Tuesday 10% off!

Dec10

Instead of my usual Tuesday Tidbits news-type post, we decided to run a “Tuesday 10% off on the 10th” sale in our etsy shop! Use the code HOLIDAYS10OFF to get 10% off any of our jewelry or sculptures though next Tuesday (the 17th) 🙂 I just finished a small new batch of my polymer clay birth goddesses…

And, our pewter figurine and pendant listings are all up to date and waiting to ship….

Finished sculptures ready to ship.

rative project of Mark and myself.

My husband and I have been having so much fun building our shop’s inventory and working on our projects together. I hope to write more about that process soon, after I finish with all this darn end-of-session paper and exam grading! Then, I’m off work for a month, with lots of time to make sculptures and cast pewter. And, hopefully lounge around reading and making treats with my kids. 🙂

Gingerbirth, Gingermamas…

Dec8

I’m either officially a creative genius, or have officially gone off the deep end. On our family fun snow day, we made salt dough ornaments and these were mine:

Pretty sweet, eh? After making them, I shared them on Facebook where they received a favorable reception. So, today…I thought, why not go for polymer clay and make some holiday pins? I spent WAY too long working on these and I also had a ton of fun (near catastrophe with falling objects in the closet notwithstanding as I frantically searched for my pasta roller to get the thickness right!). Behold, Gingerbirth Mama:

And her friends:

Large and small:

And, the manic crafter demo’ing the pin-possibilities:

Family Fun Day!

Dec6

Today was the first big snow of the winter at our home in the Midwest and we spent the day on several family traditions. First, we made snow ice cream! We always did this when I was a kid and my kids love it too. (My own parents moved to Missouri from California, so I don’t think they made snow ice cream during their own childhoods!)

Simple Snow Ice Cream Recipe

One can of evaporated milk (or one cup of whole milk or cream or coconut milk or something else milk-like and thick)

1/3 c. sugar

vanilla to taste

Stir up and spoon over bowls of fresh snow!

After the ice cream, we made grebble. Grebble is a Volga German doughnut-like item that we inherited from one of my great grandmas. There are lots of recipes online, but I just use a basic bread dough recipe. The tradition that evolved in my childhood household was to make grebble for breakfast on the morning of the first snowfall. We usually go over to my mom’s house on this day and she makes grebble for all of us. Today, since we are all snowed in at our respective houses, I made grebble for the first time for my own kids. In the twisting of the dough and the hot oil, I felt myself linked by chains of fires to the kitchens of my ancestresses. 🙂

Simple Grebble Recipe

2 ts yeast

1.5 cups water

1 c. whole wheat flour

2 c. white flour

1.5 TB sugar

1.5 ts salt

Dissolve yeast into water. Add other ingredients and mix in bread machine on dough cycle until it has risen the first time. Take out, roll into two fairly skinny loaves and slice each (still dough) loaf into rounds. Cut a slit in each round and pull one end of the piece through the hole and back out the other side to form a little twist. Fry in hot oil until golden brown, turning once. Eat dipped in granulated sugar!

After the grebble we made salt dough ornaments. They’re still (slowly, slowly) baking!

Basic Salt Dough Ornament Recipe

1 c. cheap white flour

1 c. sea salt or other salt

~1 c. water (add slowly–may need a little bit more or a little bit less to get dough the right consistency)

Stir up until thick, non-sticky dough is the result. Roll out and cut with cookie cutters or hand-build into small ornaments and sculptures. Bake in oven on low temperature (200 degrees) for around three hours or until totally, totally dry and petrified. Then, paint or otherwise embellish. Yes, we used awesome Star Wars cookie cutters 🙂