Category Archives: Crafty Goodness

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Breadmaking, the Iggy’s Mom way

In some parts of the intarwebz I am known as Iggy, first of all. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s bake some bread.

My mother made most of what we ate growing up, especially our bread. I still have a hard time eating storebought bread. It just tastes so spongy and bland and soggy to me. I like a hearty, dense bread. Thick-cut. With cheese. Mmm. Anyway, so when I’m not being lazy, I make bread which my children then refuse to eat so that I have to pay $2.29 per loaf of HFCS-free no-preservative wheat bread for them at the grocery store which they then eat inside of a week, but I digress. It makes me happy to eat homemade bread and that’s the important thing.

Lightly buttered goodness, waiting to be sliced.

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Melted Crayon Art

Project cost:

24 pack crayons – 40 cents

8×10 blank canvas – $3

 

We started out arranging the crayons into a rainbow and gluing them onto the top of the canvas with E-6000 glue (which I already had a tube of, for making hair flowers and bindis). The original inspiration for this claimed that using a hair dryer to melt the crayons was the way to go, but that was a big no in our experience: the wax did melt, but it also blew around in ways that did not look awesome on the canvas. We needed another way to melt the wax.

So I built a prop out of a 9×11 pan (one that’s old and rusty and never gets used without being lined with aluminum foil these days) and an upturned loaf pan. I put aluminum foil in the 9×11 pan – in future, I would also put some on the loaf pan behind it because a few drips of wax did go down the back of the canvas. There was quite a bit of wax in the 9×11 pan so the foil = definitely a good idea. Once I had it propped up nicely, I set the oven to 150 – the lowest temperature – and popped the whole shebang in.

And it worked beautifully.

Here’s the results, still on the prop:

And the results hanging on the wall in the boys’ room:

Interesting how the reds melt so differently, eh? We really liked this project. Fun and easy and cheap!

Tips for this project:

*If you use more than 24 crayons, just lay them all out in a row and measure how much space they take so you know what size canvas to buy.

*Use the foil lining liberally to protect whatever you use as a prop. It peels right off if any wax sticks it to the canvas.

*Once the wax is melted to your preference, just leave it on the prop to harden up. After it’s hardened, break off any wax that got around the edges of the canvas so it will hang nicely.

*Hang it carefully – it can leave crayon marks on your wall if you’re not watching closely.

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Quilts in progress

I’ve been working on quilts for my boys, since they said they wanted some quilts after I made the quilt for their teacher’s baby. I found fabric with great white sharks on it, and just couldn’t resist for my little tough guys and their carnivorous-animal-loving ways. I bought some dolphins and orcas to go with it and drew out a relatively simple top – cutting it too small into complex blocks wouldn’t really display the fabrics. I measured their beds to see about what size to make it – not quite a twin, but larger than a toddler quilt, since they’re only 6. It should wind up being about 54″ x 69″.

So once I figured out the design and calculated the yardage I’d need, I took the boys to the fabric store to pick out the first of coordinating fabrics for sashing. They had told me they wanted their quilts to be identical, but couldn’t agree on a fabric. We wound up getting the same fabric in two shades of blue. C went with a true blue, D with turquoise. A bit of slashing with the rotary cutter and I laid out the blocks and snapped plan photos:

That one in the center of D's quilt is because I miscut a section of the turquoise and had to piece one of those blocks. Whoops

And then it was time to start sewing. It went pretty fast, since the blocks are so large – the large squares are 10″ – and the boys pronounced them “beautiful” and seem quite happy. There will be more sashing: first a 2″ narrow strip for which I already have the fabric, and then another 5″ strip which will have more of the four-patch blocks at each corner. My master plan is to end it there, but I’m not sure if I should have another narrow sashing, if that will make the binding work or look better. I still need to choose a fabric for that outside 5″ sashing anyway so still plenty of time to think about it.

Stitching away. The quilt top plan is printed out and taped to my shelves so I can refer to it during assembly. Makes it much easier not to mess up the layout!

So far so good. The quilts are larger than the baby quilt, so I’m still getting the hang of working with the larger amount of fabric. I’m not sure how I’m going to quilt these yet. Might be easier to hand-quilt them, or I might find out some pricing to have someone with a long-arm quilter do it. I want to have them done for the boys’ birthday, which gives me about 6 weeks to finish them. I’ll post some new pictures with further progress. Here’s a quick shot of the assembled tops: