Sunday, December 18, 2011

The gingerbread house!


As you may recall last Christmas we made a conscious decision to simplify the holiday season.  We did not get a Christmas tree, we did not overly decorate the house, we did not buy a lot of "stuff" and we did not send out Christmas cards.

This Christmas, we're doing much of the same (although we did buy a tree from a local tree farm).  We made most of our gifts (as did my older brother and his wife apparently--can't wait to try the peach sauces!) and I did not send out cards again (I don't think there is a good picture of the three of us anyway from this past year). 

Bud is now sitting on my lap dictating the following sentences...
 
We did however, attempt our first gingerbread house.  The result below is all edible as gingerbread houses should be.  The recipe (and templates) for the house came right out of Joy of Cooking.   Bud and his dad tastefully decorated the house and the yard, complete with a version of the Phillies baseball park called Citizen's Bank Park.  The outfield was made of strips of apple flavored licorice.  The other side of the lawn contains a garden (made from nerds) and a dog made from left over gingerbread and Good n' Plentys with a gumdrop head.  Notice the bowls of leftover candy in the back of the picture.  We have continued to consume this sugar throughout the weekend giving us all sugar highs and subsequent sugar lows (and snarly attitudes).  Tonight, at least, my darling husband will be making homemade chili, which should revive us in time for the last work and school week before the holiday.  




Growing up, my father (B's Grandpa Karl) often got carried away with the annual gingerbread house.  By the end of the gingerbread era in our household, we had a totally furnished and well-lit two-story gingerbread house complete with dormer, stained glass windows, and a working chimney.  The yard included picket fences, forests (made from upside down ice cream cones), driveways, automobiles, children building snowmen, and pets wandering around.  I believe we even had smaller graham cracker houses encircling the main house for other folks to live in.

It was always a sad day on January 1st, when the three of us kids would unceremoniously smash the house (or village, as may be the case).  Then, to the horror of my parents, we would greedily eat the stale and not so tasty pieces of gingerbread, frosting and candy.  I am surprised that none of us came down with salmonella poisoning (you have to watch out for that Royal Icing) or some other bacterial infection!  

(and now  Bud starts writing the post from my perspective, showing off his fabulous typing and spelling skills)

My son thought the gingerbread house turned out to be incredible. Even though his first thought for the ginger bread house was to make it the White house. He got a little carried away (like my father always did). My son got inspired for the white house when we went to the Eastman house to see the gingerbread collection. After we went to the Eastman house my son was just amazed by all the neat things we saw.

In addition to the gingerbread house we are making all sorts of cookies. In fact when I finish my blog post (which my son is proofreading) we are going to decorate the cookies with green, blue, white, red, yellow, and a few other colors of icing. Right now we are going to decorate the cookies! 

Well, we just finished making cookies. I will tell you how it went! Well first my son and I went out to the kitchen where my husband was making Chili. We had peppers near us and my husband decided to eat one. He was coughing and his throat was burning and he had to eat bread and get water and he was doing that for 5-10 minutes. Meanwhile my son was laughing his head off and couldn't breath he was laughing so hard because my husband's mouth was burning. My son said "Dad you are quite weird" and that set me on the track of laughing. My son laughed for about 10 minutes and he was rolling on the floor and all that. Well after that it turned out pretty good. Me and my son made all the cookies and decorated them and my darling husband was OK.  That was most of what happened when we were making cookies.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

The Floor


Floor pictures, finally!  A little background: we wanted to tear out the carpet, because it was completely disgusting, but we weren't sure what to do with the floor (and we weren't even sure what was under the carpet).  In the long term, we want to put down wide pine boards as that's what's in the rest of the house.  But we don't have the money or the time right now.  We ended up using milk paint followed by tung oil.  The following briefly describes the process.

Sadly, I don't think I have any of when the utilitarian carpet was down, but just think school corridor or church basement and that's what was on our kitchen floor.  The red part (to the right) was not covered by this carpet.  Thankfully, said carpet was not glued down and the plywood underneath, while painted, was in relatively good condition.  By the way, all the scrapes on the red area are due to the door opening and closing. 

This is after we sanded the whole floor (we brought some furniture back in as we had the floor like this for about a month or so). We used a drum sander and an edger.  It took us about three hours (6 person hours) to sand it down.  We weren't too concerned with getting rid of all of the old paint, because we wanted the finished product to look old and distressed anyway. 




A spinning friend had mentioned the use of milk paints as a floor covering.  It's an old-fashioned paint made from milk and lime.  It comes in powdered form and then you add water.  The colors are all historically based (which is a good thing when we're talking about an 1840's farmhouse).  Unfortunately, not many places sell the true milk paint anymore.  I ordered ours online at The Real Milk Paint Company, but there is also the Old Fashioned Milk Paint Company.  The burnt umber color I ordered was dark upon application.  It dried to a really light color though. 
So this was what the milk paint looked like when wet.  It dried to the point where it was a light cocoa color, and you could see the grain of the plywood beneath. 


I purchased two gallons of PURE Tung oil (NOT the tung oil solvent that you find in hardware stores) from the same place I bought the milk paint.  I then mixed in a solvent in a 50:50 ratio.  We didn't want to polyurethane the floor because it's toxic and it gets such heavy use, which would mean we'd have to sand and repoly the entire floor every so often. Once the solvent in the Tung oil evaporates out, the floor is kid and pet friendly. If we need to touch up, we can, without any prep work.




The instructions said to keep applying coats until it doesn't evaporate off the floor within 20 minutes.  For this particular floor, that meant four coats.

I immediately wiped down the floor with an old rag, and then we tried not to walk on it for two days.  Ideally, one should not walk on the floor for a couple weeks, but really...come on...it's a kitchen floor!  We were careful not to track in (much) dirt, but it's a farm, and we have dogs and a nine year old boy!




We brought down the braided rug that was in our bedroom and put it beneath the table.  It works really well, since our (plywood) cabinets are blue too.






We also had a smaller blue braided rug that we put by the fridge.  And I had a beige runner (which you can sort of see in the background of the picture to the right, which we have between the sink and our chestnut work table.





In a perfect world, I would have waxed the floor after putting the Tung oil on, but it's not a perfect world, and for a confluence of reasons, the floor is not waxed at this moment.  At some point in the summer, I can imagine putting another application of Tung oil down and then waxing it.  But it looks good and seems to be holding up well.   It is going to get wear and tear, but after all, it is just a floor. 

Friday, December 2, 2011

First Fridays: December wreath making

Where has the time gone?  I have two posts in my mind (one is on the kitchen floor, the other concerning turkeys and toilets) but obviously have not written or published them.  And, right now, it is December 2nd, which means it's  First Friday post time!

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to go help a neighbor make wreaths to support our sustainable living group (and to learn how to make a wreath).  The wreaths were going to be auctioned off in the annual village "Adorn-a-dore" contest which supports our local community art gallery in town.  So, it had to be at least a decent looking wreath.

What I discovered, is that using grape vine as a frame is the BEST THING EVER (well, at least when it comes to making wreaths).  It is the most forgiving natural material I have ever met.  You can use it dry or wet, and you just keep twisting the vine upon itself until you have the shape you want.  Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of the wreaths we constructed for the auction, which had a high bid of at least $75 (our informant left before the auction ended), but this morning (when I should have been studying pathophysiology) I spent about 45 minutes making a wreath for our household. 

The options for materials are endless, but I used evergreens, rose hips (holly or winterberry would also obviously work), some sort of dried seed pods, and white wool.  Here's are some photos to inspire you.  And I do want to remind everyone that I have ZERO creative or artistic talent.  I am an analytical, in-the-box thinker, and this was actually not that difficult to do, thanks to the grapevine. Also, the only "non-natural" part of the wreath is the little loop of wire attaching it to the nail.  There are no plastic or metal frames, wires or ties.  Again, thanks to the grapevine.

You can twist the grapevine into a variety of shapes.






Adding some greens.  I used two varieties from evergreen trees we have, but don't ask me what varieties.  One was more prickly than the other, that's about all I can say!  I just sort of wove them into the grapevine.





Adding rosehips and some seed pods. 





I added sheep's wool to add some white to the red, white and green.  Not sure what I think of it though. 
Happy wreath making!