Cooking with Teenagers: Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches

 

Sugar is the best way to bond with teenagers. Maybe that's my own sweet tooth talking, or my unhealthy Southern "food is love" dysfunction, but my teenagers and I have a lot of happy moments together making weird, sugary treats and then consuming them.

Considering how many other moments we have together that consist of them being mad at me for, like, existing, I am happy to indulge my sweet tooth and pass along one of my many specific food dysfunctions if it means peace and pleasant memories!

As are most of these projects, homemade ice cream sandwiches were originally Syd's idea. This kid has a sweet tooth bigger than mine, and she's far more creative than me, too. This sometimes results in some unholy, sugar-drenched concoctions, but she hit this one out of the park.

The base for these homemade ice cream sandwiches is, of course, homemade cookies. As far as we can tell, you can use any homemade cookie recipe, although soft cookies work best. Crispy cookies get messy when you bite into them with that layer of ice cream in between, and since you'll be eating them nearly frozen, thinner cookies work better than thick ones. 

Here are the cookies we've tried and like best:

• peanut butter cookies
• chocolate chip cookies

You can also use any ice cream that you want for these ice cream sandwiches. For Will's birthday last year, I bought her this ice cream maker--

--and we use the snot out of it all year round!

And yes, I did buy a second bowl, because I am just that extra. And also, some of us have very different taste in ice cream (meaning they don't like chocolate?!?), and with two bowls we can make two different batches one after the other without having to wait for a bowl to re-freeze.

Our favorite part of making homemade ice cream is adding mix-ins, but you could do the same thing with store-bought ice cream by letting it soften a bit, stirring in your mix-ins by hand, and then putting it in a larger container to accommodate the additional volume.

When you assemble these ice cream sandwiches, you can also add lots of other gourmet components. We've rolled the edges in sprinkles or chocolate chips, frosted the cookies, etc. My absolute favorite combination is to bake peanut butter cookies and make chocolate ice cream with mini peanut butter cup mix-ins. Then when I assemble the sandwich, I spread peanut butter on the bottom of one cookie, jam on the bottom of the other, and put the chocolate ice cream in the middle. 

It's absurdly indulgent, and absolutely delicious! 

The project as a whole is time-consuming, but most of that time is just waiting for stuff to freeze. The process goes basically like this:

1. Make the homemade ice cream, then put it in the freezer to harden.
2. Bake the homemade cookies, then spread them out on a cookie sheet and put them in the freezer, too.
3. When both components are frozen, assemble the sandwiches. Take each pair of cookies out of the freezer only long enough to assemble the sandwich and wrap it in plastic wrap, and then immediately return it to the freezer. I keep an open Ziplock baggie in the freezer while I'm doing this so I can just pop the finished ice cream sandwiches into it as they're finished.

Confession time: this Mother's Day, I was feeling very bummed out. As a person whose love language is, ashamedly, Gift-Giving, I was sad and disappointed that nobody got the magical unspoken memo that it would be nice to plan out a day all about Making a Fuss Over Me. My feelings were hurt when no presents appeared, and no special activities were announced, and then to make myself feel worse I got on Facebook and looked at all the other magical Mother's Day celebrations happening out there on social media. Glad y'all are having such a great day, Everyone! I'm sitting over here eating a sandwich that I made myself and it turns out we don't even have any chips!

So there I was, sort of bumming around the house feeling bored and unloved, when out of nowhere Syd was all, "Let's make ice cream sandwiches!"

And so we did! We baked the cookies, we churned the ice cream, we assembled the sandwiches while listening to music. It took the entire day, off and on. 

I think it was while we were finishing up the ice cream, and Syd was thoughtfully polling me about my preference of mix-ins, that I realized what she was doing: she was deliberately making sure that I had an excellent time. We were making my favorite cookies and my favorite ice cream with my favorite mix-ins. We were listening to music that I liked. I was being steered towards all the fun parts of of the project, and she was the one digging out the correct measuring cups and looking through the entire pantry for the vanilla. 

A better Mother's Day present couldn't be found than getting to experience what a kind, compassionate kid I have. And maybe I have, indeed, passed down my "food is love" and "sugar heals all wounds" guiding principles, but just know that when I tell you that food is love and sugar heals all wounds, THIS is what I mean. I mean that making food together is a great way to demonstrate our love for each other, and that making and eating something sweet with your teenager is a great way to have, in fact, a magical Mother's Day.

P.S. Here are a few of the other ways that my teenagers and I bond together over food!

• Hot Chocolate Bombs
• Fancy Coffee
• Boba Tea

And here's my Craft Knife Facebook page, where you can often see the cooking with sugar happen in near-real time!

Pollinators Love My Milkweed

 

I am loving how happy my common milkweed is in the side yard that I've allowed it to overgrow. Now that it's blooming, I'm even happier to see all the pollinators also loving it!

I really like this photo of the bee that I accidentally caught in flight:

The butterflies don't quite sit still enough to get their pictures taken:

All the pollinators are going to be even more thrilled when my perennial sunflowers begin to bloom!

How to Make a Broken Dish Pendant

 

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.

Pro tip: If you pretend that your dinnerware aesthetic is mismatched Fiestaware, then it doesn't matter how many dishes your kids break, because you can always just go buy another random plate and it'll fit right in. And bonus points for style, because broken Fiestaware is awesome for crafting!

Of course, you can use all kinds of broken dishes for crafting, but I am particularly fond of this colorful and cute broken dish pendant that I recently made from my dearly departed yellow Fiestaware plate. It's easier than you think to cut ceramics with a couple of standard tools, and there are loads of ways to finish off the pendant to your taste. This broken dish pendant is a fun upcycling project, and you get to use power tools--what could be better?

Tools & Supplies

To make your own broken dish pendant you will need:

Broken Dish

The local thrift store is my favorite place to buy crafting supplies, and I have no qualms about shattering even the cutest thrifted plate just to make mosaic tesserae or broken dish pendants. I'm equally fond of upcycling my own broken possessions, which is why I have that sad little stack of broken Fiestaware!

Dremel with Diamond Bit Cutting Wheel

 

Obviously, you can substitute whatever variable-speed rotary tool you prefer, but my good old Dremel 3000 has been doing right by me for at least a decade now, so I don't have experience with any other brands.

Grinder or Sandpaper (optional)

You do want to grind or sand away any sharp edges or snags, but you can leave the just plain irregular or uneven bits alone if you're not feeling picky.

Jewelry Findings

There's a lot of scope for imagination here! You'll see me finishing my pendant with soldered edges and a double barrel swivel, but you can use any findings and method you prefer, or even just use a tile bit to drill a hole right through your piece for hanging.

1. Cut the pendant shape from your dish

The secret to this project is just how stinking easy it is to cut ceramics with the correct tools. Here, I'm using an old-school Dremel 3000 and a diamond cutting wheel. That's really all you need!  Notice that I'm doing this cutting in my sink, shamefully getting water droplets all over my Dremel. That's because the most important piece to this puzzle is keeping your work surface wet: it reduces friction and lowers the temperature (caused by friction), so your piece is less likely to crack and your cutting wheel will last longer.

2. Sand or Grind the Edges of Your Pendant (optional)

I definitely could have cut this circle more neatly (if you're worried about making wonky cuts, choose a super simple shape, like a triangle, for your first few pendants. Save the wonky-looking circles for experts like me!), but the soldered edges that I'm planning on will cover a lot of flaws. All I did, then, was switch out my Dremel's cutting wheel for a grinding bit to grind down one jagged bit and round the pendant's edges. Rounding the edges ALWAYS makes a cut piece look more professional!

3. Rig the Pendant for Hanging

You have SO many options for actually turning your broken dish into a pendant!

• Use epoxy glue to adhere a bail directly to the back of the pendant.
• Use a diamond drill bit to drill a hole through the top of the pendant.
• Wrap the pendant in wire, and twist to make a loop for hanging.
• Solder around the pendant, then solder on a jump ring.

For a piece any bigger than this particular pendant, I like the look of drilling a hole directly through the dish, but this little Fiestaware logo pendant is only 1" in diameter! Did any of y'all also learn how to solder during the soldered microscope slide jewelry craze? If so, you'll know that I burnished copper foil tape onto the pendant's edges, brushed them with flux, then soldered them with lead-free silver solder. A larger dollop of solder on top allows you to fix the hanger. 

 There are SO MANY fun things to do with broken dish pendants like these. You can turn them into necklaces or charm bracelets, add them to suncatchers or windchimes, or embellish pull chains or garlands. Supersize your broken dish pendants and use them as Christmas ornaments or gift tags, or decoupage or paint on top of them to make signage or wall art. Let me know what you're going to turn YOUR broken dish pendant into in the comments below!

Johnny Appleseed's Grave is a Lie

 

Back when we weren't traveling anywhere, I got so bored one day that I made myself a map that pinpointed every single place that I thought it would be interesting to go in my home state of Indiana. I (correctly) figured that when we did start to travel again, we'd probably start more locally, and wouldn't it be handy to have all the doughnut shops, waterfalls, history museums, nature preserves, and unusual playgrounds already marked for me so that I could simply look up a location, see what's nearby, and detour to visit that, too?

As a matter of fact, it IS handy!

And that's how we four intrepid explorers, on our way to a family reunion in Ann Arbor, Michigan, found ourselves underdressed for the weather and inanely wandering down a path between a giant parking lot and a German social club:

We don't look like we know where we're going, and yet we still managed to find our way to our destination: the gravesite of Johnny Appleseed:

There's a lot about the folktale of Johnny Appleseed that's a lie. 

He wasn't itinerant, but rather had a lot of property spread out over a large area that he often traveled between.

He didn't give apple seeds away or randomly plant them, but instead planted them in orchards as nursery stock, and then sold the young trees to settlers.

He did proselytize wherever he went, but as a Swedenborgian.

And this is probably not his gravesite.

Some stories say he was buried down by the nearby river in a grave that's now unmarked and undiscovered. Other stories say he was, indeed buried in this family cemetery, the Archer Cemetery, in a grave that was also unmarked but whose location was confirmed by then-living witnesses to his funeral. 

There are even a couple of other headstones from the family cemetery still standing there:

As usual, this little side trip, meant to answer one small and not terribly interesting question--Where is Johnny Appleseed buried?--has inspired in me the desire for other moderately-related and definitely weirder side quests. Not only did I just go on a deep dive into Swedenborgianism, but now I have yet another tiny history museum to add to the map of weird places to go in Ohio that I should totally make.

And the curious little hill that Johnny Appleseed's marker stands on got me wondering if it's, in fact, a Native American mound. Researching that led me to this site with opinionated information about numerous little-known mounds in Indiana... and so obviously I had to ask my public library to buy this book for me.

If you've got littler homeschoolers, I'd say keep them away from the Nephilim speculation, ahem. Instead, might I suggest an autumn unit study or Midwest geography study that includes Johnny Appleseed, culminating in a field trip to his disputed gravesite, a day trip to an apple orchard, and then a following week full of all the apple crafts and activities?

Add the Swedenborgianism to your ongoing comparative religions study, of course.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Sew a Button Back on Your Pants

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.

Alas, for the button has just popped off your pants! 

If you're lucky, it has simply fallen to the floor at your feet, ideally while you're getting dressed alone in your room surrounded by plenty of other suitable pants options. Of course, the way this year has been going, it's much more likely that your button has pinged off explosively in the middle of a crowded room, probably while you, yourself, are at the center of attention, and it has first smacked someone important in the eye and then fallen... somewhere, probably deep in a crack between the floorboards. And that was your only pair of nice pants. Fortunately, sewing a button back on your pants is a super easy and low-fuss skill that requires only a basic amount of hand-eye coordination. Anyone can do it!

Tools Needed

You will need:

Replacement Button

Look all over the inside of your pants and it's very likely that you'll find a couple of spare buttons sewn into a seam somewhere. Even this pair of fast-fashion H&M cargo shorts comes with two replacement buttons! If your pants didn't come with any spare buttons, however, you can use any same-sized button. Take a spare one from another pair of pants, perhaps, or ask around your local buy-nothing group.

Needle, Thread, Scissors, Seam ripper

Dig through your junk drawer until you find that travel sewing kit you got somewhere, or ask the hostess or concierge if you're somewhere public. If you do need to buy your supplies new, however, a small travel sewing kit is an inexpensive and practical purchase; look for one that has a seam ripper, a choice of pins and sewing needles, and a small selection of threads in basic colors.

Directions

As a quick note, in most cases, people want to mend their possessions to look as similar to new as possible, and that's okay! Don't be afraid, though, to have a little fun with your repair. With these shorts, I did use the spare button that came with them, primarily because it's a boring brown button. If I used a cute button from my stash then I'd just have one more boring brown button in my stash, instead, and I already have plenty of boring brown buttons, thank you very much. BUT, instead of boring brown thread, I used awesome fuchsia embroidery floss, because when I mend something I like to make it fun. Bonus: embroidery floss is very sturdy!

1. Pick Away Loose Threads

 

Your button likely left a mess of thread behind when it fell off. Use the seam ripper to pick all of that out, being careful not to pierce the fabric of your pants with its pointy end.

2. Stitch An X To Start

 When the loose threads are gone, you'll likely see evidence on the fabric of where the button stitching was. If you're lucky, you'll even see holes in the fabric from the stitching. 

 That's great because you want to sew your button back on exactly where it was before. Thread your needle, and using those holes if you have them, stitch a small x exactly where you want the center of your button to be. Buttons have to undergo a lot of pressure, and this x reinforces the button and your sewing.

 

3. Sew The Button To Your Pants

This part is a little tricky, so stay with me here: you can't simply sew the button directly to your pants. It feels obvious that you should be able to, but if you did, you wouldn't actually be able to button them, because there wouldn't be any room behind the button for the buttonhole fabric. Instead, when you sew the button to your pants, you have to leave a gap between the button and the pants. You're going to do that by holding something narrow--a pin from your sewing kit, perhaps, or the stabby bit of the seam ripper--against the top of the button as you sew it. Here's what it looks like: 

 In the above photo, I'm stitching up from the back of the fabric, using the same hole that I made stitching my starting x, pushing my needle up through one of the holes in the button, and pushing it down through another hole in the button and into the fabric, using another one of the holes that I made stitching my starting x. Before I pull the thread tight, I'm placing my seam ripper on top of the button, essentially sewing the seam ripper to the top of the button. This is the fiddliest part of the process, because you'll feel like you need one hand to hold the fabric, one hand to hold the needle, one hand to hold the button, and one hand to hold the seam ripper in place. Just try not to throw the whole thing across the room and after you've done a couple of passes, the seam ripper will stay put on its own. How many times you sew through the holes in your button is going to depend entirely on the width and quality of your thread. If you're using the thread that came with your travel sewing kit, it's probably on the flimsier side, and so you may need to sew through those holes eight or so times. With my embroidery floss, I only had to sew through each hole twice. With standard store-bought thread, a good number is around six.

4. Make The Button's Shank

 This is my favorite part! When you're satisfied that the button is secure, make sure your needle is at the back of the fabric, then remove the seam ripper and pull the button away from the fabric. Now you've got plenty of room for your pants to button! 

 Push your needle back through the fabric, then wrap it around the thread between the button and the fabric 6-8 times, forming the button's shank. When the shank looks nice and tidy and is completely covered by wrapped thread, stop wrapping so your shank doesn't get too bulky and push your needle back through the fabric.

 

5. Knot The Thread

Sew a stitch through your cross-stitch x, pull it snug, and knot it against the fabric. Cut away the excess thread. Although I used pants for my demo, this method works exactly the same, of course, for any button, whether it's on a shirt or a bag or a skirt. Shank buttons work differently, but you're not going to find those on a pair of pants.

College Tour: University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

 Never mind that Will isn't actually interested in applying to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor: we were in Michigan, near Ann Arbor, and I wanted to start our season of college tours!

Fun fact: I didn't visit a single college back when I was in high school applying to them. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, applied to colleges pretty much at random armed only with my own very miniscule amount of common sense, and wandered off to the college, sight unseen, that was both out of state and offered me the most scholarship money.

I really fell upwards in that scenario!

I might, then, be living a tiny bit vicariously through Will's college search process. Will has no interest in attending a big public university, but *I* was interested in seeing one, we were practically next door to it a few weekends ago, and a dry run at college tours, and a look at a college, even if it's one that your kid doesn't think she wants to attend, never hurts.

It looks like University of Michigan is offering in-person guided tours now, but it wasn't when we went, so Will and I pulled some interesting sites off of their self-guided tour resources to walk around and see. We'd both have LOVED to go inside every museum and library, as well, but alas that they were all closed, so I guess we had more of a sightseeing expedition than a college tour.

Wouldn't you know it, the coolest thing we saw wasn't even on the U of M campus, but on our way to it:

A delivery robot!

Remember when Will researched delivery robots as part of our Girl Scout Robotics badge lessons? And now we've seen one in the wild! I could not have been more excited if I had come across a literal celebrity out and about on the streets of Ann Arbor. 

Here's The Cube:

Here's the Law Quad:

Here's... a thing:

Here's some Virginia creeper, a vine that Matt is SO allergic to. It's probably good HE didn't go to school here!

Here's the brand-new University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, which Will and I would have given our right arms to have gone inside of:

Here's the Peony Garden, which was hopping!

Here's a willow:

Here's the Wave Field:

And here are some swings!

Will and I have been speaking a lot about her... close-mindedness, let's say, when it comes to college options. Her snap judgments. Her tendency, for instance, to dismiss a place like Yale outright simply because Yale had the audacity to send her a brochure through the mail. Honest to god, I have NO IDEA how she's going to choose a college, or, to be frank, how I'm going to let her go away from me to whatever college she does choose. But now, at least, we've got one unofficial, practice college tour under our belts!