blog #197 >> Gingerbread Houses: Part 2

(step by step instructions for you to download and print.)


(and here's my first gingerbread house with me, my brother and my mom. See the gleam of sugar in my eye.)

T

blog #196 >> Colouring Book Bot

...because it was slow at work today...


You can get your own colouring book bot here from Robot a Day.
T

blog #195 >> Gingerbead Houses: Part 1

Over the years I've made a lot of ginger bread houses. The first year we made one from a kit and after that, it was all from scratch. I trace out a pattern, measure it out, make the dough, roll them out, cut them out, bake the pieces 'til they're nice and hard, let them cool, make the icing, pipe it around the walls, let them dry, add the roof, let it dry, and decorate with a variety of tasty treats. By the time I'm done I have a massive, delicious, edible, candy-cookie house. I don't have all my pictures here. I'm missing my first gingerbread house. That one's at home and I'll post it in Part 2. And I'm missing a photo of the gingerbread church I made with hard-candy-stained-glass windows baked in. Then I added a light to shine through them. And the only picture I could find of the Hobbit gingerbread house was much too blurry, so I'm not going to post that one. These were all before the days of digital photography so the close ups aren't as good as today's pictures. Anyhow... here they are!
T

blog #194 >> Dinosaur Play Mat Completed!

ROARRRR!!!!!
Here it is! Finally finished! The dinosaur play mat! I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I made it for my 2 year old nephew Charlie for Christmas. Since he's too little to be reading blogs, this post hopefully won't give it away. I based my play mat off of this one that was posted on Craft Magazine blog. Only I made mine mostly out of felt and doubled its size. I also reinforced mine with poster board on the inside. I'm not sure how it will hold up to the destructive power of a two-year-old playing with dinosaurs, but it does seem to iron out nice. I'm having a really hard time picking out a couple pictures of it... so I'm just going to post them all!
Alrighty, now back to my list of 1000 things to do before Christmas.
T

Here is the massive dinosaur mess!



See... it looks like a volcano when it's all folded up.


This is an aerial view of the dinosaur play mat.


And these are the dinosaurs playing on the mat.

blog #193 >> Handmade Bazaar

Come to the Handmade Bazaar! Me and Trina will have a booth there for DoorMouse Designs and we'll be selling all kinds of neat stuff! I realize it's a really busy time of year, but if you get a chance you should come down and see us.
See you there,
T

blog #192 >> Under Construction

With this wonderful 4 day weekend, I was able to post my under construction page on Roaring Design my poor neglected website. So far, I've really liked CS3 Flash and Dreamweaver, but I've realized I've forgotten a lot of it. So, I'll be relearning some of it this month. Next step, redesigning the downloadable pdf.
T
(p.s. If you visit it, let me know if anything doesn't work.)
t

blog #191 >> Leftovers are Lovely

Aren't leftovers lovely? It's like having Thanksgiving dinner again and again... And this year Thanksgiving seemed especially nice. The sides were amazing, the desserts were fantastic and to top it all off, my brother and his wife brought the turkey they raised themselves. He was a BEAST! At 40 pounds he weighed more than my 5 year old niece. He took ten hours to defrost, and part of that time he was soaking in the tub because he was too big to fit in the sink. In fact, he was almost too big to fit in the oven. My sister had to wake up at 4am to start baking him. And now we all have left over turkey to last us the year. I'm already planning my turkey casserole and turkey soup and turkey sandwiches. mmmm...mmmm..... I can't wait!


If I can get a copy of it I'll post a photo of Tom still alive. He was a beautiful bird. Here's a picture of the turkey fresh out of the oven. I forgot my camera, only to realize today I had it all the time. So I stole this picture from my sister. To see more Thanksgiving photos visit my sister's blog here.
Happy (day after) Thanksgiving!
T