Happy Valentine’s Day!

My oldest daughter volunteered to bake 100 Valentine cookies for a bake sale at her school. She had told me that they had to have pink icing. I love to bake, but I am not the greatest decorator and the thought of piping icing on 100 cookies had me break out in hives before we even started. I suggested to drizzle the icing, but that did not fly. Luckily I found these instructions where you spread the icing with the back of a spoon. It is not perfect, but much prettier than spreading it with a palette knife and much quicker than piping.

In the end we baked and decorated 150 cookies. (I wanted to have some leftover, but I guess I went a bit overboard…) It took us from start to finish 4 hours and 6 batches of this recipe.

All She Wants is a Dog

My youngest daughter wants a dog real bad. So far she has not been able to persuade her Dad that our lives would be so much better with a dog. In the meantime she has been decorating her room with dogs: she has porcelain dogs, a dog calendar, books about dogs, dog pictures, stuffies and now a dog pillow.

It started out with a drawing:

And we turned it into this:

I used a very quick method. My daughter copied her design onto white muslin using a water-soluble pencil and she cut it out leaving some fabric all around it. I sandwiched a piece of interfacing between the fabric of the pillow and the muslin and stitched over the pencil lines with narrow zigzag. I think my daughter stopped breathing while I sewed. She was so nervous I would mess up. When it was done (and she was very pleased) we cut away the excess fabric using Duckbill scissors. She filled in the eyes and nose with fabric marker.

What is growing here?

Last week it rained a lot and then the temperature fell below freezing. Now there are tiny ice-sculptures shooting out of the ground like mushrooms. And when I say ground I should say mole-hills ; )