, and I didn't want to pay for or really even use fake but easy-to-apply laminate.
That left us with using new, though natural, materials, from our local big-box hardware store.
With those supplies, plus a little jiggering around, we figured out how to get the look that I wanted in a single day for less than sixty dollars--and that includes buying the wood stain, which you may not necessarily need to do.
DIY Wooden Headboard
Here's what we used:
two shelving unit end frames. These are wooden frames with metal brackets, designed to allow you to add your own shelves. You'll be turning these on their sides and stacking them, so that you'll have a large frame that's about 6 feet wide and four feet tall. People want to get rid of these all the time--we actually had one randomly sitting in our garage--so you could try to find one at your local ReStore or on Freecycle before you buy it new. It won't matter if it's in poor condition, as it won't be visible.
tongue and groove wooden planks. These are plain, unfinished wooden planks with tongue and groove edges so that you can line them up nicely. By using these, I had to give up on the staggered look that I'd wanted, but the ease of placing them perfectly and making the job quicker and simpler was worth it. We used seven of these for our headboard, although one is completely covered by the mattress, so we could have skipped that one and saved a few bucks.
screwdriver, drill, and drill bits. You'll need to screw the end frames into the wall, and the wooden planks into the end frames.
water-based stain (optional). For some reason, I find that whatever stain I buy, it always looks much darker than I think it will, so I generally go a couple of shades lighter when I choose it.
1. Lay everything out to make sure that you like it. There's no cutting involved in this project, so you really can lay your entire headboard out on the floor to make sure that the pieces will go together the way that you want and that you like the look.
2. Stain the wood planks. My kids helped me with this step, and although I was a little afraid that they'd do a wonky job, fortunately stain is very forgiving.
And yes, as our headboard that stain looks at least two shades darker than it does in this photo.
I did not seal the planks, and I may live to regret that, but it saved me a lot of time, they look fine, and really, how much wear and tear can a headboard possibly get?
Don't answer that if you're gonna be gross.
3. Screw the frames to the wall. Matt set the bottom of the bottom frame just above the top of our platform, so that the platform could still sit flush to the wall (and he found my Fitbit! I thought that I'd lost that thing forever!), leveled it, and screwed it into the studs. Remember, you're setting these frames sideways, so that each one is six feet long and two feet tall.
Once the bottom frame is in, the top frame can sit right on top of it--just double check that it's level before you screw it into the studs.
4. Screw the wood planks into the frame. Although you have to be mindful of those metal brackets, you can otherwise just screw the planks into the wooden frame. I also did not fill in the screw holes, and although I was a little afraid that the screws might catch my hair, they're far enough to either side and inset enough that they don't.
You can see in the photo above that these planks extend just far enough to each side of the frame that we were able to hide a power strip on each side--of course, all the crap that we plugged into each power strip has wires sticking out, but it still looks better than it did before.
Three years on, the headboard still looks brand-new, so I'm super smugly satisfied that I didn't bother to seal it. The rest of our bedroom is still pretty janky, but maybe in another three or four years I'll be in the mood to update something else...
I use Amazon Affiliate links in my blog post because they're super easy. If you click through an Amazon Affiliate link and then end up buying something on Amazon, nothing is different on your end, but sometimes Amazon pays me a few pennies. Sometimes it doesn't, though, and I don't care enough to figure out why. I mostly just like the easy links!
It looks like I got a lot of reading done in November, but that's a cheat, because most of those books are memoirs, graphic novels, and YA fiction, all of which go by quickly.
Y'all know how much I love musical theater, and I've discovered that there's a whole world of memoirs written by actors who've starred in Broadway musicals! The authors are primarily actors, of course, so the memoirs aren't exactly War and Peace (although there's a musical that's themed on War and Peace, if you're interested!), but the memoirs do contain exactly the kind of little, behind-the-scenes details of living, working, auditioning, and performing that I love to learn about:
And yes, I HAVE tried searching YouTube to see if I can find any of the performances of the Pokemon Live touring production that broke the spirit of Andrew Rannells, but no luck so far.
Another odd theme of November was books that are informed by the world of Harry Potter. Fan art is one of my main interests, and I love both fanfiction and professional works that take the idea of magical children in a school for gifted youngsters and run with it. One of my favorite books is Fangirl, a novel about a college student who writes Simon/Baz fanfiction, based on the wildly popular boy wizard series of novels in her world. The heroine is realistically portrayed, vulnerable and brave and the best kind of weird kid, and the author must love her a lot, too, because later, she WROTE that Simon/Baz fanfiction into a novel of her own!
And then... she wrote a sequel!
I'd read Carry On back when it first came out, of COURSE, but I excitedly read it again in November so that I could excitedly read Wayward Son and not miss a single detail:
The books are clever, and although they're informed by THE World of Witchcraft and Wizardry they are by no means Harry Potter knock-offs. They're more grown-up--in a good way!--more diverse, much more inclusive, and more playful--also in a good way!
Here's another novel informed by that world, and again, I super loved it. This is my favorite book of November!
Magic for Liars is solidly for adults. Imagine the magical children's boarding school from an adult's perspective, with all of the behind-the-scenes challenges of teaching and shepherding a bunch of magical teenagers. And for the plot, make it a hard-boiled detective novel, with a non-magical detective who has to outwit, outmaneuver, and suss out the culprit within a culture that she knows very little about. It's really good!
I didn't get as much non-fiction read as I usually like to, although I do have a LOT of non-fiction on my to-read list. Fortunately, my only non-memoir non-fiction book of November is my OTHER favorite book of the month!
Y'all know that I am a Laura Ingalls Wilder fangirl. Here's when I did a Little House study with my very little girls. Here's when I took them to Laura's house in Missouri. Here's when I took them to Pa's claim in De Smet! I've also done a lot of reading, of the "expanded universe" of children's fiction that cover the childhoods of Ma and Rose, of Laura's first attempt at a memoir, and of the numerous biographies that people attempt to write about Laura and Rose.
Prairie Fires, I think, is the most accurate of the latter. People love to speculate about who the "real" author of the Little House books was, mostly because it's clear that although Laura is their listed author, Rose, too, did a LOT of work on them. All the work on them does muddy their authorship, but this book seems the fairest in its designation. Rose did do a lot of work on Laura's writing; they collaborated, or perhaps she served as a kind of ghost writer. Interestingly, when Laura attempted to write without Rose, her work wasn't great, and when Rose attempted to write without Laura, her work was even less great. AND she plagiarized Laura. AND she was obnoxiously, heavy-handedly, didactic.
This book isn't the first that I've read that's painted an unflattering portrait, over all, of Rose. I mean, it's pretty clear that Laura, too, acted out a lot of trauma in her personal life, and co-parented Rose in a way that gave Rose lots of trauma, as well. Both of them could have used play therapy as children, talk therapy as adults, and twice a week family counseling, for sure. Rose, in particular, grew up to act a lot like a sociopath. And she was super weird about money. And houses. And she was SUPER weird about teen boys.
And I refuse to buy another Little House book first-hand ever again because I will not give anymore money to the Roger MacBride estate. Laura's writing legacy should have gone to the Mansfield Public Library and he knew it!
Here's what else I read in November!
As I mentioned a couple of months ago, Will is currently working her way through the entire children's department of our local public library... again. Will doesn't read every book on the shelf as she peruses the children's department in an orderly manner, so it's interesting to me to see the books that I know she's re-reading for the umpteenth time. I know for a fact that she's already read everything in print by Patricia Wrede and Bruce Coville, and everything that's not a graphic novel by Neil Gaiman, so it's sweet, to me, to see these books appear on her November reading log:
Some of the books that Will marked as her favorites for the month are also definitely re-reads:
I loved the Great Brain books, too, when I was a kid!
Here are Will's other favorite books from the month:
And here's everything else that she read!
Note: Will won't put a book on her reading log if it's "short," silly girl. So all the beautiful picture books that we read, all of the interesting short non-fiction that we read, it's all lost to time, alas!
As far as podcasts, I am still spending all of my free time listening to this:
I LOVE it. It's very different from what I usually listen to--almost entirely serialized postmodern fiction or investigative journalism.
There's not much mystery to Felicity, but there's still a LOT to unpack!
I love that the two hosts of this podcast demonstrate how compelling close reading and cultural analysis can be. There are a lot of powerful figures portrayed in these children's books, such as enslaved people and indentured servants and native peoples and people of color and women and girls, and it's always interesting to see what an author looks at/overlooks in these portrayals. I don't think there's a word for the Colonial times that's equivalent to "medievalism," the term that describes a pop culture reimagination of Medieval tropes that says more about contemporary culture than it says about the Medieval period, but if there is, let me know, because that word would describe the Felicity books!
Here's another thing that I am weirdly fascinated by: cheese boards! And not regular, normal, appetizing cheese boards--I am specifically fascinated by the over-the-top, conspicuously consumptive, pre-Revolutionary French feast cheese boards. The ones that have super expensive food just piled all over them, so the experience of eating 15-dollar cheese and out-of-season raspberries looks more like the experience of picking scraps out of a trough of slop. Olives touch watermelon, pistachios sit in their shells and pomegranates are displayed merely quartered--how are you even supposed to EAT those two at a social event in front of a bunch of strangers?!?
I'm disgusted, and I also can't stop looking at them on instagram. Here's how to make them, apparently!
It's definitely my emetophobia saying this, but I want people to wear gloves when they lovingly curl up slices of greasy prosciutto into rosebuds, touching every single millimeter of it with their fingers.
And the sauces. That honey is going to drip all over everything, and maybe you don't want honey on your cheddar!
And nothing is labeled! If it's fancy, expensive cheese, freaking LABEL IT so that I know what on earth I'm eating! No label, and it might as well be Velveeta.
When I wasn't trying to convince my family that cheese boards are a sign of the end times, I was introducing the children to one of my favorite shows as a kid, The Addams Family:
The Addams Family is kind of a deep cut these days (hell, it also was back in the 80s when I was binge-watching it!), but Syd always has the deeper cut, because she makes me watch Percy Jackson-themed vine compilations:
Another thing we've been streaming non-stop?
The Nutcracker, of course!
There are so many differently choreographed versions of The Nutcracker, and so many of them available on YouTube! Syd and I will skim just about every one we find--we always want to see how they handle the party scene, and the battle scene, and Mother Ginger, and if they include the angels/trees at the top of Act II. Syd likes it when young Clara is changed out for an older dancer en pointe, and I like to find the weirdest interpretations of Mother Ginger that I can. This is the weirdest I've found this year, and it's extra fun because the child of one of my Facebook friends dances in this production!
She's a soldier this year, not a baby clown, but their battle scene is also really awesome.
Syd and I watched the Bolshoi Ballet production in the movie theater last year, and it's one of my favorites. There's an actual human playing the nutcracker toy, a kid with insane ab and thigh muscles, as they've basically got to spend the entirety of Act I in horse stance, even when being hauled around by their middle:
It's good conditioning!
What did YOU read and watch and listen to obsessively in November?
P.S. I have tons more book and Spotify and YouTube recs on my Craft Knife Facebook page, because although I only list my recs here once a month, I'm reading and watching and listening to weird stuff every single day!
