Tea Party

My daughter is way into tea parties. Last April my mother, aunt and cousins staged a "grown up" tea party. There were biscuits, real flavored tea, good china, Easter party favors, desserts, and all the guests dressed up. Ever since then, she has been asking me for another one. Since summer is just about the busiest time of year for everyone, it hasn't happened yet. Settling for second best, we have been having "tea party" lunches. I took some pictures of our 'al fresco tea party'. We pitched a tent in the yard and set up a laundry bin with a tablecloth. A blanket sufficed for carpet in the tent. Mom claimed dibs on a small pillow to sit on. The menu was 'fruit plate' - cut up fruit and veggies, some chips, crackers, cheese, dip and sandwiches to round it out. 'Tea' was some grape juice drank from fancy cups with matching glass trays handed down from my grandma. Very nice! But too hot to hang out for very long. The light inside the tent was very yellow (for obvious reasons). I did the best I could with the photos, but they're still pretty yellowish. Oh well.

Paisley Pattern

Check out what I've been messing around with. Paisleys! I saw a really cool font that wasn't quite as complicated as this pattern, but it did have paisley cutouts in all the letters. Really quite neat looking. So that'll be the next step to see if I can transform this lovely pattern into an actual font that can be typed, scaled, etc. I have some fonts that I've made before, but they were all vector art in Adobe Illustrator. You know - make a copy of each letter and position it just so... again and again until you've spelled something out. Uhg. There MUST be a better way, I just haven't gone out there to find out how. Anyway, here are some lovely paisleys to brighten up your humpday.

Unoriginal Monday

Despite the negative feelings I have about 'puffed up' content on many of the blogs I visit, I am here today to share something worthy. Worthy of what, I leave up to you. Thus the title of this post, because there isn't going to be anything I did myself in this post. Well, other than possibly view it before you did.

Jim's Pancakes Totally awesome (bees are my FAVORITE!) One of his works was featured in a magazine ... I think AARP. Nope, I am not that old yet, but my mom is. We totally drooled over the whole site. I watched the videos too. Pretty clever, he uses those ketchup bottle things and a lot of ... creative coloring agents. Stale turmeric? BLECH!! I'll just stick with food coloring, thanks.

Penguin Pancakes

I totally copied these guys over at Kitchen Fun With My 3 Sons. LOVE it! Check out the whole rest of her blog, it's pretty awesome. This was really fun and easy to make. Here is my version.

Here are the parts in progress. Made the body and head with a bigger blob on bottom, and smaller blob on top. I used pancake mix divided, part with a little cocoa added. I ran out of the lighter colored batter, so this one has all choc. parts. They are supposed to be oval shaped for the wings. Not perfect, they still taste great. I think they look fine as 'organic' shapes too.

Here is the finished penguin.

I had a lot of fun making these. The beak and feet are made of orange sections, and the eyes are whipped cream and mini M&M's. Yummy! The kids were not too hungry, so I cooked up the rest of the batter. We will be having penguins the rest of the week, yay!

In The Garden

I took these photos a few days ago. I love having a garden (but hate weeding)! Just have to show off and brag a little.

When we moved in almost 9 years ago, my mom n dad helped me build this cute little raised railroad tie bed in the back yard. It was a lot of work, because they overloaded their trailer with dirt to fill it up (somebody somewhere in Iowa had a mysterious gash appear in their ditch), and one of the trailer tires popped under the load. My dad chain-sawed 2 ties in half to make the short ends of a rectangle. He had an extra-long drill bit and some spikes that he used to fasten the ties together sort of lincoln-log style (or maybe more like legos, where they overlap). They have one of their own just like it in their back yard, though they covered the corners in metal press plates mom got from her work at the newspaper. At any rate, we covered the bottom over with black silo plastic as a weed barrier and poured in the dirt. Presto! Instant raised garden. I use it almost exclusively as a vegetable patch, with the occasional herb or two thrown in. This year we updated our medicine cabinet. The old one was rusted on the bottom. Instead of throwing it out, I had my husband drill some drainage holes in it, and bolted it to the side of the RR ties.