My Only Sunshine

Doing Fine

Have you ever had one of those days where you just wanted to tell everyone what a great day you were having?  Like when you make a really great batch of cookies and just want everyone to taste them?  There is a new forum that has just started up, pretty interesting, all about those kinds of days.  It's a place to go to talk about all the good in the world.  If you'd like to take a look you can click on the Doing Fine.Org button in my right  sidebar.  It would even help me out if you clicked it, and then I'd be Doing Fine.

Sure is good COOKIE

Do you like Nestle' Tollhouse Cookies or do you prefer the fancy cookies you get at bakeries and those cookies boutiques at the mall?  Yeah, me too, I like them both.  Over the long weekend I was in the mood for chocolate chip cookies and a little baking with my Girlies.  I wasn't in the mood for thin Tollhouse style this time though, I wanted something thick and rich and gooey.  I may well have found the perfect recipe.

This recipe is from Words To Eat By and she calls them "the best homemade chocolate chip cookies in the entire world".  I'm pretty sure she's right.  She includes some tips on how to keep your cookies from spreading out flat and I used some of them but I also did a few things of my own.  I creamed cold butter with the sugar for the shortest amount of time I could to get things fully mixed but still cold.  I used a cold egg and kept things cold as I worked.  I also used Nestle' Chocolatier Bittersweet Morsels which are 62% cacao.  Yumm.  Once the dough was mixed I used an ice cream scoop to put the dough onto the cookies sheet on a silicon liner and then put it all into the fridge to chill it thoroughly.  This way when I cooked the cookies they didn't spread too fast and stayed thick ad chewy.  With the size of the cookies I made I only got about 14 out of the recipe but that was just right.  One cookie is the perfect size to go into Bitty's backpack for her school snack.  She'll probably come home with chocolate all over her.

Happy Valentine's Day

These are the Valentines the girlies and I put together for their teachers and best friends.

I think the vintage Valentine's cards work perfectly with the felt hearts I made, don't you?  Oh, and I can't forget to post a picture of my Valentines.

Dance Book

Last week Bug started learning her dance for her ballet recital in May.  This year she has moved up two classes and they are doing something different.  Her teacher is having them write down the steps they will be doing.  It's a pretty big step.  Bug is 8 years old and she is having to take French dictation from a slightly scattered ballet teacher in order to learn moves she hasn't done yet. I was pretty excited by all of this so I decided to try a new craft (I know, I didn't exactly need another) and make her a book.

I painted the front coverboard and covered the back in fabric and pasted in flowered end papers.  Bug picked the rub ons for the front.  Suits her doesn't it?

The signatures are a combination of blank pages, lined pages, and some inspirational ballet photos.  I used a coptic binding to hold it all together and I'm afraid I'm not all too good at it yet.  I'm excited to learn more though.  Bitty enjoyed watching me make it so much that she now has one as well.  She designed and painted her own cover and the interior pages feature lots of bunnies.

This next one is my favorite photo.  Bug's notes from class.  It's hard to write in French when you can hardly write in English yet.

Proof

See, I do have proof that some crafting has been going on.  This is the neck warmer I made for my Dad for Christmas.  I made the pattern up as I went along from the yarn left over from my Hemlock Ring Blanket.  I think he liked it.  I made my mother the Bainbridge Scarf from cream colored cashmere.  Sadly I didn't get a picture of it.

I've also been making pins for Valentine's Day.  The pattern is borrowed from Pavoreal who makes stunning jewelry and wedding headpieces.  I'm planning on making these little heart pins for the girls' teachers and bestest friends.

This last bit of crafting is from Mailorder #8 over at Angry Chicken.  It was designed to be a papercut but I decided to cut it out of shrink plastic.

It turned out a little lopsided in the shrinking but I think it will look good matted and framed for Bitty's room.  You know how she loves bunnies.  The entire thing is about 2.5 inches across.

Last but not least, Bug got another haircut, this one even better than the last.

My New Banner

Hey, anyone who is reading this, what do you think of my new banner?  I made it this morning and implemented it faster than any banner I have made.  I must be learning or something.  I can only see the banner on the browsers I use on my beloved Mac so I don't really know how it looks on other machines.   I use Safari and Firefox and it looks good to me.  Does it look good to you?

How about a few pics for you to look at while you decide?

Proof I have been crafting!!!

In order to get caught up...

...I should probably at least talk about Christmas now, it is mid January!

After The Nutcracker was over we decided to have Christmas.  Saying "we decided" sounds weird, but after all the work of The Nutcracker it can be hard to make myself do the Christmas thing.  We had one day to prepare before the big day and we hadn't even made all of our purchases yet.  Dude and I got a little time for some last minute shopping when Nana took the Girlies out to the movies.  We didn't get much time though because we had to get home and start with the holiday assembly.  You see, Nana bought the Girlies a trampoline for Christmas.

Half and hour or so of assembly and we had this.

Which doesn't look too bad.  But after another couple of hours it looked like this.

See how it just isn't quite right?  Well that had a lot to do with the instructions being very very wrong.  We had to start over.  We worked on the thing late into the night, stopping to put out cookies and milk and get the girls to bed.  By the next morning it looked like this.

The Girlies didn't get to jump for long Christmas morning because we hadn't had enough time to put the enclosure up and it was WAY too cool out for jumping in Christmas PJs.  They loved it though, and still do.

Other gifts were also had and it was a wonderful day.  The one down side?  Coughing.

You see, a few weeks before Christmas I had what I thought was a cold.  I thought for sure I was the unluckiest person in the world because as soon as my cold was done I started coughing which I thought was allergies with terrible timing.  By Christmas it seemed like my cough was finally starting to die down but then we spent many hours out in the very cold air building a trampoline.  I coughed like I was dying on Christmas day and decided it was time to go to the doctor the next morning.  They thought my lungs probably just got irritated from the cold and gave me some medicine.  A week later I was still coughing like mad so I went back to the doctor.  Any guesses what I have?  Whooping Cough.

For those of you who don't know much about whooping cough, I sure didn't, it is a bacterial infection more properly called Bordatella Pertussis.  This is the illness that represents the P and the DTP vaccine most children get.  Since being diagnosed with it through a blood test I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about Pertussis.  It is an illness that causes people to cough and choke as if they cannot get enough air in what are called  paroxysms and then to gasp for air, sometimes making a whooping noise.  The average length of this illness is 7 weeks and I have just entered my 7th week so I am really hoping it is nearly over.  Since Christmas it seems to have been mostly worsening with the occasional really good day and the occasional amazingly bad day.  I hope I don't jinx myself but yesterday and today there was nearly no coughing (which is only fair, I think I cracked a rib coughing on Saturday night).

Ok, I'm pretty sure there was more I was going to say about this but I'm tired and can't think of anything else.  Being sick for 2 months is exhausting.  In closing I will point you to the soon to be updated Girlies Photo Album.

Very terribly behind

It has been a long while since I have posted and many things have happened but I promise I have a somewhat good excuse that I will tell you all about later.  First things first, The Nutcracker.

Here's Bug reprising her role as mouse in this year's smash hit, The Nutcracker!  She was brilliant as "tail mouse" who jumps on the Rat King's back and then is shot by the canon and carried off by rat medics on a litter made of cheese.

Presenting Bit in her debut as "pocket mouse". After her 2006 role as Russian Doll Bitty was promoted to mouse and gave a sparkling performance jumping and waving with her sister and 14 other small gray mice.

As a wonderful compliment to their roles as mice, Bug and Bit also danced as Petite Rock Faeries (that is the rock they are sitting on) which is amazing considering the appearance of their eyes being glued shut.

The Girlies danced in 3 performances of the longest running Nutcracker in DFW and were wonderful.  The entire production turned out brilliantly.  The mice are so much fun to watch but it can be awfully hard to tell which mouse is your mouse, what with the masks and all.  This is why having faerie daughters is so much fun.  No face coverings and there are only 5 of them so that gives me pretty good odds of picking my 2 out.

My ballerinas danced beautifully and got every single step right all three times.  I had great fun overseeing all of the mice back stage and then the faeries too.  It was a great deal of work but all the children are such a joy.  My two particularly (it's ok for me to say that, they're My two).

The Nutcracker was great and I was so proud of my darlings.  The entire experience was great including Bob getting us a suite at the hotel next door to the performance hall so we wouldn't have to make the 25 mile trip back home over and over.  It was lovely.

In the next post I will talk about Christmas, that will get me a little closer to today, won't it?

Cutting Out

I have been knitting like crazy, but I can't show you.  I bet you've seen that on many blogs lately haven't you?  Yep, you guessed it, secret holiday knitting.

I do have things to show you though.  I spent a large portion of yesterday and today both cutting out things for Bug's second grade class.

They are starting a new math project in January and the teacher said she had HUGE amounts of laminating done that needed to be cut out.  She wasn't kidding.  I cut out a couple hundred 8.5 x 11 sheets.  It was easy work and I was happy to do it.  See what you have after you cut out all of those plastic coated sheets?

See what you get when you have help to cut all of those papers out?

After finishing all of that cutting I decided to cut some more!  Did you all see this post when it was posted?  Well I didn't.  It's wonderful isn't it?  What I did see was this post by glittergoods.  What a very very fabulous tutorial to go along with Soulemama's post. (not to mention how much I wish I had the cash today to buy some glittery zipper pulls for the girlies)

These little books I made using the tutorial will be perfect to give out at the holiday party next week for my DI Team.  I may even stamp each of their names on their little blank books.  Don't you think these will be good gifts for my little creative elementary schoolers?

This is what little blank books look like when you have help.

Costumage

Last week I showed you the head pieces my little Rock Faeries would be wearing in the Nutcracker.  You've also seen plenty of other costumes around my blog since I have two little dancer girls who are always wearing this costume or that.  This week I have the strangest costume yet.

From this picture it doesn't look all too weird, but trust me, it is.  This costume, that I brought home to sew name tags into, was made by a professional seamstress.  It's one large piece of fabric that has been sewn into a tube.  It has a piece of elastic sewn into the middle of the tube as a waist band and ribbons tied around the shoulder parts in order to keep the top up.  The edges are frayed and continue to fray leaving long string that catch on everything including the snowflake confetti that has been glued with craft glue all over the costume.  The costume is designed to stay up by being tied (those shoulder ribbons again) to a nude leotard.  Another weird thing about these costumes is that they don't really match each other, which I don't understand.  There are five faeries but one of the costumes is in two pieces and another is backless, but I don't believe they were originally made that way.  Go figure.  On the stage though, these costumes will look lovely on my little faeries.  It will be dark and far away and they will look ethereal and lovely no matter what they are wearing ( well maybe not if they were wearing sweats).

Look, my Chev Scarf is coming right along.