Unsinkable

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.

Day 2 of the Thirty Days of Creativity:

I decided to get back to work on a costume I was making for a friend.  Specifically, the Rockford Peaches costume from the movie, “A League of Their Own.”

So, my plan for today was to work on the patch.  I looked online but couldn’t order one anywhere, so I had to think of another way to put it together.  I had some old inkjet transfer paper, so I found an image online, photoshopped it a bit (blowing it up to a printable size made it really bitmappy and also I needed to reverse the image), and printed it on the transfer paper.

Then I ironed it on according to the package directions and wound up with this:

Not sure why the bottom came out better than the top, I thought I was pretty even with my pressure (and pushing a flat iron onto a slab of marble on a countertop you would think would result in an even application of heat) but I had planned on overstitching some of the patch anyway – you know, to make it look like a real patch rather than a 2-D transfer.  So I stitched around the circles with my machine and used my super-high-level-fixer-upper-tool (a sharpie) to color in the letters and scales a bit more.  And this is how it turned out:

I am generally pretty happy with it.  Stay tuned, as I plan to actually finish the costume during the next thirty days.  It is mostly complete, but the part I am most worried about (with the highest possibility of screwing everything up) is the buttonholes, which I generally avoid doing because I haven’t really ever learned how.  My mom and I made doll clothes when I was a little girl but most of my sewing ability was acquired through a lot of trial and error.  And, it turns out, when you are making Halloween costumes for family or volunteering to do costumes for local theater groups, you need to know more about using velcro or zippers to close things than fidgety buttons.  But I wanted the costume to be authentic and look good close up (which is the problem with a lot of the cheap storebought costumes these days) because it was supposed to be for a really cool costume party in May that got canceled (and therefore bought me some time with the whole actually completing it thing).

Long time, no post… I had been doing SO well with the postaweek challenge and then all of a sudden, the wheels totally fell off the wagon. I am going to try another challenge now: Thirty Days of Creativity.  Basically, trying to create stuff (anything) for thirty days in June.  And I’ll try to blog about it here.  I know what you are thinking, “right, Molly, you can’t manage to post every week so you immediately up the ante to try to post EVERY DAY in June?”  Well, I am sure as heck going to try.

No idea what I am going to create every day in June, so for today I am going to count this blog post and try to figure it all out tomorrow.  I have a number of creative projects I have been working on: a Halloween costume for a friend, an herb garden, a vegetable garden, a couple of websites, a few random sewing projects, etc.  Maybe I can take some time in June to do some of the things I really enjoy doing but never seem to have the time to spend on them.  Maybe I will learn how to cook tortilla soup.  That counts, right?  Creativity you can eat…  yum.