It’s Christmas Eve. If you have small children, I’m sure your nerves are frayed with their over-excitement. We’re having enough trouble dealing with just Rusty today, and he’s over thirty.
Why not whip up this quick distraction tool (from Easie Peasie, what a great name) for the young (and old) to keep them busy for a while. It’s worth the mess, I think.
In a small saucepan, combine 3 tablespoons sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup corn starch, and 2 cups water.
Heat, whisking often, until the mixture starts to thicken. It happens all at once, so make sure you’re paying attention.
BAM.
If you keep going it will turn into plastic, so make sure it’s still stir-able when you take it off the heat.
Remove from the heat and pour it into individual containers.
Use food colouring to create the desired colours.
Stir those colours in well. Make sure you scrape the bottom and sides to get it all mixed in.
I went with the classic rainbow.
Keep the paints sealed and out of direct sunlight. Give them a bit of a stir before using, because there will be a bit of a dry skin on top.
When I was young my dad refinished our back room, where the laundry machines were, and the door to the backyard. While it was empty, my mother chucked in a huge roll of craft paper and a pile of finger paints and I would spend hours back there, making a mess. I’m handing these (along with a roll of craft paper) over to the Incredibly Little Hulk and Il Principe when they get back from Kansas so I’m sure I will be soon seeing some very painty little boys.
We spent Thanksgiving with Kª and Kº downstairs. Il Principe, the Incredibly Little Hulk, and twin girls were also in attendance. I wasn’t allowed to bring any food with me, but I thought I’d bring something to keep the kids occupied at least: playdough!
This stuff is so easy to make that you can customize it in a second.
In a decent-sized pot, mix together 2 cups flour, 2 cups warm water, 1 cup salt, 2 tablespoons vegetable oil, and 1 tablespoon cream of tartar.
I replaced a few tablespoons of the warm water with rose water and added a few drops of orange essential oil to the vegetable oil (I actually used almond oil, because it’s a better scent carrier than olive or canola).
Cook that on low heat, stirring often, and the mixture will begin to form the consistency of mashed potatoes.
Keep stirring.
When it starts to smooth out and pull away from the sides in order to clump in the middle, then you’re done. Test it with your fingers to see how sticky it is. If it’s still coming off on your fingers, keep cooking.
Pull out the dough and plop it on a piece of waxed paper until it’s cool enough to handle, which won’t be very long.
Then pull on a pair of protective gloves and separate the playdough into balls for colouring.
Add a few drops of food colouring to each ball and knead it in until the colour is even.
Once the colour is mixed in you won’t need gloves anymore. And if you’re not planning on colouring your dough, make sure to knead it for a while anyway, just to get the gluten going.
I made four different colours.
Then, obviously, you play with it.
When you’re ready to store it, seal it in an airtight container or wrap it tightly in plastic wrap. If it starts to dry out you can add a few more drops of water and knead that in; conversely, if it starts to get soggy due to humidity, you can always heat it again to get that water out.
Seriously, have you? It’s fun and super easy and you get some really quick results. Definitely something you can do with kids. It produces a long chain of stockinette-like loose stitches that remind me of what used to come out of that weird plastic crochet-tube thing we were given as kids. Remember? Maybe not.
Anyway, if you’d like to try it, get yourself some yarn. A huge chunky knit will give you the best results, but I am planning on felting my strings so I’m going with some merino wool.
Find the end and drape it over the space between your thumb and forefinger. You may need your thumb to hold that tail in place for the first few rows, but you can let it go after that.
Take the yarn and bring it in front of your index finger, behind your middle finger, in front of your ring finger, and around behind your little finger.
Then bring it in front of your little finger, behind your ring finger, and so on, until you’ve woven it back to the beginning.
Then pull it around your index finger and do that again, so you end up with two loops of yarn on each finger.
Now take the lower loop on your little finger and pull it up and over the upper loop.
Repeat that with all your other fingers until you’re left with one loop on each one.
Take another full pass with your yarn, in, out, in, alternating on the way back.
Then pull the lower loop over the upper loop again on each finger. Keep going. Eventually something like this will start coming off the back of your hand. It will look a bit different depending on the size of your fingers, the tension and thickness of the yarn, and all that jazz.
If you get tired or bored while you’re doing this or you need to do something else, just jab a pencil through your loops and put it down. Come back to it later.
When you’ve got a chain as long as you want it to be, you can cast off. After doing your last row of loops, leaving you with one row only of loops on each finger, take the loop on your little finger and put it above the loop on your ring finger.
Pull the lower loop on your ring finger up and over the one you just added.
Take the loop that is left and put that onto your middle finger.
Hook the lower one up and over, and put the remaining loop onto your index finger.
Hook the lower one up and over and then you’re left with one loop!
Then it’s a simple matter to thread the end of your yarn through and tie a knot.
This is a finished chain. You’ll note I’ve reinforced the knots at both the beginning and end. Next to it is one that I felted by running through the wash and then the dryer.
Here’s a closeup of the loose weave of the chain I made versus the tight string after it’s felted. Dog hair may or may not be included.
Here’s a very long chain I made as well. You can see how easy it would be, especially with a chunkier yarn, to sew the chain together to form a block, a blanket, or a rug. Or whatever. I’m still debating what I am going to do with mine, but I’ll keep you posted.
YARRRRRRR! We be makin’ ARRRRRRRRT t’day, matey! It’s also International Talk Like a Pirate Day for the Pastafarian religion, and I *may* have recently watched the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies in a row. Also, I live in Newfoundland, where people tend to talk like pirates on a daily basis. It’s also the anniversary of the night the Pie and I went on our first date. Eight years have gone by since that night, and so much has changed in our lives. Crazy. Tonight we are going to make ourselves a nice dinner and cozy up with our favourite orange, black and white wedding present, the inimitable Grenadier St. James.
In the meantime, however, why don’t you sit down and make yourself some pretty?
I saw a picture on Flickr of my cousin and his son making this particular project, and I thought it was so cool that I should try it on my own. Then I discovered that this stuff is ALLLLL over the internet, especially Etsy, these days. I’m no trendsetter, obviously. Even so, I’m going to add to the plethora of posts about it, so that you can see it, Ali-style.
Now, I’m being a real keener and starting my DIY Christmas gifts really, really early this year. So I’ve pretty much taken over the dining room as my craft central, especially as now there is a large bed in my former office work space.
For this project you will need some crayons (go with Crayola, it seems they melt the best), some glue (I used hot glue), a blank canvas (I used two small 5″ x 7″ ones, stacked, but you can use cardboard or wood or whatever you have on hand), and a hairdryer or other focused heat source. I hear tell of people using paint strippers for this, but you really don’t need anything that hot. Oh, and you’ll need newspaper or a drop cloth or something to protect the surrounding area from flying hot wax.
For my first attempt at this, I thought I would go with a straight rainbow, before I got too fancy. Plus I know someone who really loves rainbows, and this would make a nice little present.
I started with the basic colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, and I laid them out on my canvas.
Then I filled in the gaps with other colours in the spectrum.
If Crayola has colours called things like this:
Then why are they still naming colours like this?
Then the question was, should I lay them out with their colour names facing up, or the Crayola logo facing up? The Pie told me to go with the logo, because after everything is melted it will be easier to see than the smaller names.
Then we glue. I used hot glue on the crayon, and I only put it on the top half. I wasn’t sure how it would deal with the melting wax, and I figured that most of the melting was going to go down on the lower half of the crayon.
Then I used hockey tape to temporary secure my two canvases together.
And I leaned it up against a shoebox (full of stuff, for weight) on top of my drop cloth and newspaper.
Then I started in with the hairdryer, on its hottest and highest setting, focusing pretty closely on the bottom ends of the crayons.
You can see how the wax tends to fly a bit.
It took a while to get them started, but once they got going, they really got going.
I liked how the wax crept around the sides of the canvas, and I wish I’d had a bigger one to work with.
Let the wax cool and harden.
Then you can hang it up, any which way you would like!
As our chapter of Newfoundland living draws slowly to a close (our five years are almost up!), the Pie and I are trying to take any opportunity to experience the good things and the amazing things that this province, and the St. John’s area, have to offer. And this summer, owing to the generosity of my law firm and some fortuitous Groupons, I ended up taking not one, not two, but THREE boat tours of the area, with three different companies. So I thought, now that the boating tour season is almost over, I’d give you my opinion on the whole enterprise, so that if you’re in the area next spring and summer, you can decide if you’d like to try this experience as well.
But first an Ali-cized version of Newfoundland history. As you may know, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador has been the location of various fishing colonies from Portugal, France, and England (and a few others) for the past five hundred years. Legend has it that the first Vikings to visit North America stopped here first, and that they could walk from their ships to the rocky shores on the backs of the plentiful cod in the water. All that cod meant a lot of fighting over fishing rights, and after a few switches back and forth, England eventually won out (although France and Portugal still have their own interests). Newfoundland became part of the Dominion of Canada after World War II, and here we are.
Imagine cod cushioning your feet from these jagged rocks.
In 1992, the cod fishery was so severely depleted that the government declared a moratorium on cod fishing — there simply weren’t enough fish in the sea anymore. This resulted in thousands of fishermen losing their traditional livelihood. If a Newfoundlander can’t fish cod, is he really a Newfoundlander?
Who says size matters?
Some enterprising fishermen came up with some new ideas about how to put food on their tables. They converted their fishing boats into tour boats, adding seats and life jackets and taking out the nets and hauling equipment. Tourism in Newfoundland began to thrive. And from May to September every year, you can take a tour with one of these companies and see all the sites that Newfoundland has to offer — from the sea. In May and June, if you’re lucky, you can sail up close to a massive ice berg as it makes its way south to melt. In July and August you can sail alongside all manner of local whales as they, too, migrate to other waters.
From whaling and codfishing to eco-tourism.
My first tour happened back in late June. My law firm charted an Iceberg Quest boat to take us from St. John’s Harbour around Cape Spear to Petty Harbour.
View of the harbour, from the Narrows.
It was a calm and sunny afternoon as we pulled out of the harbour, but once we hit the currents of the North Atlantic, the swells got a bit higher and the spray off the bow was enough to thoroughly soak most of us in minutes.
Me and Mel, thoroughly soaked.
There were a few members of the party who had to make use of the barf bags on board. I’m sure the open bar didn’t help. I kept getting salt water in my rum and Coke (which actually didn’t end up tasting that bad). But those of us who had our sea legs had a great time.
Everyone had to have a Titanic moment.
My favourite moment of this particular tour was when we rounded Cape Spear, which is the most easterly point of land in North America. And at that particular moment, I was more east than Cape Spear.
East-er than the east-est
We did catch a glimpse of a humpback whale off our bow, but it was gone before any of us got any good pictures of it. This is the dorsal of a minke who was too camera shy and gone before long.
There were birds all around us, though, and they were interesting too.
We pulled into Petty Harbour nicely sauced and just in time for dinner.
Chafe’s Landing is a restaurant just a few steps from the harbour and is rumoured to have the best fish and chips on the Avalon Peninsula. And I’m here to tell you that those rumours are TRUE. It was incredible.
We took a bus back to St. John’s as the sun set, all happy, salty, and full of good food.
While the staff were friendly they weren’t all that talkative with us. Perhaps because this was a private charter they weren’t required to give us the rundown on the things we were seeing as we sailed around the Cape.
A particular benefit of Iceberg Quest is that they are the one tour company that sails directly out of St. John’s Harbour, so if you’re in town and you don’t have transportation, it’s the way to go. I think that because it is directly out of St. John’s that the tour cost is probably quite a bit more expensive than those which operate outside of town. Because the firm paid for it, I have no idea how much it actually cost. But the boat was flashy and shiny and big.
My second tour was with O’Brien’s in early August, and the Pie and I got a Groupon for a four-person pass at half price, which cost us about $120. We took Cait and Jul and drove to Bay Bulls one morning for a 9:00 AM sailing. As we left St. John’s and headed south, it got foggier and foggier, and by the time we hit Bay Bulls we could barely see ten feet in front of us. Not to worry. We were experiencing what is known as “capelin weather,” which meant we were in luck. Capelin are tiny fish, about four or five inches long, that provide the main source of food for not only the cod, but many other species of wildlife in the area. Capelin migrate through here in the summer, and are usually the most plentiful (like, you can scoop them off the beach with a shovel) after several hot days in a row followed by a cold, muggy, foggy spell.
Despite the weather being the pits most of the time, Newfoundland is definitely beautiful, rain or shine, and we were quite taken with the shoreline emerging suddenly from the mist, and disappearing just as suddenly.
Then we hit the mouth of Bay Bulls and saw a giant patch of birds, all feeding from the same place in the water. This meant capelin, and so, if we were lucky, it also meant we might see some whales. Then, not a hundred metres from where we were, we heard a humpback take a deep breath. Then, a few seconds later, we smelled it. Whale breath is not a pleasant thing.
Over the next hour or so, we were joined by two more humpbacks, who were very curious about us and the other tour boat next to us. Instead of gorillas in the mist, we got humpbacks in the fog.
Justin, our highly experienced (and musically gifted!) guide, said this was the best year for whales he’d seen, and he’s been doing this for twelve years. He was very good about explaining to us exactly what the whales were doing when we couldn’t see them. You see this round patch of water? That’s the whale’s footprint, essentially. You get that sort of upswell when the whale makes a deep dive. It sticks around for a surprisingly long time.
Whenever we thought the whales would get bored with us and take off, they would surface again and just sort of hang out between our two boats. It was truly incredible.
At long last we had to bid the whales adieu and keep to our schedule. We headed a bit further out of the bay to Gull Island, which we smelled before we saw. This area is an ecological reserve for seafowl and has the largest population of puffins in the entire world. But it’s also home to a huge number of other birds, and we got to see them all.
As we headed back to the Bay, we piled into the cabin for warmth. When you sail through fog it tends to stick to you, so we were all coated with a light, salty mist, and our hands were so cold it made holding our cameras tricky. But it was definitely worth it for such an amazing experience!
My third tour was actually just yesterday (because I’m writing this on the 24th of August), and I wrangled another Groupon package deal for four with Mullowney’s Boat Tours for $110, which was half-price. Trav was staying with us at the time and so the three of us went. I ended up giving the fourth ticket to one of the other passengers. The highway to Bay Bulls is only one lane on both sides with little room for passing and we got stuck behind the slowest person alive on the way there, meaning that we arrived at Mullowney’s five minutes after 12:00 PM, the time the boat was supposed to sail! We thought we had missed it entirely but fortunately, because I had made a reservation, the boat was waiting for us. They had heard from other passengers that the traffic was bad and they stuck around until we got there, which was really nice.
Despite it being noon, Trav is not yet truly awake.
Today when we left Bay Bulls it was sunny and calm and absolutely glorious. We had layered up in anticipation that we would get cold and we actually found ourselves to be quite comfortable, even a little warm, in our jackets. Now, this is the North Atlantic, so for it to be this calm and quiet was extremely unusual. If you do a tour, make sure to dress warmly.
It had been three days since any of the local tour companies had seen any whales, so we didn’t get our hopes up this time. It is the end of the whales’ migratory season anyhow. Because I wasn’t looking for whales, I got to focus a bit more on the sea birds around, and we had a great time laughing at the antics of the puffins, who are the most ungainly flyers I have ever seen. The other birds regarded them with disdain, and chased them down for their fish.
Gull chasing a fish-laden puffin. Gulls are huge jerks, apparently.
Despite not seeing any whales, we all agreed that we’d had a great time. Mullowney’s takes a bit of a different route from O’Brien’s, so the Pie and I got to see different sides of Gull island than we’d seen before, and it was nice to observe their habitat when it wasn’t shrouded in fog. The pleasantness of the day alone made puttering around on the sea a true delight, and the companionship of our friendly young guide Alastair made for an entertaining trip.
Overall:
I can’t say that I had anything other than a very pleasant experience with all three of the touring companies I used this summer. The staff were all very friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable about both sailing and the areas we visited, and I know from speaking to several of the employees that the companies are not in competition with each other. That makes for a much friendlier environment, and they help each other out when it comes to spotting whales and bergs and the like.
When you take a boat tour there’s no guarantee that you will see whales or ice bergs or any of the more spectacular things out there. There’s not even a guarantee that the water will be calm or the sun will be shining. But even if you don’t get the jaw-dropping experience of seeing giant whales or colossal ice bergs, you can still appreciate nature writ large as you sail past Newfoundland’s ragged coast line and you hear the cries of hundreds of sea birds all around you. Any day you go, whatever you see, you are guaranteed to have an experience you won’t forget any time soon.
When we were much younger, my brothers and I sailed with my dad on his ship across the strait from Victoria to Vancouver to see the sights. Back then, I was too terrified to attempt the crossing at the Capilano Suspension Bridge, but the time had now come for me to face my fears. Ando, his wife Teedz, and my two nieces, Tego and HG, decided to attempt the bridge while we were out west, and the Pie and I thought we would tag along. I’m really glad we did. In recent years, the rainforest surrounding the bridge has been turned into a huge educational conservation area, with lots of interesting stuff to see and do. Admission is pretty steep ($28 for us students), but it’s worth it.
Right off the bat, you head across the 450ft (137m) bridge, suspended from cables 230ft (70m) above Capilano River. The Pie told me that the bridge would support 96 elephants, so I was not to worry about falling. As long as there were no elephants around.
Tego continually watched me for my reaction every time the bridge bounced under the feet of the hundred or so people crossing it at the time.
The view of the river (a little low at this time of year) from the middle of the bridge.
Once across, there were tons of things to see and do to get kids (and grownups) more in tune with the nature around them. One such activity was to test out your wingspan. HG was not pleased to be ONLY halfway between a raven and a great horned owl. She’s trying to make herself longer in this shot.
Tego was happier to be a great horned owl, almost a goose.
And the Pie broke the mould by being a giant, and an eagle at the same time.
We were surrounded by so many ancient and massive trees, cedars and firs and all sorts of things. It was quite a shock to come from Newfoundland, where trees are maybe the height of a house and live for about 40 years, to see things like this Douglas Fir, which was 205ft tall, 20ft in diameter, and about 1300 years old.
Tego learned quickly what it means to be a tree hugger.
HG didn’t find the tree’s height all that impressive.
We also took part in the relatively new Treetop Adventure, which I actually found more nerve-wracking than the big bridge.
Teedz, Ando, and HG were happier than me.
But we got some great views and learned a whole bunch of stuff.
Then we crossed back over the bridge …
And went on the park’s newest attraction, the Cliff Walk, which is a wee construction sticking out from the side of the Capilano gorge.
Tego watching to make sure I don’t freak out.
Because the floor is made of GLASS in some parts.
HG again was unconcerned.
In fact she ran ahead while I clutched the rails.
Once our ordeal was over, the Pie and HG were pleased to accept their certificates for having completed every activity station in the park. What you can’t see (because it matches his shirt too well) is the Park Explorer button that HG won for completing the Tree Top adventure. She gave it to her uncle because it didn’t go with her outfit.
Isn’t this cute? I made it for my new baby cousin. I have another one in the works for Doodle’s new nephew, but I didn’t get it finished before we went to Portland so I will just have to mail it. I also didn’t finish Atlas and Krystopf’s blanket before their wedding, either. Seems deadlines are not my thing this summer.
Also whenever I hear the word PIG I think of that scene in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure when Napoleon is at the Ziggy Piggy restaurant and he finishes off that mammoth sundae and the servers present him with a special badge and they chant “zeeegy peeegy, ZEEEGY PEEEGY, ZEEEEGY PEEEEGY!” and then they oink a lot.
I love eighties movies. Fashion, movies, politics … all those things really sucked in the eighties. But the movies? They were choice, as Ferris Bueller would say.
This is a Martha Stewart pattern, and I followed her instructions here. You may remember the stuffed chicken I made from this same project a while back.
This one was a little trickier to sew than the chicken, what with all the limbs and all.
Plus there were pipe cleaners involved.
And I stuffed it with scraps of felted wool instead of cotton batting.
And I think I messed up the ears.
But it’s cute, right? You might recognize the pattern of the wool from the “keystone” in Doodle’s afghan.
White walls. Black chairs. Scuff marks out the wazoo. No amount of scrubbing with all-purpose cleaner will remove them.
I’d heard that you can use toothpaste to remove scuff marks from vinyl flooring. I thought I would experiment to see if it worked on paint as well.
So I have my toothpaste and a scrubby sponge. Put a little dab on the sponge and rub it into the scuff.
A little bit of elbow grease later, and there’s no scuff — to the right, obviously.
Make sure to remove all the paste. You’ll probably want to rinse the wall or spray it with a cleaner to remove all the paste residue, which tends to show up at a certain angle.
So now my dining room walls look good as new, and the whole room has a minty fresh aroma that is quite appealing. I’m going to see if it will get the scuffs off my stairs now, but I’m going to need a lot of toothpaste!
The harbingers of summer here in Newfoundland are not the dandelions taking over the green spaces (although they do that, too), nor are they the rare but blindingly beautiful cloudless skies.
No, they’re icebergs, and their smaller components, growlers and bergy bits. Actually, now that I think about it, that’s pretty typical of this upside-down province: ice is the herald of warm summer days. After all, Gren and I were out in a (short) blizzard just three days ago.
When the Pie and I were here house-hunting in June of 2008, St. John’s was experiencing one of the best years for icebergs in a long time.
Then we moved here, and, true to form, saw barely any ice for the next three years. This year, however, is another good one for ice, and you don’t have to stray too far from town to see it. This one was nestled in Quidi Vidi Bay a few weeks ago.
It was worth struggling over slippery rocks in high winds and sleet to get a better view. Unfortunately I only had my phone with me, so the picture quality isn’t what it could be.
The Pie wasn’t too happy without his touque.
These ones are off the shores of Blackhead, a tiny ancient settlement between St. John’s and Cape Spear.
I wanted to get all three in one shot but they were really far apart.
We headed a little further south to see if we could get a different angle and ended up at Dead Man’s Cove for these pictures.
A very nice lady took our picture with a berg. Unfortunately the berg looks more put together than we do.
Then we found these bits up in Middle Cove.
That’s the Pie down there on the beach.
There were bits of ice all broken up on the beach.
I got to touch a piece. It was very cold. If I hadn’t been worried about the pollution I would have taken it home and put it in a drink.
On one of our various moves, my brother-in-law Rusty scratched the headboard of our bed. Big time. You can see it here.
Fortunately, until recently we had been using a box spring on our bed, which pushed the mattress up and concealed the scratch from view. Now, however, in preparation for our new memory foam mattress that will be arriving any day now, we have ditched the box spring (it’s gone into my office to make it into a guest room) and are using slats. This makes the mattress wayyyy lower on the bed, and now, If I haven’t plumped the pillows up, you can see the scratch.
I’m not sure exactly what the finish is on our bed. It’s something that’s not quite a veneer, not quite just paint. Either way, I came up with an easy solution. It turns out that Crayola’s black coloured pencil is the exact colour of our bed. How convenient.
So I just coloured in the scratch. It was that simple. I mean the scratch is still there, because it’s pretty deep and shows up quite strongly in relief, but it’s a bit less obvious. I also took the pencil around the bed and coloured in all the chips and nicks from the past seven years. It worked beautifully.
If you have wood finish, why not try it with some brown coloured pencils? I have heard as well that rubbing a walnut over wood scratches helps to hide them. Try it!
