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Homemade citrus paper!
Here is something fun that Bug and I did together the other day. That’s my secret, you know. That’s how I get stuff done when she is awake. I force her to help me. Actually, it’s more like I rack my brain all day long for things that we can do together so that I can actually cross something off my list and not go insane at the same time. I get very bored of playing picnic and watching Dora all day long. I think boredom brings out the creativity in me. That might be a good explanation for why having kids can be so inspiring for creative moms and why we all feel like we are going insane because there is never enough time to do everything we want to do! But if we didn’t have the kids we’d never have all the ideas so it’s a catch-22!!
We made wrapping paper! We’ve done this lots of times before, with crayons and potato stamps…but this wrapping paper was made especially for some people on my gift-giving list who like lemons. It’s not exactly the most Christmas-y paper but it does fit the recipient. I really wish I had some bright yellow cheery ribbon to go with it but I refuse to go shop for any. I’m going to do as much of my holiday gift-making/shopping at home as possible. Long live Etsy!
You can do this too if you are so inclined. I just carved two lemon shapes out of some apples we had (we didn’t have any potatoes so apples did just fine in a pinch). One of the shapes is a lemon slice and the other is an oval with those characteristic lemon bumps on both ends. (Though I think in real life lemons don’t actually come in that shape that often…but whatever, it’s all about recognition and I’m not going to get all Norman Rockwell while carving an apple.) It is sort of funny that no citrus fruits were harmed while making this paper. Just apples.
We stamped the crap out of those apples. Too bad poster paint isn’t edible because those apples were ready to be applesauce by the time we were done. It was pretty fun. The perfect craft a two-year-old attention span. After she was done slapping the paper with apples we hung it out to dry on our handy dandy patio lighting.
And then, me being me, I had to add something. The paper was perfectly cute with just lemon stamps and the odd kid thumb print here and there but my black roller ball pen was calling my name and the next thing I knew I was scrawling silly phrases about lemons. I think it turned out cute. I gave one present to a friend already (her wedding was last week so it was a late wedding gift) and she wadded up the paper right away not even realizing it was homemade. Then when I told her, she shrieked and un-wadded it right away. So you could say that the paper looked so good it looked store-bought, or maybe you could say that it looked like something to throw away. Haha. I’m going with the former, of course.
So there you have it. Homemade lemon paper.
We also made some Christmas paper from candy canes carved out of apples but by then Bug’s attention span had flitted off to something else and she started finger-printing my beautiful paper like some kind of murder happened. So I shooed her away and finished it up by myself.
I tried to tell Toby that Bug made the paper but he was onto me. So I guess this 100% kid art was made by a 100% 36-year-old kid. I still like it and I think everyone getting a gift from me in this paper will like it too. I may or may not clarify who did the painting. We’ll just say that Bug helped in her own way. And she did! See that massacre of red fingerprints attacking my nice cinnamon bun swirls? That was all her.
Wrapping paper with a story is always better anyway.
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Operation Gingerbread!
At last my top-secret operation has been revealed! I like to call it “Operation Gingerbread.” Like all top-secret operations, it had phases. Three of them. Phase One was the cardboard-box version that I posted about over on Alpha+Mom. Phase Two was a real gingerbread-cookie house and Phase Three is still yet to be done but involves freezer paper, a t-shirt and a gingerbread man illustration shouting “Catch me if you can!” Stay tuned for Phase Three.
For Phase Two we brainstormed and did our research. We may or may not have gotten some inspiration from a Sur la Table catalogue and Mars (via Bug’s antennae). I LOVE gingerbread now. It’s so pretty, cute and delicious all at the same time! I almost love it as much as I love hedgehogs (which is huge). I have a feeling December’s banner may involve some gingerbread…
I might not have fallen so hard for gingerbread if I hadn’t stumbled across a giant display of this mix at my local grocery store. I don’t usually like to push products on this blog (and I’m not getting any kickback for this) but Krusteaz makes the best mixes!
I guess I’m a bit sentimental about Krusteaz because when I was in college (and starvingly poor) my dad got a job as a grocery broker representing Krusteaz. This meant he went around to all sorts of grocery stores to make sure their product was up to code and looked nice on the shelf. As a side benefit he got to take home the out-of-code boxes of pancake mix and brownies, etc. Sometimes my mom would send these out-of-code boxes to me in big care packages.
Let me tell you, there is nothing as delicious as FREE food when you are a starving college student. I was pretty much surviving on spaghetti noodles, ketchup and the stale biscotti from the break room at my job. Getting a box of cake and brownie mixes in the mail was like a gift from heaven back then. These mixes were especially great because most of the time all you needed to add was water. Perfect for a college student who has no cooking skills and not a thing in her refrigerator.
But I digress. I recommend this mix because it’s easy, it tastes good and it smells DIVINE!!! If you need a little kick to get in the holiday mood, bake a batch of these and next thing you know you’ll be sniffing the air and singing Christmas carols.
We had so much fun making and decorating the cookies that I made three batches of them. One with Jen and her family, one with my nieces and then one with the kids I babysit. It’s super-easy and always a crowd pleaser.
Making the house, however, was a bit more challenging. I’ve never tried it without a mix but it was plenty hard (for me) with the mix. I’m sure JustJenn would disagree but then she’s a baker AND an architect—which is not really fair in my opinion. My first problem was getting the walls and roof to harden enough to build with. I thought I could finish Operation Gingerbread in one day but I was very wrong. It took THREE days (and several hours in the oven with just the pilot light on) for the gingerbread-cookie walls to harden completely.
Then when they did harden enough to be sturdy, the pieces weren’t perfectly square anymore. I think something happened in the various ovens I transferred them around to. When I put the walls together there were big gaps that had to be filled with copious amounts of gloopy sticky icing. And that icing! Could it be any stickier?!!! It sticks to everything! My clothes, the table I was working on, the floor, my fingers…it was a mess. Of course it didn’t stick when I was using it to glue a heavy star candy to the side of a wall for decoration. No, then it slipped down and left a big track mark of white paste. I guess it wasn’t all that bad. But I would definitely say that this project is best with older kids who can help and not with toddlers who like to not help.
My ten-year-old niece, Rapunzel, was a huge help. I don’t think I could have done it without her.
In the end, the little house turned out pretty cute. I covered up the icing glue tracks with slices of gumdrops. My niece added a curving pathway and candy corn fencing. Then we dusted everything with powdered sugar “snow” and called it a day. Enough sugar will heal all that ails, right? The kids loved it. After I took enough photos to prove that I really did complete the project, we gave the house to my Grandpa to display at the group home he lives in. I think the old folks will appreciate it a lot more than I did.
