A new week--phew!

Hooray for a brand-new week! After last week's hassles, I'm more than ready to start anew. Thank you all so very much for commiserating with me! Things are mostly back to normal. We got a new battery for the car. The washing machine works again and if the pipes were frozen, they thawed with no damage (that we know of yet...knock wood). Maren did end up with a couple of fractures to her wrist: one transverse and one buckle. Here she is with her new pink cast:

She's doing fine and hasn't complained at all about wearing the cast; we'll see if that holds for the rest of the 3.5 weeks it has to stay on.

As for this little monkey,

he's still climbing out of his crib, and twice he managed to OPEN closed bedroom door! I ordered a crib tent from Amazon and paid for expedited shipping so it arrived on Friday afternoon, so I put it up and found that if I install it per the instructions, it doesn't fit my crib! There were nearly tears. From me! I think we may be able to rig it so it will work, especially since Amazon won't take it back now that it's been opened. Not sure how they think I could have figured out it wouldn't fit the crib without trying it on since there are no measurements on the box and my crib is most definitely what I would consider standard-sized, so I'll be adding my 1-star review to the others for this product on Amazon. Boo!

I did want to mention that I still have some cute vintage Valentine assortments in my Etsy shop. Shipping is cheap because I'm mailing them First Class, so you can order for the next day or so and they'll should still get to you in time for Valentine's Day on Monday.

Groundhog cupcakes

Friends, it's been a rough week. And it's only Wednesday afternoon.

On Monday morning, Maren had two cavities filled. She was a brave girl--didn't cry one tear and never even needed the nitrous oxide! That afternoon at school she fell during indoor recess (cold kept the kids inside) and hit her head on the wall and landed hard on her wrist, resulting in the dreaded call from the school nurse.

The doc decided it warranted an x-ray, and it turns out she has a buckle fracture in one of her bones. We head to the pediatric orthopedist this afternoon to find out if it needs a cast or can stay in the splint. (sidenote: Maren keeps calling her splint her "sliver." I think she's getting the whole splinter/sliver thing mixed up but it makes me giggle every time.)

Yesterday school was canceled due to ridiculously cold weather. The high temp yesterday was several degrees below zero, and we spent the whole day listening to the heater cycle on and off nearly continuously as it tried to keep up with the cold outside! I went into the basement yesterday morning to put in a load of wash and found that the water in the washer won't come on. We're not sure if it's due to a frozen pipe or just that the washer coincidentally went kaput on the coldest day of the year, but either way we have about two more days of clean undies until I'll be knocking on my neighbor's door with a basket of dirty laundry in hand.

Last night, Porter finally figured out how to climb out of his crib. I know that he's known how to do it since before Christmas, but last night was the first time he actually tried it. Moving him to a toddler bed is not an option for numerous reasons, so we're going to try the crib tent thing for a while.

To get Porter to stay in bed last night we rigged up a 'lid' for his crib out of packing boxes and duct tape. It did the trick and kept him in safely, but then I woke up around 4:30 am this morning, worried that he'd manage to get his head stuck somehow and asphyxiate so I crept downstairs and got scissors and cut all of the tape just in case.

Today school is closed again because of the extreme cold, but I decided we'd go out to the chiropractor (my back/neck are killing me) and to buy a crib tent. I got us all dressed to fend off the -20 degree windchill, strapped everyone in their car seats, and only then found that the car battery is dead. {bangs head against wall}

The bad news is, I fear we haven't faced the worst of it yet. My dear grandmother is fading rather quickly, and I'm afraid that she may not last through the week. Every time the phone rings I'm afraid to look at the caller ID.

Highlight of the past few days has been the Groundhog cupcakes that Maren and I made yesterday.

They're not perfect, but they're still cute! This photo was taken after Porter perpetrated a small Groundhog Massacre so a few of them have wonky faces. I sent them to work with The Mister--I don't care for Almond Joys, so this may be the first time I've ever made cupcakes that I didn't want to go in there and eat them all by myself.

Anthropologie-style antiqued mirrors

I'm so tempted to give this a try! Aren't the results beautiful?

Here's a link to the tutorial in case you can't watch the video.

Sad week for wreaths

Sunday morning I came into my office to find the floor littered with shards of pink glass. I think I might have actually screamed out loud when I realized that those shards could only have come from this:

My beloved pink wreath was hanging on the closet door in my office to keep it up and away from destructive little hands. I keep a 3M Command hook on my closet door because it's a good place to photograph items for eBay and Etsy, so I hung the wreath there for photos as well. Sometime during Saturday night, the adhesive on the hook failed and the wreath crashed to the floor below.

Thankfully, the floor is carpet so the damage wasn't as extensive as it could have been.

As it is, the ornaments marked with Xs are now in the belly of my Shop Vac. I think I'll be able to carefully replace the three large ornaments around the bottom, but the sweet little bird is history and I'm not sure what I can do to fix it. I used up all of my pink ornaments on the other two pink wreaths, so I can't do anything about it until I find more anyway, which means it will probably be months.

The truly sick irony is that earlier on Saturday afternoon, I moved the other two pink wreaths downstairs and packed them carefully into wreath boxes to store them safely until next Christmas. If only I had moved this pink one instead, it would still be intact and beautiful. :(

To add insult to injury, yesterday I caught the dog in the act of eating the gumdrops off of the gumdrop wreath I made in 2009.

 I had put it in the basement because I'm still in the process of putting away my Christmas decor (I know, don't judge) and it was awaiting space in a box. I forgot it was on the floor and left the basement door open in between doing loads of laundry, and the dog wandered down there and found it. He'd denuded half of it by the time I found him, and had vigorously licked the other half. I'm sure I could have made some attempt at repair but at that point I was so disgusted and annoyed that I just pitched the whole entire thing.

It's a bad week to be a wreath in my house, apparently.

More Ornament wreaths

May I present vintage ornament wreaths no. 2

and 3:

 I was able to dig into my stash come up with enough pink ornaments to squeeze out a third wreath, though I had to mix them with silver to have enough for the whole thing.

I love them! I think I'll sell at least two of them next year, as I don't really need three pink ornament wreaths in my house (which has NO pink in it other than Maren's bedroom). Now I just need to find a way to keep them safely stored until next year--these things are fragile!

Top Ten "Junking" Finds for 2011

What do you think of the list? Is there anything missing or anything you don't agree with? What's on YOUR personal Top Ten Junking Finds for 2011 list?

Vintage ornament wreath #1

Confession #1: my Christmas tree is still up and decorated, and about half of my other Christmas decorations are still out. It's now the middle of January.

Confession #2: I don't even care!

I've never before left my Christmas decorations up so late but they're not bugging me, so I've ignored them. Part of the reason I haven't boxed them up is that I'm still doing Christmas crafts, so there are some things that I can't put away because I'm using them! All of my boxes have to fit neatly into a small space so I have to have them all ready to go and put them all in at once to make it work--it's like Christmas box Tetris.

Last night I made my first vintage ornament wreath. I've wanted to make one since, well, since I started collecting vintage ornaments about six years ago. But as with the other crafts I've shown this week, December gets crazy for me (schedule-wise and mentally) so I can't seem to get one done before the holiday. Now I'm early for next year!

I didn't hit the post-Christmas sales at Target this year because 1) I don't need anything and am trying to declutter and 2) I was lazy. :) But I did have to go to Target last week for something else and decided to wander by the Christmas aisle to see if anything was left. It was already 90% off so pickins' were slim, but I did find some colored tinsel wreaths in silver, pink, blue and green. Original price was $2.50, so I figured I couldn't go too wrong for a quarter apiece and bought the silver and the three pinks that were left on the shelf.

I used one of the pink wreaths as my base and glued on the outside ring of larger solid colored ornaments first, then filled in the middle with the fancy stuff. I wondered if maybe I ought to use a different color than my precious pink vintage beauties in case I messed up my first attempt, but luckily it worked out and I couldn't be more pleased with the final product!

I still have two pink wreaths and a silver left, which is a good thing because now I'm addicted! I've already started a pink and turquoise wreath, and I'm trying to decide what color scheme to use on the silver. I bent the remaining pink wreath into a heart shape and I'm going to see if I can't come up with something for Valentine's Day. I'll have used up all of my pink ornaments though, so that one will have to be mostly red and perhaps silver.

I'm giving myself one more week to get the Christmas crafting wrapped up and put away--just in time for all of the Valentine's decorations to come out! Guess I don't have to worry about that whole post-Christmas emptiness in my decor, right?

More Christmas crafting: vintage-style hanging glass bead ornaments

Still working on the post- (or pre-, depending how you look at it) Christmas crafting. This project was easy, I just didn't ever have the time to sit down and actually do it before Christmas!

Earlier this summer I bought this vintage Christmas wreath-thingy (I really don't know what to call it) at an estate sale. It's made of glass beads and the top is shaped into a wreath, with four long dangles hanging down, and each long dangle has a small glass ornament at the bottom.

When I purchased it, two of the green ornaments were broken, but I was sure that I had something in my stash that I could use to replace them. While I was doing the repairs, I realized how simple the construction was and thought maybe I'd try to make one myself.

The supplies were minimal: glass beads in two sizes, feather-tree size ornaments for the dangles, two foil leaves and a piece of ribbon. I didn't have any vintage foil leaves in the right shape, but I did have some very similar silver holly leaves made by a scrapbooking company called Prima. I used Zip Dry glue to adhere a length of thin floral wire to the back of each one.

A word about the mercury glass beads: finding strands of these is one of my top 10, possibly even top 5 thrills while junking. I LOVE them! I've found about a dozen strands over the past few years, but here's the thing--I've never really done anything with them. They don't display well on aluminum Christmas trees, and I plum forgot to put any on my green tree this year. I could put them in a big jar like beautiful glass bead spaghetti, but I just don't have a place for that and they get tangled really easily. When I decided to attempt to make this ornament, that was the push I needed to finally DO something with them. I cut apart the strands, removed all of the broken bits and now I have a jar full of glass beads that I can actually use. Sometimes the thought of using my vintage (and therefore difficult to replace) treasures is scary, but I have never regretted it when I actually do!

The construction of the ornament is simple. I don't have photos of all the steps because it was late at night and I made it up as I went along. The colors of my ornaments were constrained by the fact that I only have a few of the larger size strands of beads needed to make the wreath: red, turquoise and royal blue. My first attempt was the royal blue. Using the green ornament as my size guide, I cut a piece of wire roughly the same size as wreath and strung on blue beads, then twisted the ends to secure.

Next, I made the little bead clusters that sit in front of the leaves. I can make a tutorial for these if anyone is interested--leave a comment and let me know! I didn't have any small blue beads for this part so I improvised and used red. Then I twisted the tails of the clusters and the wires of the leaves together. One thing I wish I'd done differently is make the wreath portion bigger. The blue beads were smaller than the green beads, but the leaves I used were larger than the originals, so I think the proportion is a bit off.

The original dangles were strung on heavy thread or string, so I used three strands of embroidery floss to make mine. I again used the original as a size guide and strung the same number of beads. When I got to the bottom, I looped through the wire of the ornament, then went back through the beads again and out the top to make each dangle. When I had all four completed, I pulled the threads through a large silver bead and tied the threads in a knot. Here again I think the proportion is just a bit off: the silver beads I used were just slightly larger than the originals, and using the same number as the original resulted in longer strands. I used two red balls to bring in the color from the clusters, but I don't know if I like how it looks and I may remove those in favor of more blue.

To put it all together, I tied the threads around the bottom of the wreath (where the wires were twisted), cut the threads close to the knot and applied a drop of glue to keep the knot from coming loose. Next I twisted the wire from the leaves/clusters around the same place. Then I made a small bow, twisted a piece of wire around the middle and attached another glass bead, then twisted the ends around the same place as the leaves. It's not as clean on the back as I'd like, but honestly the original is a bit messy in that area as well.

I liked the next ones I made better, because I figured out my proportion problems so I think they look more balanced. I made the red one with gold dangles because of the gold leaves.

My favorite is definitely the turquoise one! I wish the holly leaves were smaller, but I worked with what I had and I made the bow out of wider ribbon to try to balance them.

I'm not sure what I'll do with these--perhaps they'll end up in my etsy shop next year. I also think it would be interesting to make a smaller version, better sized to be an actual Christmas tree ornament, using some of my really tiny feather tree ornaments at the bottom of the dangles. I'm not sure what I'd use for the leaves, but I have 10 months to figure something out!

Muffin Tin Advent Calendar

This past weekend I spent working on crafty stuff--Christmas crafts, to be precise. Now, you might think that I'm about three weeks late, but I prefer to think of myself as 50 weeks early for next Christmas!

One of the projects that I did was this muffin tin advent calendar. I've wanted to make a cookie sheet advent calendar for years, ever since I first saw Teresa McFayden's fabulous creation years ago. Every year I'd plan to make one, and then every year it would be December 1 before I knew it and too late. 2010 was no exception, but this year Teresa had a new advent calendar in the Christmas issue of Inspired Ideas (the same e-magazine where I got the inspiration to make my glittery cookie cutter ornaments). Teresa's article is on pages 40-44 if you want to go check it out.

I bought my Wilton mini muffin tin at JoAnn's so that I could use a 40% off coupon, but Wilton pans frequently go on sale both there and Michael's as well. I haven't painted it or drilled the holes in the top yet, but that task may have to wait until I pull it out next year--though I ought to just get it done now, right?

I don't have the 2 1/2" or 2 5/8" scalloped circle punch that Teresa suggested, but I do have one that is 2 3/8" from Stampin' Up. It fits, but just barely covers the muffin wells, so I knew that attaching magnets to the back of cardstock circles probably wouldn't work well. I opted for another method: I purchased magnetic sheets at JoAnn's (with a coupon, of course! I'm too cheap to pay full price for anything there) and because they're thin, was able to use my punch to cut out 24 circles. I also punched scalloped circles out of some of my favorite hoarded Daisy D's vintage Christmas scrapbook paper, and ran them through my Xyron to apply adhesive to the backs. Then I simply applied one scrapbook paper circle to the top of each magnetic circle.

The most fun part of the project was definitely picking through all of my little bits o' junk to make all of the numbers. I used stuff from my scrapbooking stash (brads, metal numbers, rub-ons, chipboard, stickers, tags, metal shapes) and vintage junk as well (a domino, a checker, bingo numbers, game card, milk bottle cap, buttons, tickets, price signs). I glued it all together with my favorite Zip Dry craft glue, and I accented some of the numbers with another of my favorite crafting products, Stickles glitter glue.

If I didn't think the candy would go bad (and possibly attract bugs), I'd go ahead and fill the wells now so it would be all ready to go on December 1, 2011 when I pull it out of the box! I'm glad to finally get this project done after literally years of having it on my mind (another one out of my system)!

Ugly Sweater Party

A friend and I co-hosted an Ugly Sweater Party on New Year's Day. It was the perfect fun ending to the holidays before we all got back to real life.

It was also the perfect excuse to hit the thrifts, since I had to search for appropriately horrible sweaters for us to wear. I found mine the week before Christmas but didn't snag the Mister's until a last-minute Goodwill run two hours before the party. Mine was bad, but his truly took the prize for Worst Crime Against Fashion Perpetrated By Acrylic Yarn. The ugliness even spilled over onto the back of his sweater. It made my eyes bleed a little bit.

One of the best parts about the party (besides collapsing with laughter each time a new couple arrived in their hideous sweaters) was our photo booth! My co-host Becca is a photographer and I whipped up some Etsy-hipster-style mustaches-on-sticks and other silly props, so we were able to capture our awesomely bad outfits and post them on Facebook and for possible use as 2011 Christmas cards.

Here's my favorite--we were going for an Awkward Family Photos vibe:

I think the Mister really nailed it.

For party food we had appetizers. I made three recipes from my favorite food blog, Our Best Bites:

• Holiday Cheeseball Unfortunately, not a repeater. It was the size of a bowling ball and I came home with 7/8 of it, so it wasn't a hit.
• 7-Layer Greek Dip Yum! I think people liked this one. I'm still eating it a week later and it's still good and fresh. It's a healthier alternative to the traditional Mexican 7-Layer dip: I made my own hummus (no preservatives, only a little salt) and used fat-free cream cheese and feta cheese. Fresh parsley, cucumbers and tomatoes and kalamata olives are good for you too, and I served it with pita chips. I'd definitely make this again.
• Sweet Fruit Salsa with Cinnamon Chips This one was a winner. I used blackberries, mango, kiwi, fresh pineapple, and a few frozen raspberries. Mine didn't look nearly as pretty as the photo for a few reasons: I ignored the warning about adding berries last, and the raspberries indeed dyed the salsa and gave all the fruit a reddish tinge (I was smart enough to add the blackberries last). Also, I should have chopped my fruit much smaller to begin with. I didn't and at the last minute decided it looked more like fruit salad than salsa, and gave it a quick whirl in the food processor. The result tasted fine and the consistency was more salsa-like, but because of the red tinge, looked a lot more like vomit than I was comfortable with. The cinnamon chips were yummy.

The party was such fun we may need to make it a yearly tradition! I may start my hunt for next year's sweater right now.

Buh-bye

Dear December:
Boy, am I glad you're over. You sucked rocks approximately 87% of the time. Good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Dear 2010:
Overall, you were pretty good (see above for the exception). Thanks for the memories!

Dear 2011:
I have big plans for you! Get ready!

Crafty stuff: Glittery vintage cookie cutter ornaments

One type of item I see frequently at thrift stores, estate sales and antique malls is aluminum cookie cutters.

 

Every housewife at some point in the 1940s-70s must have had some in her kitchen, so they're usually easy to find and inexpensive. I've picked up quite a few, but stopped myself from bringing home more when I realized that other than putting them all in a big jar, I couldn't think of anything else I could actually do with them.

I did make these Christmas cookie cutter garlands a few years ago, using a combination of new reproduction cutters and vintage cutters from my collection. To make the garlands you need to use cutters with two holes in the front so they can be strung on the ribbon.

Most of the cutters in my collection are the ordinary type without the wooden handle and the accompanying pair of holes, therefore unsuitable for garland-making so they've still been sitting in their jar, patiently waiting to be turned into something fun.

Enter the Christmas issue of Inspired Ideas! If you're not yet familiar with Inspired Ideas, it's a wonderful online magazine put together by the fabulous and charming Amy Powers. In my opinion, the 2010 Christmas issue is the best yet! There are 170+ pages of yummy eye-candy and crafting and decorating inspiration, all for free! The feature about cookie cutters that caught my eye is on pages 157-159, by Heidi Woodruff, who has an appropriately-named blog called Everyday Cookies. Heidi used doll-sized vintage aluminum cookie cutters to make cute charms, but the suggestion that got my wheels turning was to cover cookie cutters in glitter and make them into Christmas tree ornaments.

Since I needed more ornaments for the Jolly Green Giant tree anyway, this was the perfect solution! And it was simple enough that Maren could help, so it would also fulfill the requirement of keeping her busy while she's been on her school break. (12 days and counting...)

I used Heidi's instructions from the magazine article, so I won't give a tutorial here. I chose the Christmas-themed cutters from my collection and used a Cropadile to make holes in the tops for hanging. I had originally intended to use coarse silver German glass glitter. Maren used pink and red glass glitter on her two ornaments (the pink flower and red heart) and the coverage wasn't great, so for mine I switched to Martha Stewart glitter. I tried the tree and a heart in Tourmaline, a lovely aqua color, but by far my favorite was the Antique Silver. It looked like the original color of the aluminum cutters, but sparklier! For glue I used a bottle of Martha Stewart Glittering Glue that I had in my stash. The bottle lid had an attached brush that was very handy for painting the glue all over the cookie cutters.

Once they were dry, I used Heidi's method for making beaded hangers. I used long head pins from my jewelry making supplies and glass beads cut from vintage beaded Christmas garlands.

The glittery ornaments are incredibly sparkly in real life and look so pretty on my tree! I was sad that I ran out of Christmas-themed cutters before I could make more. I've scoured the thrifts looking for bags of cookie cutters, but haven't been able to find any (figures--the rest of the year they're plentiful, but I need them for a project and they disappear.) I saw tons at the antique mall last weekend, but didn't want to pay antique-booth markup when I know how much they cost at the thrift stores! I'll have to keep my eye out this coming year and stash away a few to make more ornaments next Christmas.

Photo swiped from Rebecca at Thrifty Goodness

I knew that I wanted to make these for our yearly Goodness Girl ornament swap, but as I was out of Christmas-themed cutters, I used hearts instead. For these ornaments I punched a hole in the bottom of the heart as well as the top, and used more glass garland beads and a piece of a chandelier crystal to make a little dangle. I've yet to find anything that didn't benefit from even more sparkle. :) I packaged them in little muslin bags stamped with the year.

I've always wanted to have a "kitchen" tree, and I think these would be darling on one, hung from a piece of polka-dot ribbon. Thanks to Heidi Woodruff for the cute cookie cutter inspiration, and be sure to check out Inspired Ideas if you haven't already!

Thrift store chair re-do and cute chair inspiration

One of my favorite things to do when my dad visits is hit the thrift stores to look for treasures together. He shares my love of junk and it's fun to spend time with him prowling the aisles of the thrift store or antique mall. On one such trip several years ago, we picked up this old oak chair.

My dad shares my weakness for old orphaned chairs, and what made this one particularly appealing was not the ugly paint job or scary upholstery fabric, but the pretty claw feet:

You can see the original price tag of $6.99 but if I remember correctly, it was purchased on 50% off day so it was only $3.50.

This chair sat in the garage until last summer, when I decided it would be the perfect project to work on while I was out supervising Maren, who loved to play in the front yard with the neighborhood kids. If I was going to be out there, I might as well have something productive to do, right? I managed to get most of it sanded, and that was where my good intentions petered out. In summer '09 I was pregnant with Porter and pretty soon the idea of hanging out in my south-facing garage in the afternoon in the hottest part of the summer didn't seem all that appealing anymore.

So the chair was abandoned again, halfway sanded and with the chair cushion removed, looking sadder than ever. And then this summer in a fit of productivity, I decided to have a go at it again. I wasn't pregnant, but still didn't want to hang out in my hot garage any more than necessary so I decided to go the lazy route and just paint the darn thing instead of sanding, stripping and refinishing. I'm fairly certain at the moment the first blast of black spray paint hit that oak, a chill ran down my poor dad's spine, and he didn't even know why.

It may have been the lazy way out, but I love that it's actually DONE. Well, not completely--I still need to attach the cushion to the chair but as long as nobody actually sits in it, that's not a problem.

The cushion was made from another thrifted item I've had hanging around for years:

I found this fab skirt a few years ago and although it was a child's size 12 and wouldn't fit Maren until about 2020, I grabbed it because I saw its potential. The skirt is red velveteen, with bands of black velvet ribbon and a really neat ruffled trim. I contemplated making it into a pair of pillow covers, but it worked out perfectly to cover the chair cushion. I simply cut off the waistband, split it at the side seams and removed the lining (which I actually reused for another project I'll share someday), and let out the bottom hem to make it easier to fit around the cushion. Plus I still have another panel to use, so I can still make that pillow cover someday!

Back in September when I visited Utah, we went to a craft fair and found a booth with the cutest upcycled chairs. My mom purchased one of the Halloween designs (they stuck to Halloween and Christmas only) and I thought it was so cute and clever that I wanted to show you.

The chair was likely a thrift or yard sale find, painted black. The cushion cover was made by sewing strips of patterned fabric (in this case, Halloween prints) together, and then it was recovered in the normal fashion (click on the photo to enlarge it if you'd like a larger view). It is a very simple design, but so cute! I love the idea of a red-painted chair for Christmas, with a cushion made of strips of vintage Christmas tablecloths.

The pillow on the chair was also from the same vendor. I think that it is made out of bleached, ironed drop cloths and painted with a freezer-paper stencil. The paint was a little bit glittery and it had the nice sharp edges you get from the adhesion of the freezer-paper to the fabric. This example is for Halloween of course, but you could do a Christmas version with a big red 25, and a drop cloth would give you enough fabric to do a bunch of cute pillows to give as gifts. It's probably not a surprise that with cute (and so reasonably priced) wares like this chair and pillow, that vendor's booth was hopping!

No-Bake Gingerbread Houses for Kids WINNER!

The winner of my giveaway of a copy of No-Bake Gingerbread Houses for Kids:

Random Integer Generator

Here are your random numbers:

13 

Timestamp: 2010-12-15 02:24:24 UTC

Commenter #13 is Amy! I happen to know where Amy lives (ooh, that sounds stalkerish, doesn't it?) because she's a local friend, so Amy--I'll get your fabulous book to you soon! Thank you all for entering, and I'd encourage you to check out my friend Lisa's book, which is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. You can also check out her blog, where she has info about where to find candy, great decorating inspiration, and even the plans for two of the houses in her book! Now I have to decide which house to make next: the Cozy Cabin with its yummy Pirouette walls, or the darling toadstool house to go with all of the toadstool ornaments on my Christmas tree. Decisions...
 

Mermaid Palace from No-Bake Gingerbread Houses for Kids

Since Maren is STILL out of school (25 days until she goes back and counting**), I figured this was a perfect time to try our hand at one of the houses in No-Bake Gingerbread Houses for Kids. I let Maren choose which house we'd make first, and she chose the Mermaid Palace--no surprise there from my girly girl!

Once the Master of Disaster was in bed for his afternoon nap, we set to work. I used meringue powder to make my royal icing, per Lisa's tip in our interview. I had a can leftover from a Wilton Cake Decorating class I took a while back, but it can be readily purchased in the Wilton aisle at both Michael's and JoAnn's (don't forget your 40% off coupon!) The Mermaid Palace uses stacks of vanilla Oreos and ice cream cones to construct the towers, so we glued them all together and let them dry for a bit--not long, because royal icing dries out very quickly.

Once they were dry and secure, we got to do the fun part--the decorating! We mostly followed the picture in Lisa's book, though Maren chose blue icing for the walls instead of seafoam green. I piped on the frosting and Maren helped me smooth it out with a frosting knife.

For decoration, we used Smarties (leftover from Halloween!) and some tiny pink sugar pearls that I had in my cupcake decorating supplies; every Mermaid's Palace needs a little bling, right? Lisa's Mermaid Palace in the book looks like rests on a sandy seafloor made of graham cracker crumbs. I don't have any graham crackers right now, so we improvised and used breadcrumbs, which look just the same! I simply squirted royal icing all over the cardboard base, smoothed it out with a knife and we dumped the crumbs on.

My local Walgreen's was sold out of the green sour straws so we had to forgo the seaweed, but we did add sour gummy worm sea anemone to wave in the underwater currents. Maren loved how it turned out and had such fun making it! The whole thing was incredibly easy; the hardest thing for her was being patient while the icing dried. Being able to use store bought, pre-made items for the structure of the tower was such a huge mess- and time-saver for me!

I think next up we'll try the Cozy Cabin from Lisa's book. Maren and I have been reading the Little House on the Prairie series and when she saw it she said, "Look, it's Mary and Laura's cabin!" so that would be a fun way to tie into our reading. The fact that the cabin is constructed from Pirouette cookies, which just happen to be one of my all-time favorites, has nothing whatsoever to do with it. ;) And Pirouettes are on sale right now anyway, so it's economical!

You have a few more hours to leave a comment here and enter to win your own signed copy of No-Bake Gingerbread Houses for Kids! The giveaway closes at noon MST!

**(disclaimer: I love my daughter and I enjoy spending time with her. However, I also enjoy the precious 2.75 hours of "alone" time I get per day when she's at kindergarten and the baby is napping. It keeps me sane and allows me to get a lot done. Maren truly loves school, and is bored without it. Six weeks out of school in the middle of winter when it is too cold to go outside and run around gives us all cabin fever.)