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I made 31 yellow flags tonight – for a total of 34. That is all.

A friend needed some help turning a few yards of fabric into twenty or so flags.  She brought it over after dinner tonight, and so far I’ve only finished four of them.  My least favorite part is cutting (I hate trying to make right angles – I almost always cut fabric crooked).  But I dug out my fabric cutting board and rotary cutter, which is the right tool for the job:

I did the two big flags first, which is always the best-practice when it comes to cutting fabric or wood or whatever you’ve got, probably.

And then two little ones.  I am going to drop off my proofs of concept to my friend in the morning and she can decide if the sizes are appropriate.  I didn’t realize that the official flag ratio is 10:19, which really seems too long to me, but that is what I am working from at this point.

Anyway, that’s six days of creativity in a row!  Not too shabby!  (Tomorrow is probably going to be more flags, though…)

I’m kind of a big deal in the world of pancakes.  I mean, not to brag or anything but I make homemade buttermilk pancakes that are amazing.  I’ve been on the quest to make the perfect pancake since I was 18 and went to college, and I have to say that I am pretty awesome at it.  However, I have been resting on my laurels a bit, and never really gotten creative with the pancakes.  So today, I asked the kids if they wanted their pancakes in shapes or how I could spice them up a bit.  This is what we came up with:

The pancake on the left was supposed to be a heart, the one on the right is a star.  I thought about doing the “cookie cutter on the frying pan” version of pancake molding, but I was out of nonstick cooking spray, so I thought that would likely just be a giant mess.  The squeeze bottle version is just not going to happen, since pushing the batter through a squeeze bottle (even though it allows you to make awesome shapes in the pan) would take all the fluffiness out of my pancakes.  The kids weren’t picky, though, they thought this was pretty freaking awesome.  Dillon requested this for his second:

Overall, pancake creativity was a hit.  Maybe I’ll try it again sometime soon.

p.s.  Charles, don’t get any ideas.  (He makes the best waffles in the world and I like them exactly as he currently makes them.  No hacking needed.)

Today, Rose and I got creative together.  We decided to plant some petunias in an old stone planter on the front porch that basically was a repository for a salsa jar that had been housing a spider that Charles caught in the house and didn’t want to kill two years ago, and no one has looked in the jar since then. (It is possible I am a little weird about any bug with more than six legs.  Pretty much think all arachnids are creepy.)

So I put the jar in the recycling (without looking in it) and Rose and I picked up some flowers on the way home from school to put in this and an empty window planter that also was looking pretty sorry.  Rose is a great helper and takes gardening very seriously.  She gets that from her Grandma and her Great-Aunts.   I got skipped with the whole green-thumb gene though my saving grace is outdoor gardening with extremely hardy, low maintenance plants.  Basically things that mostly take care of themselves.  Let’s just say that I value independence in both plants and children.

So hopefully these petunias will do okay if they are a little neglected.  Though my lovely daughter will probably remind me to water them.