First Day of School

Ugh. School again.  Just when summer starts slowing down, school starts.  I don't know about all the moms out there that can't wait until they have a few extra kid free hours, but I don't want school to start. I love school, but this year I got a bottom locker, PE first thing in the morning, and a teacher I don't like.  I thought I ought to let you gals know that since I am going back to school, I won't be able to post half as much.  

This year I need a notebook, and  I got the cheapest and un-prettiest one at target for about a quarter.  Then I painted over all the white writing with black, and then painted on doodle flowers. Look How cute it is now!

 Maddie

Birthday Month

Sorry I haven't been able to post anything this week.  This past month has been crazy because school is starting, there were 4 birthdays, the Fair is in town and we had to do stuff for that, and we had lots of other things to do.  This year we all had family parties except for me. I had two parties because I happen to have two awesome best friends that threw me my second surprise party.  Surprise parties are awesome. Here was my birthday cake (which I decorated):

Here is my sister's pool cake (made by my mom):

And cutest of all, my younger brother's rainbow cake:

Guess what I got for my birthday? Blue wall paint (we are finally gonna paint my room!).

P.S. I'm thirteen now!

The Zoku

My mom recently got an awesome new toy (even though it says "THIS IS NOT A TOY" on the back) called The Zoku Quick Pop Maker from Williams Sonoma.  It is this really cool thing that makes popsicles in 10 minutes.  How cool is that!  And so far only one popsicle stick has been broken. What a record! Usually stuff breaks really fast in our family. Here it is:

We also have some extremely yummy  recipe's for it from the Zoku Blog.  Here are my favorites:

Pineapple Coconut pops
8 ounces fresh pineapple
½ cup pineapple juice
¼ cup unsweetened coconut milk
¼ cup milk
3 tablespoons sugar
¼ cup sweetened shredded coconut (optional if you don't like shredded coconut)

MAKE THE PINEAPPLE-COCONUT BASE

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth.

ASSEMBLE THE POPS

1. Remove Zoku Quick Pop Maker from the freezer. Insert sticks and pour the Pineapple-Coconut base into each cavity until you reach the fill line. Let freeze completely and remove the pops with the Super Tool. Repeat with remaining pops.

And here is another favorite (but its not from the Zoku blog)

Strawberry Coconut Pops

2 ounces cream
4 ounces milk
7-8 small strawberrys
a golf ball sized clump of sweetened shredded coconut
Sugar to taste

 Blend in a blender and taste. Add more sugar to your taste.  Pour into Quick pop maker and freeze, 7 to 10 minutes. 

We also made Watermelon pops out of strawberry coconut (the green and white was a coconut base with a bit of food coloring).  If you wanted you could add mini chocolate chips to look like seeds but I didn't want chocolate ruining my Popsicle's tropical flavor (no offense to the chocolate).

And the Pictures at William-Sonoma show you just how adorable a popsicle can be:

None of these photos are mine except for the watermelon pops picture. I can't take photo's this good.

Now I want one... But the rule is we can't have Popsicles until after lunch. Darn it.

Keep Licking,

Maddie

Potatoes, the Unfried Kind

 Potatoes are very good fried, as well as baked, boiled, and mashed.  Imagine Thanksgiving without them! They are quite delicious.  A while ago my dad boiled some to put in ham and potato soup (which is also delicious) and we taste-tested them by dipping them in butter and salt. So the other day I made some for lunch.

 To make:
Grab a couple small ones, peel them, chop them, and then boil them for around 8 minutes till they are tender enough.  I put tons of salt in the water to great affect because the potatoes absorbed the salt.  Serve them with salt and butter to dip them in.

 Maddie

Paint Palette

This post is completely dedicated to different kinds of things that you can use to dump, mix, and scoop paint from.  And here they are:

 Cardstock is a great one.

I covered a full page in paint and now its a piece of art itself.

Small glass bowls are nice too.  I started using these the other day but they are nice for watercolors.

Ice cube trays are great if you are using lot of colors of mixing colors.

Paper plates

Plastic trays. (I LOVE these things.  I have like 12 of them (plus I got them free). They are one of the best surfaces to work on for beading, painting, molding clay, or anything except baking (yeah... I accidentally tried that once and there were little brown circles under every cookie and a burning smell)

The bottoms of soda bottles have 5 little pockets to put paint in (Just chop off the bottom).

Medicine bottles are great. They are air-tight and leak-proof.

Then there are regular old plastic paint palettes.  They are cheap, only about a buck at craft stores, but why spend money on one when there are a hundred other free things to use.
Keep Painting! 

Maddie

My Fair Entries

The Fair starts on the 19th and I entered three things: a cake (as usual), decorated cookies, earrings, a painted T-shirt,  and a piece of art work.  I have entered stuff into the fair for 3 years in a row.  The deadline was yesterday up and we all spent the day gathering last minute entries.  My cookies are based off of Sweetopia's Owl Cookies.  But mine are not half as good because I have only decorated a few cookies in my life and I don't have a Kopycake Projector so I drew the design on (I used pencil because the cookies are not going to be eaten).  I have been getting very frustrated lately because I can't make a good cookie and my fondant wouldn't lay flat on my cake.

I have entered a cake into the fair 2 years in a row so far and this is my 3 year (am also planning on winning first place for the 3rd time).  Here is my cake:

Here are my cookies, but only 4 out of 9 turned out good (I am a beginner): 

I think these are so cute because I made their eyes too big.

Here is the T-shirt:

I'll post a tutorial for these wire cage earrings sometime soon:

 And here is the art:

 I also entered my B (which stands for our last name)

 I hope I win for my cake! It took a lot of work and 20 dollars which is a lot of money for me.  But we saw some of the other cakes and it looks like I have some competition.
Maddie

Watercolors on the Go

I have been searching for a way to do watercolors in the car, or at the doctors office, or at whatever boring thing that is next on my list.  Then I finally had an idea.  I took a small plastic box with a lid and squirted watercolors into it.  I did a little dab of all the colors I wanted and left the lid blank so I could mix colors.

I let the paint dry (I used Reeves watercolor tubes, they are around 10 bucks for a set at Hobby Lobby) and took a small travel size shampoo bottle from a hotel (that I had been saving for a year), emptied it and filled it with water.  All I need now is a paintbrush small enough to fit in my little box and a pad of paper and I will be ready to paint.

Make sure the shampoo bottle fits in the box because once that paint is dry, it fits along with it. Now you are ready to paint the boring hours away!
Here is my little set:

 And here is my first work of art with my set:

Maddie

Bulls-Eye!

Remember this?

Well thanks to my aunt, I figured out what to do with one of the circles.  A giant Shooting target!

So I painted it with a LOT of paint and a foam brush and made this:

I painted from the outside edge to the center.  I also added numbers to show scoring but I need to make them a lot bigger.

I hung it up on a tree in the backyard with some yarn so we could use it.  It would be so much fun to have target practice for a boy's birthday, and whoever gets a bulls-eye gets a prize and that sort of thing.  Unfortunately I'm am a girl.  We are planning on shooting arrows and Air soft guns

What to do with Melted Candy

Has a perfectly good bag of candy ever been left in the car on a hot summer day?  If so, then you know it melts into a big blob.  That is exactly what happened to a bag of Peach Rings that my mom bought.  They went from rings to a blob. But my mom had the idea to remelt them and pour them into molds.  So I did, and they turned out perfectly.

But Beware:  They stick to EVERYTHING once they are melted.

We had to make them in 2 batches because there were not enough molds. They MUST have a sugar coating or they will stick to the plate (they did stick and we had to use a spatula to pry them off)

Maddie