Flowers and Fishes...

… before i started on painting the glass “jam” jar last night, I thought I’d make the clay pots I’d painted a couple of days ago, “pretty”. So i took out some acrylic paints and got down to it… I couldn’t take pictures last time, because the paints were all wet and i couldn’t touch it (believe me, if there was any other way, I definitely would have taken the pictures… i did for the jam jar!!!)

And this is what I ended up doing…

and this

I obviously had way too much time last night…

Painted Jars for the kitchen

… is what I sat up till 12 last night doing…

A bit smudged...

I used acrylic paints and then baked it in my oven for about 20 minutes

Plastic Cups and Fabric Lamp

My kitchen is very bare and boring and I’ve been thinking for the longest time to do something to make it “happy”. Then a couple of days ago I found just the thing and I thought, why not make it myself… and thats just what I did…

I must admit, it does require a lot of improvement. For Eg. – Need to size the cloth right to hide the edges of the plastic cup, but I’m proud of it all the same. I love making things for my home… but like a friend mentioned, running out of where to put them.

I am happy as a clam today!

Show and Tell at school

… and the subject was “RED”. Exciting!!! So I send a distress message… and my awesome family and friend rose wonderfully to the occasion. I got some awesome ideas ranging from a tiny lobster, red riding hood, flamenco dancer, to a collage of different red stuff in different material, to a Matador. Now, I thought the matador idea was super… especially when my cousin pointed out – How cool would it be if a 4 year old started with, ‘In spain,… ‘. But try explaining that to a four year old… She would sing loud songs, whenever I broke into, “In Spain…”

So… I needed to think of something else. I checked with very talented friend (you should check out her site – www.allfamilyholidays.com), and she does some brilliant photography. We source most of our craft ideas from her… (if she does put her stuff on, we’ll be in so much trouble) and she came to our rescue. She gave us a brilliant idea that she saw on Mister Maker that morning, and all we needed to do was incorporate “Red” things into it.

And this is what we came up with, (it did help that we’d been to Kasauli, a hill station and she’d seen a lot of the things we put in, fairly recently)

So what I did was that I drew out rolling hills and the trees, and used Atta (wheat flour dough) to line the hills and tree top). Its better to use playdoh (like my friend did) or sticky tac (like Mister maker did), because atta sticks to the paper.

S then filled in the colours:

S needed a bit of help with the edges

 But no help getting the dough off (she was very cross that I took it off the trees)

Notice the atta stuck

So now all we needed to do was add the elements, S suggested – ladybirds, flowers and apples. Oh yes, she did mention monkeys with red bums, but my drawing talent didn’t stretch that far. We finally did all of this (except the red bum monkey) and added some butterflies (S wasnt’ happy, because the butterflies we saw at Kasauli weren’t red), a helicopter, car and a kite.

We couldn’t find any red buttons, so we painted our own 

Felt for the tiny ladybirds

Rolled up crepe paper for apples

The other elements were helicopter and car with felt (cutting the thick felt was the toughest, even little S volunteered to help me out. She gave up pretty soon), a kite with old gift wrapping paper and wool, butterflies with colour paper folded like a fan and tied in the middle with thread and pipe cleaners for the stem of the flowers. And finally Project Red was ready go… (will add a picture of her taking it to school on Tuesday)

On Tuesday

Baby Bath time

S came home from school saying that she wanted to give her doll a bath, apparently they did an activity in school which involved personal hygiene and giving a doll a bath.

So after lunch and a bit of rest, thats exactly what she did…

Needless to say she had a blast, though she needed a change of clothes too… and a cup of chickoo shake too

Caramel and Banana Cake

I was rudely woken at 7 on a Sunday morning by a hungry daughter, who was very specific about what she was hungry for – bread and butter (not too demanding i know, but 7 in the morning on a Sunday is like the crack of dawn and i was intending to give her a banana). I buttered a slice and gave it to her and then was up and couldn’t go back to bed. When I got into the kitchen, I got a blast of some awesome ripe banana smell (i love bananas). So I decided to make best use of the early hours and bake a banana bread, so I did a quick search on various food sites and came across the caramel chips and banana cake recipe and  thought why not!

I tweaked it a bit so i could use what ingredients I had available at home and also did not use exact measures…

What went into making it -

• 2 tbsp of sugar with a splash of water, boiled till the sugar melts, thickens and becomes golden brown. Pour it into a baking sheet or anything that won’t burn – I used a cookie tray so i could get a thin layer.
• While its cooling whisk together 3 tbsp of butter, with about the same amount of powdered sugar (castor sugar) to a fluffy, feathery consistency, add 3 eggs, 1 and a half cups of flour, a tsp of baking soda, 2 ripe bananas, 2 tbsp of ground almonds, and 3 tbsp of curds. Whisk till smooth. The batter does seems too liquidy, but it doesn’t matter
• S and I used a rolling pin to smash and shatter the cooled and hardened caramel and added this to the mixture. Poured it into 2 baking dishes (S has her own baking dish). We baked it till it was nice and brown (don’t worry if you see liquid still bubbling on the sides, thats just the melted caramel, it hardens when the cake cools)

Baking – look at that lovely caramel chunks…

Baked

and served

S loving it…

The only problem that I faced, is that all that lovely caramel sank to the bottom and formed a layer on the cake, which was fine by me and more importantly, by S.

Planters

Most of us have empty cans lying around and if you’ve not already thought of painting it and recycling it… then you should. This is what S and my project for today was. Well apart from shopping for some clay pots to paint (thats a project for me alone, don’t want her to get oil paint all over herself and around the place)
When S was away at school today, I sized and cut up some construction paper.
Since I wanted to involve S in the project, I drew simple geometrical patterns on it.

Gave S some oil pastel crayons and she got started

And when it was ready, we stuck it on the can.

And we were good to go…

I wanted to plant coriander seeds in it, but didn’t want another seed disaster (Read the post – girl with the green thumb), so I planted cuttings of a plant I already had in the garden.