Lego Cake Pops

So my first attempt at cake pops was pretty much a complete failure. I saw the idea for Lego head cake pops  here and thought they would be perfect for my son to take to school for his birthday treat. Unfortunately, I didn't quite grasp the appropriate size of the pops. When I make them again, they'll be a lot smaller...

I thought they should be, well, cupcake size. Not a good idea. They were so heavy that the pops buckled under their own weight. Luckily, I made six extras, so there were enough unbroken ones for the 21 kindergarten and first graders in my son's class. (On Mackinac all our elementary classes are splits. The first graders attend school alone in the morning and the kindergartners join them after lunch.)

The day we made them was one of those days where nothing seemed to go right. Not only did the pops bend the sticks and crack, but we also had problems with the candy melts (the yellow coating). And I'm a direction reader! I read them all - and yes, I read them before we got started.

The candy melts (Wilton brand) did not want to melt well, and even when they did liquefy, we had to add shortening to get them liquidy enough to coat the pops. But even then the coating wasn't smooth. Luckily the kids weren't the least bit critical. They identified them immediately as Lego guys and hastily began attacking them (complete with zombie noises.)  The kids didn't care that they were lumpy, cracked, and on bent sticks - because, while they looked nothing like we wanted them to,  they were really tasty!

I'll let you know how round two goes. Right now: Cake Pops - 1, Liz & Miranda - 0...

A Christmas Wish

Dear Santa,

All I want for Christmas is for Mackinac Island to look like this. This whole riding my bike in 20 degree weather thing is getting kind of old. A nice winter storm, that no one had to drive in, would be perfect.

Thank you, Santa, and drive safe!

Liz

An Island Treat

I know there are a few of you out there who pop in here from time to time just to see what is going on Mackinac Island. Well, today you will not be disappointed! Wednesday night was the Mackinac Island Public School's annual Christmas Program, and I thought you might enjoy it. It certainly isn't going to win any awards and the sound quality isn't the best, but our island kids are pretty darn cute.

The program included pre-school through high school students (although only the elementary grades are included in the 32 minute portion above.) At the end, for the sign language song, you can see all of our kindergarten through 7th graders, and, if you look very carefully at the left hand side of the screen, my disembodied hands leading the song...

Lost

A plane bound for Mackinac Island crashed last night. I rode over to the island on the 11:00 am boat this morning and we could see several Coast Guard boats still searching the Straits. I don't know many details, other than the Search and Rescue Team finally found the wreckage along the shore near St. Ignace this afternoon.

Both the pilot and the passenger died and both left families behind. My heart goes out to all of them - and to the pilot's work family at Great Lakes Air. I've flown across the Straits from St. Ignace to Mackinac many times, and I always felt safe in the  knowledge that I'd land on the other side. I have complete faith in both the staff and equipment at Great Lakes Air, but moments like these remind me to savor each and every day I am lucky enough to get. You never know when your time is going to be up.

Now, I need to go tuck my little ones in one more time and let them know just how much I love them...

Thankful

 

Today I am feeling very thankful for my husband. He has cooked our entire Thanksgiving feast - single-handedly. Well, I did my part by cleaning the kitchen as he cooked, (it's been through three cleanings so far,) and I set the table. I know, I'm very lucky. He is a much better cook than I am, at least in a modern kitchen. He enjoys cooking where I usually just see it as a chore.

Tonight we will be enjoying: spinach salad, winter fruit salad, baked pineapple, mashed potatoes, rutabaga, green bean casserole (with homemade mushroom sauce) and Beef Wellington with morel mushrooms. (Excuse me while I wipe the drool from my chin.) For desert we have pecan pie, pumpkin pie and apple pie - all with real whipped cream. I won't be getting on a scale for a while because all those pies average out to a half a pie per person. Yum!

Minifig Cupcakes

I went for easy this year on the Lego-themed birthday cake and didn't make one. I opted to make cupcakes instead. Not very fancy, I know, but my son was pleased. He loved biting off the heads of the extra chocolate minifigs!

(These molds (here and here) made it easy. I looked for them on eBay but they weren't really any cheaper since I would have had to pay for shipping.)

A Family Affair

My husband can't resist getting in on the Halloween action...

I decided to be a jellyfish this year. Thanks to my husband's great idea to recycle the EL wire from last year's costumes, I was a phosphorescent jellyfish. He did all the wiring to make my tentacles glow, but otherwise it was easy.

I started with a clear plastic umbrella I got a t Wal-Mart for $12.00. I measured the circumference of the widest part and bought that much fabric plus a 1/4 yard more. (I think I ended up buying about 3 1/2 yards.) I sewed the two cut ends so I had a large tube, and then added a casing for a drawstring into both selvage ends. One end I made as tight as I could and poked the end of the umbrella through it - covering the umbrella. The other end, I drew up tightly inside the umbrella and tied tightly around the handle.

I cut small slits in the fabric to allow the EL wire to hang down through the fabric. Finally I sewed long strips of tulle and wired ribbon around the bottom edge of the umbrella to create the tentacles. I also added a bunch of tentacles to the handles to try to camouflage it, and then I just wore black so I could fade in to the background. The small blue circles were made from glow-stick bracelets I sewed to the outside just before we went out to trick-or-treat.

Hubby decided to be an angler fish...

He paper-mâchéd the fish body around a balloon, painted it, and added the EL wire to highlight the fins and the tail. The eyes were made from ping pong balls, cut in half, and illuminated by LEDs from behind. The teeth were done in glow in the dark Fimo clay.

I think we looked pretty cool - one of the Island high school kids said we were "epic," which, I think, is a good thing...

Lego Minifig Birthday Shirt

Remember that Lego birthday party we did earlier this fall? It's taken me forever to get this post together, but I couldn't not make my son a Lego birthday shirt.

I searched for a pre-made lego minifig pattern (for you non-legoers, a minifig is the technical term for the little Lego people) but I couldn't find one. No biggie - I made my own. If you would like to use it, click on the image below and download it. You probably can just print it out, but I opened it in Word, reset the margins to .5 inch all the way around the and inserted the image. At full size it should be 7.5 inches across by 10 inches tall. At least, that's how I did it. I suppose you could also just print it out and resize it on a copier...

I did not use the raw edge technique for this applique, so there is no seam allowance included in the pattern. Instead, I traced the pieces onto fusible-web and appliqued it that way.

The dashed lines are to help you with placement. The head and the hands go underneath the shirt, as does the top of the pants. For the face, I just used a colon and a parenthesis :) that I resized until I was happy with it. For the number, just print the number you need in a font you like and resize it until you are happy with it. Then trace it onto your fusible web upside down - that way it will be correct when you iron it onto the shirt.

If you aren't sure how to do applique, you could use the tutorial here. However, I did not use a zig-zag stitch like in the tutorial, I straight stitched about 1/8 of an inch inside the edge of each piece (using my edge stitch foot) and sealed the edges of the fabric with Fray Check. It's been through the wash five or six times so far and it still looks great! (Though I do wash it inside out.)

What do you think?

Mackinac Moments

The days may have gotten shorter,
but, despite the rain and the chill in the air,
they are every bit as beautiful.

Halloween 2011

Halloween on Mackinac Island is alive and well. And I'm glad. To me, Halloween is all about dressing up and having fun, plus I love to make things for the kids!

This year my daughter wanted to be Pegasus. (Talk about giving Mama a challenge!) Disney's Hercules has been one of her favorites lately, and of course she loves horses, so it was no surprise.


I started her costume with McCall's 6185. I left off all the dinosaur parts, moved the zipper to the back, altered the teeth and ears to make them more "horsey," and added the mane and tail. I also made hooves to cover her hands. They were just rectangles of fabric that velcroed around her wrists, but they looked great. The store-bought wings Papa managed to find finished her off perfectly. We added a collar and name tag just to be sure she wouldn't get "What are you?" all night long; instead she heard, "What a cute little........ Pegasus. .......... Oh, you're Pegasus."

I would have liked her headpiece to be more elongated - like a horse's head, but I couldn't find a pattern and I just didn't have the time to draft one myself. She was happy, so in the end it didn't really matter that her head wasn't all that horse-like.

My son wanted to be a werewolf.


His costume was easy - except for the sewing with faux fur part - what a pain that was! You should have seen my sewing room after I was finished with it - it looked like I had shaved a wolf because there was fur everywhere! I used the same pattern for his headpiece, except I altered the ears and made them shorter. Then I hand sewed pieces of fur on the inside of his shirt and pants and then ripped the fabric to let the fur show through. (I imagined him ripping his clothes as he transformed.) Back in August he ripped the knee of of those jeans, but I held on to them (because, remember - I'm a hoarder,) and I found the shirt at Goodwill for $1.89. (It was so cheap because it already had a hole in it.) We finished him off with grey gloves - with fur hot glued to the tops, furry shoe covers, and some face paint. Did he ever have fun growling at his friends Halloween night. I even heard him howling a few times.


Each of the kids got a matching treat bag as well. I love how the bag goes with the costume, but the best part is, it becomes a storage bag. All the costume parts go inside the bag so they stay together. Plus, when I am searching for a specific costume in the Halloween stuff, I know exactly which costume is which.

How about you. What were your kids for Halloween?

My apologies for the odd faces on the kids.
I try to maintain their privacy on line.

A Lego Party

What little boy can resist Legos? Mine sure can't; they seem to be all the thinks about right now. (Well, that and bodily functions - he is seven, after all.) I shouldn't have been surprised when he asked for a Lego themed birthday party this year. Did I ever have a lot of fun planning this one! There are a ton of great Lego party ideas out there: here, here, here, here and here, but I also wanted to do a few things on my own. Also, I didn't want to spend a ton of money.

I decided on a palate of bright Lego colors with lots of red and yellow. I was really happy that I actually remembered where I stored the pennant banner I made for this party. I knew it would come in handy!

I wish I could remember where I found all the Lego photos I used as the wall decorations. Some are from here and here, but the best ones came from this guy. He has a ton of wonderful photos of his Lego creations, and he allows them all to be downloaded. My son loved them so much, we actually sent him a thank-you email. All we had on the walls were the photos, balloons, and a banner made using the Lego font. (A similar font is available here.)

I made the banner using Word 2010. The new features in 2010 made getting the LEGO logo coloring just right: Lego font, black letters, yellow outline, red highlight. Each letter was on a separate page and I used my paper cutter to trim away the extra paper. I didn't bother stringing my banner on yarn, I just taped the letters to the wall.

The table decorations were a snap, or at least they "snapped" together easily. (Are you groaning or laughing?) I used a yellow table cloth and placed several Lego scenes around the table. Oh yes, and the Lego candy was a huge hit. Both the kids loved that they could actually build with pieces.

Each person's seat was marked with a place card, held up by a simple three block card holder.

I used actual Legos to stamp on the cards. The bottom of the brick made the rectangular outline, and the top stamped the circles. I found the letter stamps at a garage sale on the island a few years back for $3.00. I'm so glad I brought them home with me!

Probably the most fun part of the table decorations were the minifigs at each place. (For all you non-Lego people out there, minifigs are the little Lego people.) With the help of my friend's son, Parker, each person at the party was greeted by their minifig self when they sat down at the dinner table. You may not be able to tell, but that little plastic character in the photo above is a dead ringer for my mother! I loved them so much, I took the ones for my husband, the kids and myself and snapped a few "family photos."

What do you think, should I send that first photo out with our Christmas card? I think it would be a hoot...

Mackinac Moments

Fall on Mackinac the year has been delightful. Absolutely delightful! It's been gorgeous - warm and sunny every day for the past two weeks. I'm sure there's rain in our future, but this has been the nicest fall we've had in years.

How have things been in your neck of the woods?

Do You See It?

I was riding my bike home the other day, and this dray carrying a load of paving stones past me near the top of Grand Hill. I felt like Richard Dryfus' character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Remember how he kept seeing Devil's Tower in everything. I kept staring at that load of rocks thinking,

"The shape of that rock looks so familiar."

So I road up to the dray to get a better look at it. It was just a piece of stone, packaged with about eight or ten other pieces. None of them looked cut, or treated in any special way. They just looked like randomly shaped paving stones headed to someones yard.

That's when it hit me:

It wasn't a perfect Mackinac Shape, but it was so close. Now it's got me wondering if the person who is walking on it every day has noticed...

It was one of those days where I was thrilled that I actually remembered to put my camera in my backpack that morning. Remembering actually was a big deal. Given some changes that have happened at work this year, I'm going in about 15 different directions. I actually left the island this week to go to a doctor's appointment and left my overnight bag in my bike cart on the dock! I couldn't believe it - I've lived here 20 years and that was the first time I've ever left the island without my stuff. Did I ever feel silly...

More Late Night Visitors

Lately, we've had some very vocal visitors hanging out in the neighborhood. We live right on the edge of Mackinac Island State Park, so we're lucky to have acres of woods right out our back door. Plus, the lots to us on one side, and many of the lots across the street remain undeveloped as well. So, basically, we've got woods almost all the way around the house. I wonder if the owls like to hang out in the tree line and hunt in our yard - like how hawks like to hunt along the sides of the highway...

Regardless of why they're here, it's been wonderful. I'm not sure what time they get started at night, but we hear them at about ten, when we head up to bed. They'll "talk," back and forth, for an hour or so and then all is quiet. We're not sure if they are moving to another area, or just quieting down. Last night we think there were at least three or four of them. Hopefully they'll be back again tonight; it's a nice way to fall asleep...

Credits:

First photo
Second photo

Midnight Visitor

A certain little boy in my house lost his very first tooth recently - just days before his seventh birthday. Thank goodness I could find this when I needed it! That poor bunny may have sat in my sewing room cupboard for nearly three years, but it was perfect. The tooth didn't get lost, and the tooth fairy told my son (in her note) that she loved it. She told him that she doesn't like it when she has to fly under the bed to find teeth that fall on the floor, and that she appreciated knowing she wouldn't never have to go searching for his.

At first a few of my son's friends were jealous that got a teeny tiny note from the tooth fairy in addition to the three dollars she left him. But as soon as he explained that he had left a note for her first, and she was just answering him, no one was too upset. In a town as small as ours, you've got to be careful about these things. Years ago one of the island kids found a $100 bill under her pillow after a visit from the tooth fairy. Needless to say, all the other island kids were really upset when the tooth fairy didn't leave hundreds for them too! As I remember, she got a large number of angry letters that year. I was sure glad I didn't have little ones then...

Do you have any interesting toothy traditions in your house?

Our Very Own Font

Do you remember when a rock on Mars was named after Mackinac Island? This week we got a font. How fun is that!

I especially liked how the designers used words like "span" and "bridging the Old World with the New" in their description; very clever I must say.

Then, I discovered it would cost me $239.95 to download it. Well, to be fair, it's on sale for only $191.96 until September 30th.

Such a bargain.

Guess I'll have to do without...

Kindergarten

Last week school started here on Mackinac Island. My daughter is thrilled to be in Kindergarten this year, and she came home after her second day going on and on about how much she loves kindergarten. When I asked her why kindergarten was so wonderful, she gave me one of those how-can-you-not-know-this looks and said, "The snacks in kindergarten are so much better than in preschool. Mama, Mrs. W's fruit snacks are awesome!"

Thank goodness she got off to such a good start, because her teacher had to keep her after school for about 40 minutes the very next day. Little Miss K didn't want to write her name on her paper, so she snuck over to her brother's desk (on Mackinac, the kindergarten and first graders are in a classroom together) and asked him to write it, which he did. Mrs. W erased the name, after explaining the importance of completing one's own work, and asked K to write it for her self.

Well, K dug in her heels and flat out refused. Plus, she yelled at Mrs. W, insisting, "You're my teacher! You're supposed to help me. It looked nice and now my paper looks yucky." It took her about 30 minutes of sitting in the classroom, by herself, before she was finally willing to write. Then it took another 10 minutes before she would put up the chair so the custodian could sweep.

Sigh

I keep reminding myself how pleased I'll be with that strong will when she's dating, but there are days right now when it's quite challenging...

Monday Morning

Monday morning the kids and I walked across the Mackinac Bridge in the 54th Annual Bridge Walk. We had a great time! We walked, stopped for snacks in the middle, and had a blast visiting with our friends up from out of town.

We knew it would be a long day, but we were beat by the time we got home. It wasn't just a five mile walk for us; we had to walk a mile to get to the boat, a 1/2 mile from where the shuttle left us off to get to the bridge, a mile from the end of the bridge to the boat dock in Mackinaw City, and then another mile back home from the dock on the island. It ended up being more like a nine mile walk for us. Well, for the adults anyway; the little ones were able to take breaks in the stroller. Except for my daughter - hers wasn't really a break - she fell asleep by the time we were half way across and rode the rest of the way. Let me tell you, my hips hurt Tuesday morning. But it was so worth it.

How about you, what did you do over the long weekend?

Mackinac Moments

The kids and I were lucky enough to get to enjoy this lovely evening with some good friends. Oh yes, and ice cream; my daughter insists that I include the part about the ice cream.

On nights like this one - with friends, a cool breeze coming off the lake, and a beautiful sky, I just can't imagine being anywhere else...

A First

You know you live in a small town when the very first time you attend services at a church, you are asked to do a reading. Mackinac Island is a very small town. With only 500 of us here year-round, you pretty much know everybody - really well. It dawned on me the other day that I've lived here for nearly 20 years, I've been friends with the local Episcopal priest all that time, but I've never attended services at the island's Trinity Church.

I decided to go because a dear friend of mine from Philadelphia, who happens to be an Episcopal priest, was giving the Mass that day. (If I got that wrong, please forgive me. I'm not sure what which verb is correct - giving? leading? celebrating?)

photo via

Trinity is a lovely little church, just up a from Market Street, near the bottom Fort Hill. Although services began in the 1830s, the parish wasn't organized until 1873. The members met in the fort and the Court House until the building was finished in 1882. I love that a number of the soldiers from Fort Mackinac provided some of the labor needed to construct the church.

Mass was lovely. All the more special because of my connection with Father R. I'm still not use to referring to him that way. It's been an adjustment for me, learning to see him as a priest. Sure, he is still my friend - the same friend I've had for going on 20 years now, but he's a priest. I first met him back when he was 18 or 19 - in his "pre-priest" days. I guess I just never thought about "priest" and "friend" being the same person. Priests weren't friends - they were up there on the altar - separate from the rest of us. Unknowingly he's helped me learn that priests are people too - just like teachers. R is a wonderful man, and I think the priesthood suits him. Now I know just how my students use to feel when they would see me at Meijer, stare at me with a look of shock on their faces and say, "Teachers shop? I thought you lived at school."