Tutorial: Shaving Cream Puff Paint

Because obviously we need yet another art supply!

To make shaving cream puff paint, mix together equal parts shaving cream--

--and white glue:

Whip it together quite quickly, so that the shaving cream doesn't lose its fluff.

Next, whip in an amount of powdered tempera to your liking:

Just a small amount gets the whole cup of paint quite gorgeous and cheerful:

Oh, and it makes a huge mess. Mental note to hose it all off later:

Prepare all your colors in separate cups--

--and then have at it!

It's a little hard to tell in a photograph how dimensional the paint is, but you can tell, at least, that the cloud blobs in Sydney's painting will dry just as cloudy and blobby as she made them, even if you can't see the waves and turns in her sky:

This paint does not keep, so when you're done painting you have the pleasure of dumping all the paint colors out onto a giant newsprint and playing at marbling them for a while:

What with starting up the summer garden and prepping for next week's International Fair (not to mention next weekend's first craft fair of the season!) and experimenting with getting the girls into the habit of doing a goodly amount of chores every day, it seems as if we've been doing an awful lot of work stuff this past week, so it felt good just to dig in and play for a while. Once the chores are habit and the big events are past (although they do just keep popping up, don't they?), I'm confident that our routine will settle itself into an easier ebb and flow of work and play.

And shaving cream puff paint. Can't leave that off the schedule.

Their Summer Sport

Sydney enjoys a vastly larger variety of extracurricular activities than Willow does, so when Willow said that she'd like to take gymnastics I was stoked, and immediately punched weekly lessons into the homeschool budget. Fortunately, "Routine Day" happened to be scheduled for the week of their second lesson, so I was able to pass through the magic window into the Actual Gym to film the girls showing off their approximately 1.5 hours of instruction thus far:

All the other parents were very good sports at clapping for my two tumble girls, I should add, since their own kids' routines had probably been in the works since at least the beginning of the year, if not longer (one of the kids could actually do that backward flip thing). Still, I do believe (quite humbly) that Will did herself credit during her performance.

As for my Syd monkey, however:

She is obviously another Olympic gold medalist in the making.

The best part of Routine Day, however?

MEDALS!!! On the second day of class!!!

The girls were THRILLED. Will wore hers non-stop all weekend, to Arkansas and back, and neither child so much as questioned why they happened to deserve medals at their second lesson, but if there were any doubts in their minds about whether or not gymnastics was super-fun (it's a little warm in the gym, after all), those doubts were completely and utterly quelled for all time.

Because, for Pete's sake, in gymnastics you get MEDALS.

Our Homemade Modeling Beeswax

On a hot day in the early summer, it isn't quite so much of a chore to warm up the modeling beeswax by hand (other times, we immerse it in warm water)--

--and then to model it into something fabulous--

 
 
 
 
--like a fire-breathing dragon--

--crowned with wildflowers, of course:

Check out my homemade modeling beeswax tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Baked Banana Oatmeal

We have a lot of oatmeal. Lot. Of. It. And we love oatmeal, eat it for some meal or other (not nearly always breakfast) just about every other day.

I don't actually have a lot of instant oatmeal, however, because instant oatmeal isn't the cheapest where I shop, and so not only do I have to insure a clean pot before I begin (which sux), but I also have to hang out for something like 20 minutes just to get that dang oatmeal cooked (double sux).

I tried mixing up a big batch of overnight oatmeal to save time the next day, but this was so not a success that it wasn't even funny. The texture was just not okay to the children, and to children texture? It's everything.

This, however, was such a crazy success that it's also not even funny:

Baked banana oatmeal (it's not actually that yellow--the light in my kitchen on a rainy day is yet another thing that sux) is so stinkin' good that it's one of the few recipes in my repertoire that gets not double, not tripled, but quadrupled when I bake it. The only thing that I change about the recipe is the sugar--the recipe's author doesn't put any sugar in, because he is apparently some kind of sugar-free superhero. I, on the other hand, dust the top of the raw oatmeal mixture generously with organic turbinado sugar just before I put it into the oven. Cooking on top of the bananas and into the oatmeal, it comes out perfectly sweet.

Eat it hot, cold, or room temperature, and seriously, quadruple the recipe, because it's just that good.

Where Have I Been?

I've been in Arkansas, feeling unspeakably, incredibly, couldn't-be-prouder proud of a certain beloved baby cousin:

Watch out, because he's just about one second away from taking the world by storm.

Tutorial: Easy Rainbow Cake

NOTE: The following post was originally posted a week ago for just a few hours before Blogger crashed and deleted it. Fortunately, it was recently recovered back to my draft posts, so here it is again!

When you were a little kid, did your parents have a "special" cake, the one that got baked for all the special occasions, the one that you ALWAYS requested for your birthday or a celebration or any time that you got to be in charge of picking the cake?

When I was a little girl, Mammaw's chocolate chip bundt cake was THE cake.

For my little girls, I think that my rainbow cake is now the cake. We had rainbow cake last year for Sydney's birthday, and then for her birthday party--made sense, because her party theme was rainbows. This year, however, for Sydney's birthday, with a choice among all the cakes in the entire world--cookie cake, ice cream cake, chocolate cake, pink cake--her request was, again, for a rainbow cake.

Now, you can do a rainbow cake two ways: the easy way, or the hard way. I do the hard way for the birthday party, and the easy way for the birthday. The easy way still, obviously, takes more work than just buying a birthday cake from Sam's Club, but it's really not that hard, since you can even use a box of cake mix if you want, and the impact of the finished cake is giant.

Here's how to make rainbow cake the easy way, because you are definitely going to want to do this yourself. It's that fun:

Prepare a double batch of white cake using your preferred method. I have made white cake from scratch and have used white cake mix for this recipe--it works either way. If you're a total baking newb, however, double-check your cake mix box to make sure that you're buying white cake mix. When I was a total baking newb I brought both yellow cake mix AND white cake mix to my aunt, who was making a giant dinosaur cake for Will and needed two boxes of mix--she was not pleased.

I advise making a double batch of cake mix because you'll have more cake batter to dye, and so it'll be easier to work with as a whole. If you only need one cake or one batch of cupcakes, then just bake the rest and freeze it for later--rainbow cupcakes make a nommy breakfast treat!

Separate the cake batter into as many separate bowls as you want colors in your cake, and dye each bowl of batter separately, using a clean spoon for each:

For a traditional rainbow cake you want to go ROY G. BIV, but this is just a fun project for Sydney's birthday, so I let the girls choose any and all colors that they wanted.

I highly recommend using better-quality gel or paste food coloring for this project--the point is the carnival colors of the cake, and those colors are just more vivid with better coloring.

If you're making this cake yourself, as the adult, you can work a little more systematically from this point, but, especially if you're baking cupcakes (as I am here), this project is a fabulous one to let little kids do themselves from here. Especially for cupcakes, which cook fairly quickly, this would also be a fun party activity to allow little party guests to design their own cupcake.

Arrange all the different bowls of colored mix so that they're accessible, each with its own spoon:

Don't mix up the spoons!

Using the dedicated spoons, drop spoonfuls of cake batter into the cake pan however you'd like:

You can smooth out a certain color, of course, but don't stir, because you don't want to blend the different colors together--you've already eaten brown cake before, haven't you?

You can use this same cake technique for a full-size cake pan, a smaller individual cake pan, as Sydney has above, or for cupcakes:

 

When you're finished, bake as usual.

I think that you'll be really pleased with what you end up with:

The birthday girl seems pleased, doesn't she?

I wouldn't actually let her put her treasured cupcake IN her brand-new decorated treasure chest (thanks, Abby!), so on top had to suffice:

Stick around, because Syd has already requested a star-shaped layered rainbow cake for her star-themed birthday party this weekend, and so if I'm making a layered rainbow cake, anyway, well, then I might as well write a tutorial!

Here's the food coloring we used:

Her Star Party

Sydney wanted a "Star Party" for her fifth birthday.

Happy to oblige, my sweet!

As the little party attendees arrived, they were invited out back to paint a star mural on brown paper taped to the garage wall:

When they filled up the paper, it turned out that nobody wanted to paint over anybody else's work, but they all still wanted to paint, so I dragged out some giant sheets of newsprint, and the consensus moved onward to rainbows:

There was a star-shaped piñata for whacking (to make your own, check out my paper mache piñata tutorial over at Crafting a Green World):  

 Syd's having a little trouble letting go of her precious piñata, can't you tell?

Know what could make her feel better, though?

Why, that piñata's filled with candy!

We admired, sang over, cut, and served the rainbow layer cake decorated with star sprinkles:

And Sydney received presents from some very generous and loving good friends:

It was, clearly, the best birthday ever, and Sydney began her sixth year of life happy, well loved, and full of sugar, just as she'd planned.

Stay tuned, because Willow's birthday party will be later this summer, and she's already chosen her theme:

The Ocean.

Watermelon whale, blue Jello, and dolphin piñata, here we come!