Made-from-Scratch Gingerbread House, Part One: Infrastructure

We did some things differently this year:

No kit gingerbread house, with its thick, heavy slabs of inedible gingerbread.
No royal icing, because raw egg whites? No.

This gingerbread is made from scratch, and even if I have to get out my hot glue gun, it will NOT fall down, by god.

Instead of those gingerbread house kits, (and boy, they were tempting, and priced to sell!), I used the basic gingerbread recipe from the Celebrating Christmas web site. I was extremely surprised to note that this recipe calls for no ginger--where the hell did it get the name gingerbread, then?--and there's no point in the recipe that actually calls for the one-half cup of water listed in the ingredients, although when the gingerbread dough still seemed extremely dry at the end of the recipe, I noticed that half-cup of water, threw it in, and...perfect!!!

At one point in time (our wedding, perhaps?) we were gifted with a set of about a billion plastic cookie cutters--over the years I've culled the absolutely ridiculous ones, so that we're left with a somewhat basic set of shapes, with a few seasonal cutters and some vintage odds and ends that I've collected here and there (mental note: buy me some dinosaur cookie cutters sometime!). For the gingerbread house, after I got the man to roll out the chilled dough to the perfect 3/16 of an inch thickness--
--I used a smallish square with a triangle whose base matched the length of the square right on top of it, and I cut around the two with a steak knife so that I wouldn't cut the shape in two:This is the front and rear of the house with the gable on top. That same small square can make the two sides of the house, and any larger square can make the two sides of the roof, with eaves that extend appealingly on all sides.

The dough recipe made enough for me to make a house for each of the girls, and probably could have made one or two more houses if you didn't allow for two little girls, one small--

--and one a little larger----to cut out their own gingerbread masterpieces.

And thus, at rest lie future gingerbread mansions, unaware of their glorious fate:

Wait until you see what we're using instead of royal icing.

Bright Little Fingernails

Basically the only way that the girls will let me trim their nails is if I announce, apropos of nothing, "Hey, let's trim your nails really quick so that you can paint them!"I'm pretty sure this would work with boys, too, because the nail polish colors are AWESOME--purple basecoat with alternating green polka dots and orange stripes, or each fingernail half red and half pink and the thumb is blue, or, if you're a traditionalist, you could just go for the red and white "candy cane" paint job.
Of course, this is mainly the plan in the little girls' heads. No matter how carefully I talk them through proper manicure procedure, the paint job does always reveal itself to be child-engineered in a multitude of ways. But, eh--the kids love it anyway.

Best part, though?

The best part is however long I can convince them to sit quietly just like that so that their nails can dry. It's never long enough to actually allow their nails to dry fully, of course, but I will take any small amount of peace that I can get.

Stash Wrap

The goal? Wrap all my Christmas presents using only my stash, none of which consists of traditional wrapping materials.

Okay, my real goals are as follows:

• Finish making all my Christmas presents, wrapped or not.
• Have a couple of the girls' friends and their moms over for hot chocolate after school on Friday and actually be prepared with hot chocolate and pumpkin bread and a clean(ish) house.
• Make a gingerbread house from scratch with the girls. Have this house be extremely unlike last year's failed gingerbread shack.
• Psych myself up for Christmas week with my parents.
• Stop eating when I'm bored.

But wrapping my Christmas presents using only stash is also a good goal, don't you think?

Katie's quilt was the easiest, requiring only a piece of twine. These gifts from the girls to their small cousins (handmade matching games, which I'll talk you about later, but trust me, they are SUPER fun), are wrapped in an envelope folded from notebook paper, with a hole punched in the top flap and a piece of ribbon threaded through and tied in a knot to close the envelope--no glue or tape required!This handmade present from the girls to one grandma is tied with some wide satin single-fold bias tape--I used to use this type of bias tape when I first started making simple quilts, before I knew how easy it was to make my own bias tape, and so I don't remember if I bought this bias tape way back then or later acquired it as a hand-me-down from someone. I tied the bow separately and hot-glued it and the gift tag on. When wrapping gifts, I am starting to heart myself some hot glue!

This is another present to another grandmother, but tied this time with a wired ribbon. I bought this ribbon on clearance post-Valentine's Day one year because I wanted to see if I liked wired ribbon--I don't:

And, of course, the ubiquitous gift wrapped in the comic section:I made a nice, big bow out of strips cut out from the comics, but I didn't use any proper bow-making method, just lots of hot glue.

Only twelve more child-free hours until Christmas! Tomorrow, especially since there's no storytime at the library, I dearly desire to complete three little superhero capes for three little superhero cousins. I also desire to finish The Liar's Club, make gingerbread dough, and buy cinnamon essential oil.

Ah, to dream...

Willow Blogs: A Car Could Go Anywhere, Except on the Grass

This car is mostly for driving, but the red thing on top falls off all the time:
This is the bottom. It was very hard to build it. There's a sword on the other side of the axe, but you can't really see it. They're mostly for pretend killing people that are Lego mens. The pinwheel would blow if it was a real car. Sometimes it falls off. The arm that's on the car is mostly for chomping people that are pretend bad guys. Now, as you can see, on the rest there's a window down at the bottom, and then there's some wheels: If it was a real car, that red thing on top would swing:

You can drive it around, but some things will fall off. If you hold on too tight, some things will fall off from the car.

A T-Shirt Quilt for Christmas

Some leftover bias tape that just happened to match the blanket back, a couple of hours machine-binding while watching episodes of Miami Ink on Netflix (If you got another tat, what would it be?), and one Christmas present is done and DONE:
I don't get to see my little cousins often enough (although thank gawd for Facebook), so it was quite fun to get this glimpse into the life and times of a 13-year-old girl. I love, for instance, how a teenager's passions can so easily range from air-brushed dolphins--
--to sexy werewolves:I'm totally on Team Jacob, too. Real men don't sparkle.

And, personalized T-shirts? Make wrapping Christmas presents WAY easier:
Next on Santa's list are superhero capes for three even littler cousins. And since that means getting out the Cricut, who knows what other wonders will emerge?

Coloring Page Christmas Ornaments

I make these with my girls because it enables me to goof around with my scanner and my laminator, but if you're a working girl I imagine that you could goof around just as well with your photocopier and the local copy shop.

1. Find some nice holiday-themed coloring pages. Coloring books are probably the way to go, but since we don't actually do coloring-within-the-lines coloring all that much, I get way more coloring pages than I can use each week in my free Dover samplers. You'll be shrinking these coloring pages, so choose some that are meant for younger children, with broad lines and easy to color big spaces.

2. You have a couple of options for shrinking your coloring pages to ornament-size. I scan my coloring pages, shrinking them in the process, then set them up on one page in a graphic design software program. You could also set up a bunch of full-size pages in a photocopier and shrink them to the correct document size.

Another option, for super-littles or when you want to make multiples (these are great to enclose in Christmas cards), is to have your child color the picture full-size, then color-copy and shrink or scan and shrink the finished document.

3. Print out a few copies of the ornament-sized coloring pages, and let the littles color them in. When Matt took the girls to a program on the Nutcracker at the public library the other weekend, they actually got sent home with some coloring pages meant to be used for ornaments, so my littles had a ball coloring in small nutcracker princes and sugarplum fairies and mouse kings on circular decorated backgrounds.

4. Cut out the coloring pages. I like to back mine with Christmas scrapbook paper, attached by a dab of glue stick (since I'm going to be laminating the whole shebang in a minute), but you could also make your ornament double-sided, or just forget about backing it and get the damn thing done, already.

5. Laminate the ornament, then cut a hole in the laminate for an ornament hanger.

6. The best part is the decoration:
At least it seems that way from the look on my littler little's face:

Manic housecleaning and a screening of Dinosaur Hunters are the sole items on the docket today, but tomorrow I have big plans for popsicle stick Christmas trees and potholders for my grandfather.

Outsourcing My Quilt Designs

I'm sewing a T-shirt quilt for my little cousin Katie this Christmas (this is no secret, or otherwise I imagine she'd have been asking her mom, "Where are all my T-shirts?"). After cutting out all the pieces for a one-block quilt from Katie's T-shirts, Willow found me on her bed yesterday, about to lay out a design for the quilt on top of her comforter. Will asked if she could lay out the quilt, instead, and never one to turn down an offer of unpaid labor, I agreed:
The final design certainly wasn't the kind of pattern I would have made it into, but it wasn't random, either, and although it's not something that I'd permit Willow to have free reign on in a quilt for a paying customer, she adores her big cousin Katie, and I was happy to give her the chance to add something permanent to Katie's world:
Sydney served as photo-documentarian for the event, catching Willow deep in concentration as she figures out some key detail in her layout:Catching me taking the pieces back up in the exact right order to ensure that I sew them correctly:And then catching us in post-layout celebration:
Now it just needs to be pieced, backed, bound, and wrapped.