I realize that many of you are up to your necks in real snowflakes at the moment, but here in the SF Bay area it has been bone dry all winter. I’m not trying to say that we would normally be strapping on our snow shoes at this time of year or anything but we’ve usually had at least a little rain by now. In order to bring a little bit of that wintery feeling into our house, I’ve been making paper snowflakes and taping them to our windows.

I learned to cut paper snowflakes back in elementary school, as I’m sure you all did too, but I didn’t start liking how they looked until my mom — an expert snowflake cutter — shared a few tricks with me. Today I’m going to share everything I learned from her with you!

To start, you’ll need a piece of paper and a pair of scissors. I like scissors with really sharp tips, but they’re not necessary.

Your first task will be to cut your paper into a square. To do this, fold it in half diagonally, matching the top edge of the paper to a side edge as pictured above.

Now trim off the extra little strip along the edge. There’s no need to be super precise about this.

When you’ve finished cutting, you will be left with a right triangle.

Fold your triangle in half again by matching the two sharpest corners. Crease the fold with your finger.

This next part is a little tricky because instead of folding it in half again — which would result in an eight-pointed snowflake — we are going to fold the paper so that we will end up with a proper six-pointed snowflake. Like in nature. You want your paper snowflakes to look like they came from nature, right?

Unfold the triangle you just made so it’s folded in half with a crease down the middle. Now bring the edge over so that the crease on the right side of the paper crosses over about a third of the way into the left side. (Look at the picture if my words don’t make perfect sense). Flatten the crease on the paper about a half an inch up, but don’t flatten it all the way up! You just want a little crease at the bottom right now, because you probably don’t have your fold right quite yet.

Now bring the opposite edge across and match it up with the edge of the fold you just made. Again, crease the new fold about a half inch or so. Open the fold and check to see if you’ve made three same-sized sections. You probably haven’t so fiddle around with it a little until you’ve divided the half triangle into equal thirds. Once you’ve got it to your liking, flatten the folds with your finger all the way up to the top edge.

Fold your triangle in half again and then really press down on the folds to make a sharp crease in the paper. I like to use my scissors for this. Sharp creases will make it easier to make precise cuts.

Finally, cut off the points that are sticking up above the top of the folded edges. This will ensure that all of the cuts you make for your snowflake go through all the layers of the paper.

Now for the fun part: cutting the snowflake! I start off by cutting the top edge of the snowflake. This will define the basic shape of the flake. My preference is to cut it so that one edge is higher than the other because that gives it the classic six-pointed snowflake shape. If the two edges are the same height, your snowflake will look like it has 12 points. (Which is also nice.)

A note about unfolding: you are going to be tempted to unfold your snowflake while you are in the process of cutting it. Don’t do it!  The more you cut, the more delicate your paper will be and it will be really hard to refold it properly. Besides, if you unfold it before you’re done, you’ll ruin the big surprise at the end and that’s no fun, is it?

After you have your top edge cut, start cutting into the folded edges of the snowflake. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind as you’re cutting:

1. This one may seem obvious, but it’s so important that it’s worth mentioning: do not cut through both folded edges of the triangle with the same cut! If you do, you will cut the center out of your snowflake!
2. In my opinion, the snowflakes that look best have very few chunky bits of white paper in them. To avoid this, I try to cut out as much paper as I can while simultaneously leaving enough paper to keep the snowflake from ripping. It’s a fine balancing act, my friends!  I find that leaving between 1/8 and 1/4 inch between the cut-out areas is just right (but don’t get out a ruler or anything).
3. After I’ve cut the top, I use that edge as a guide for my next cuts. I cut through one of the the folded edges in parallel to the top edge but about an 1/8 of an inch down. Once I have finished the parallel cuts, I’m a little more loose about where I cut, but I eventually bring the cut line back to the original fold.  Does that make sense? It is really hard to explain with words, so you’re going to want to look at the photos up above.
4. As I work my way down to the tip of the snowflake, I alternate which folded edge I start cutting from and I always use my previous cuts as a guide for the subsequent cuts.
5. If I find myself with some bigger chunks of paper in the middle of the triangle, I like to make a few smaller  jagged cuts into it (see above right photo). This gives it that authentic, crystallized look. These types of cuts also look great along the top edge.
6. The snowflake I’m cutting in these photos only has straight cuts, but I love the look of curvy cuts too. Experimenting with different types of shapes is all part of the fun!

When you are done cutting, your snowflake will look something like the photo above on the left — not very much paper, lots of cut-outs.

Gently unfold it. I like to fold each crease back onto itself a little as I go to encourage the snowflake to lie flat.

Ta da! Once it’s all unfolded, marvel at the beauty you’ve created!

Do you like to cut snowflakes out of paper? How do you use snowflakes after you’ve made them? I’d love it if you shared any tips you have for us down in the comments!

Time for the January update on my 40th year project. Woo hoo!

This month I started digging into the box of super-special-save-forever treasures that I packed up and sent to California when I helped my parents move out of my childhood home several years ago. Though my parents had made changes to my room in the 15 years since I moved out to attend college, the closet and my huge desk were still packed with my stuff. Toys, papers, notebooks, tchotchkes  – you name it, I saved it. I did my best to clear everything out because I didn’t want to saddle my parents or myself with all my junk so the stuff that went into the box is the creme de la creme. Going through this box is very intense for me because literally every piece of paper in it has some kind of significance in my life. So far I’ve only managed to excavate 2 inches into it! You’ll see a lot more of these historical documents as I add them into my album in the coming months.

Let’s take a look at what I put together:

This page shows:

• I little bit about my love for tea. I really like tea.
• A photo and a smidge about my life from my freshman year of college.
• I great quote from Ira Glass about mastering creative pursuits. These are words I revisit frequently. (Found on Pinterest.)
• Rob Lowe, my teenage crush. I totally forgot how much I loved Rob Lowe until I found the photo of my bedroom in the lower left corner of this page and saw all the posters of him on the walls. He does nothing for me now, though. Isn’t that weird?
• A sparkly photo of myself I took using Incredibooth.
• A photo of my room from when I was in 9th grade. It was definitely NOT this clean normally. I think I took the photo specifically because it was so tidy.

I also included a going away card that my co-workers made me when I left my first post-college job in an 8.5 x 11 page protector. Lots of funny messages with inside jokes inside there.

The back of that page protector has a layout I made after asking Wyatt and Augie a bunch of questions about me. Their answers cracked me up and I realized they think my job is laundress. Nice.

The second side of this layout has:

• A picture of me with much longer hair than I have now.
• A bracelet that I found in the basement when we moved last year.
• My typical morning routine.
• A couple things about my love of books.
• A bit about my childhood relationship with NyQuil (Blech!) and the lengths I went to to avoid taking it.
• A picture of my awesome Sharp boom box.
• And a photo of me on my 21st birthday.

This next spread incorporates both the divided page protectors and a full sized 12×12 page.

The right side has:

• A photo of my goofing around in my first real grown-up lady apartment.
• A card that was thrown out into the audience when I went to a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in high school.
• A print-out of the box from my all time most favorite LEGO set.
• A note on my chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse. (Slim.)
• Stickers from my trip to Disney World when I was 8 that I never stuck onto anything. There’s a Minnie Mouse one behind the Mickey you see there, too.
• A photo of my Grandma Ruby and all her kids.
• And a picture of the first gingerbread house I ever made.

The opposite page holds a report card from 6th grade and my 7th grade ITBS test results.

The back side of that page holds a Mills College admissions office brochure about student life. My roommates and I were interviewed and photographed for the brochure.

And finally, the last page includes these little tidbits:

• A photo and ticket stub from a trip to Minnesota I took with my friend Gretchen for an Iowa football game.
• A photo and quote from Amy Poehler that I like.
• All you’ve ever wanted to know about my feelings for orange pop.
• My 7th grade class schedule.
• More about zombies!

And finally, in honor of the Martin Luther King holiday, I’ll leave you with an insipid poem I wrote in sixth grade that was inspired by his famous and much more eloquent speech:

A Dream by Wendy Thorpe

I have a dream!
I have a dream for peace on earth,
No nuclear bombs, and jobs for all.
I have a dream that Mr. Chauvinist and Ms. Prejudice are dead,
Laying in their coffins.
I have a dream of flowering shrubs.
Trees in blossom, and grass swaying in the breeze.
What I dream is a beautiful picture,
No hospitals, just health,
No poverty, just wealth.
I have a dream.

Flowering shrubs, ladies and gentlemen! Flowering shrubs.

Yesterday the boys and I made our 5th Annual Copley Gingerbread House. I’d like to say that after doing this so many years in a row this project is old hat and we crank it out quickly and easily, but I would be lying. Lying like a rug! In fact, I think this was the hardest year yet!

As usual, I used the Wilton gingerbread house kit. It comes with pre-baked pieces, instant royal icing  and an assortment of candy for decorating. I supplemented with a bag of assorted hard candy, a box of candy canes and a bottle of Christmas light sprinkles (I’ll use the other sprinkles in the kit for cookies or lunches). In retrospect, I wish I’d bought some gumdrops too because I really like how they look on a gingerbread house and the kids ate almost all the ones that came with the kit before we started decorating.

I had two big problems putting the house together this time. The first problem was that I read the directions wrong and I assembled the house wrong. Instead of putting the side walls just inside the front and back walls, I put them outside. When it came time to put the roof pieces on (after I’d let the walls dry for 3 hours — argh!) there was a big gap between the roof and the top of the walls. I ended up covering the gaps with candy cane pieces, so I think I hid it pretty well, but it was hard to get them to stay there and it was a big pain in the patoot.

The icing was my other big problem. I made the icing and assembled the house one day and we decorated the next. I stored the icing in a plastic icing bag overnight and I even covered the tip with a wet cloth but it dried out a bit anyway. By the next morning it was really hard to work with. I ended up taking it out of the bag and mixing in a bit of water to thin it but I didn’t realize I’d thinned it too much until I’d already put it back in the bag. Grrrr! So I had to take it back out and add some powdered sugar to thicken it. It was still a little runny when I tried again, but by then I was really frustrated and the kids were whacked out on sugar from stuffing so much candy in their mouths so I just made the best of it.

I’m pretty happy with how our house came out this year, but it’s not really my favorite one we’ve made. (That would be 2008 with the icicles and Santa in the chimney.)

Here’s the thing: I don’t really make a gingerbread house for my kids. I let them participate because they think it’s fun and I’m a good sport who loves them, but really I do this because I think it’s fun. When they were younger, I could railroad them into making the house exactly they way I wanted, but now that they’re getting older they have their own ideas. And since they’re young, their ideas aren’t always as good as mine would be so the house doesn’t come out as nice as I would like.

Do I sound like a jerk? Yes. But I think all you crafty parents out there know exactly what I’m talking about.

My favorite feature of the house this year is this little walkway I made. I smashed some of our hard candy in a baggie with a rolling pin, then sprinkled it onto some frosting that I spread out on the board. If it were a real sidewalk, it would cut your feet up, but it looks good, right?

I also love, love, love the Christmas light sprinkles. This is the second year in a row I’ve put these on and I think I’m going to look for them every year going forward!

Want to read more from me about gingerbread houses? Here are some of my older posts:

• Five Tips for Decorating a Gingerbread House with Kids
• Gingerbread House 2010
• Gingerbread House 2008
• Gingerbread House 2007

Do you make gingerbread houses?

We’ve been having a pretty great December so far. Somehow we’ve managed to pack a bunch of fun stuff in while also keeping it pretty low-key. I’m not sure how things are working out like that, but I’ll take it. A lot of the stuff we’ve been doing are activities from the advent calendar but it’s been spread out with just a little bit happening each day, which is nice.

I also bought a new Hipstapack (the Foodie SnapPak) for the Hipstamatic app on my phone and I finally took 5 minutes to get my Instagram account set up (my user name is wendolonia if you want to follow me). So now I’m in another grungy photo phase and have been taking tons of pictures with my phone instead of the good camera. Be forewarned.

So here are a few of the things we’ve been up to:

Snowman Pancakes! I saw this idea from A Little Loveliness on Pinterest a few weeks ago and couldn’t wait to make them for the kids. That jaunty bacon scarf! It kills me every time I look at it. So last Saturday I decided to surprise the kids with these pancakes. After I started making the pancakes, they turned into terrible little brats — bickering, hitting each other, screaming, getting into things they’re not supposed to touch, making enormous messes — and they did not deserve cute snowman pancakes, but I wanted to make them so I plowed ahead. When I served breakfast their response was underwhelming. One complained that his brother’s piece of bacon was bigger and whined because he doesn’t like chocolate chips. The other only ate his chocolate chips and bacon and threw his marshmallows on the floor. I found myself hissing, “Eat your snowman pancakes!” through clenched teeth.

Yay. Fun breakfast treat.

Our Christmas tree has been a much bigger success. We bought a too big tree from our local grocery store and had a bit of trouble getting it set up in the stand so it didn’t fall over. We also had to remove multiple pieces of furniture from our teeny, tiny living room to get it to fit.

But the kids were so excited about it and were super enthusiastic about decorating it. They even agreed to pose for a nice photo in front of the tree!

Last year Santa put these crazy glasses that make the lights look like cool shapesin our stockings and we have all been loving them. The boys and I spent over an hour trading glasses, doubling them up and running around the house looking at all our lights with them. I put the Santa pair over the lens of my camera and got a pretty good representation of what you see.

The fireworks pair was even more spectacular! We’ve decided we need to bring them along the next time we drive around looking at holiday light displays.

I’ve been drinking my tea out of our Santa mugs every morning, which just makes me happy.

Augie and I also spent an afternoon cutting snowflakes out of paper. He’s a talented three-year-old, don’t you think?

OK, OK — those are mine. Just curiously, would anyone be interested in a snowflake cutting tutorial? There are a lot out there already, so I’m not sure the world needs another.

On Monday, I took the boys to a favorite bakery after school for a surprise cookie and hot chocolate date. Augie was super cranky about the whole thing.

But Wyatt was into it and managed to turn Augie’s mood around. I love these occasional instances of fantastic-ness in their relationship. They’re relationship is a see-saw and it feels like it can go either way at any moment.

We made our favorite cream cheese spritz cookies. The boys helped at all stages which was great fun though the sprinkle stage got a little out of hand at one point. I’m still finding green sugar in various nooks and crannies of our kitchen days later.

And yesterday we took a little time to make some cards for our friends who moved away last summer. I just plopped some stickers, scissors and Christmas-themed paper on the table and let them go at it. The kids were unusually excited to craft and their cards were terrific and funny and creative.

And while they worked on their projects, I made this scrapbook page using the photos you see in this post!

What have you been doing this December?

One of the activities I put on our advent list this year was an idea that came from Family Fun magazine: create a snowscape with shaving cream. My kids had no idea what that meant when they pulled the little card out of the box but they were pretty excited once they figured it out.

I put out a cookie sheet for each kid, gave them each a selection of Imaginext guys, and made them take off their shirts. (That last one was a good move.) Then I sprayed a pretty good size layer of cheap shaving cream all over Augie’s tray. Once the kids saw what I was doing, they each wanted a turn with the can.

The idea with the toys was that they could make the guys ice skate, or sled or just generally play in the snow.

I’d even taken extra care to pull a Bat-snowmobile out of the toy box…

And penguins! But neither of the kids ended up using the shaving cream as snow.

It was interesting to watch them because I could tell they knew this was supposed to be fun, but they were also kind of baffled about what they should do.

And at first, they did not like getting the shaving cream on their hands. Wyatt probably got up to wash his hands three times in the first five minutes. Augie just wiped them on his tummy which he didn’t mind for some reason. I guess one’s feelings about shaving cream touching them aren’t always logical.

I gave them some rubber spatulas to play with and that’s what got the ball rolling. They swiped and wiped and squooshed the cream up into big mountains. They buried their toys and dug them out again.

And pretty soon they overcame their distaste for having shaving cream on their hands!

They were busy with this for about an hour or so but I’m not going to lie — clean-up was a total pain. Shaving cream sticks to everything and doesn’t easily rinse out of the tiny nooks and crannies on little toys. And despite the cookie sheets, quite a bit of the cream made it onto the table. There was a sizeable amount on tummies and jeans too. I let Augie wash the toys for a bit which he just thought of as a new variation on the game and Wyatt only complained a little about wiping the table off four times. So despite the hefty clean-up time we all thought this was a big, fun success!

Does your family play with shaving cream? Any tips to minimize the mess?

I love decking out our living room with all sorts of holiday swag, but the decorations that bring me the most joy are our Christmas tree ornaments. I think themed trees are beautiful, but for me the best ornaments are sentimental. I’ve been collecting our ornaments little by little for years and I try to select each one for a specific reason. A wagon for Wyatt because he loved his Radio Flyer so much. A trike for Augie the year he learned to ride. That sort of thing.

It makes me so happy to unpack each ornament and remember a little something about our family as I hold it in my hand. I like to tell my kids the stories as we work on the tree and I think they enjoy hearing them too. Here are a few of my favorites:

Fimo Santa

Back when I was single and living by myself, I had lots and lots of time for crafting. In 1996 I made everyone in my family Santa ornaments out of Fimo. The face was cut from a carefully assembled millefiori face cane and then I added the hat and beard. I made something like 15 of these and it took me weeks!

Sparkly Pyramid

This is one of the ornaments I made for my very first Christmas tree. I bought a four foot tree from the drugstore near my house and dragged it home across a super busy street because I didn’t have a car to strap it to! This ornament is modeled after a similar one that my parents have on their Christmas tree that they made for their first Christmas together.

Paper Clay Hand-prints

I made these hand-print ornaments for the boys’ first Christmases. I made quarter inch thick rounds out of paper clay, inked each kid’s hand up with red ink and then pressed them into the clay. After they were set, I stamped their names and the dates with tiny little letter stamps. These make me feel all gushy inside.

Spock Ornament

Zach and I bought this Spock ornament at the Star Trek exhibit in Las Vegas shortly before we were married. We went with a big group of our friends and had an excellent fun time. To say that Zach likes Spock is an understatement, so the choice to get this one was a no-brainer.

Tin Toy Flying Saucer

This is one from our very first married Christmas! Again we chose this one because of Zach’s love of aliens. The legs retract when you pull on the string to hang it up.

Camel Ornament

I bought this one a few years after my trip to Egypt to remind me of…er…my trip to Egypt. Yeah, it would have probably had a little more sentimental value if I’d actually bought it in the market in Cairo, but not every ornament has to has to be purchased in the time associated with it. I’ve decided I can assign sentiment to objects after the fact too.

Now I’d love to know, how do you spread real cheer with your holiday decorating? Show me with your photos! Click “Add me” in the Cheer Tree below to upload your holiday decorating photos and share them with your Twitter followers and Facebook friends. Be sure to click on “Special Offers” to unwrap the hidden coupons and deals exclusively from Sears. Keep checking throughout the holidays–new deals are unlocked every day! For all your holiday decorating needs and solutions, don’t forget to visit Sears and discover real deals, real cheer!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Sears. The opinions and text are all mine.

In the last few years, it’s become apparent that I’m a little bit crazy for advent calendars. So far this year, I have three lined up! I say “so far” because sometimes one of the kids’ grandmas or someone will send them an advent calendar too. I say: Bring ‘em on!

Advent calendars weren’t a fixture of my childhood, but they did make an occasional appearance. I always like the ones with chocolate, of course, but my favorite advent calendar of all time was a paper one from Germany with beautifully drawn pictures behind each door.

This year, like last year, I bought Wyatt LEGO advent calendar. We all thought last year’s was awesome so when I heard they were releasing a Star Wars version it was a given that one would be coming into our house. Augie is still a bit young for the LEGO calendars so I bought him an Imaginext advent calendar that’s a little more his speed. These toy-based calendars come out of the budget for the kids’ gifts and they’re one of my favorite things to give them because they get almost a full month of play and happiness from them.

My favorite advent calendar is our activity advent calendar. I tried this for the first time last year and it was great for a few reasons. First off, it helped us all focus on the fun of doing things rather than getting things. It also helped me pace myself a bit. I’m occasionally prone to going crazy and trying to jam a whole bunch of fun into a short period of time. By selecting just one Christmas-y activity per day, I kept myself from going overboard and getting burned out on holiday fun well before Christmas day.

Here is my list of activities for this year:

1. Assemble paper Christmas train.
2. Assemble paper Christmas village.
3. Bake Christmas cookies and decorate them.
4. Build Christmas sculptures with Legos.
5. Create a snowscape with shaving cream and action figures.
6. Cut snowflakes out of paper.
7. Decorate the Christmas tree.
8. Decorate the gingerbread house
9. Do some Christmas Mad Libs.
10. Donate to the school food drive.
11. Draw pictures of fun Christmas activities we’ve done.
12. Eat dinner by candlelight.
13. Go out to look at Christmas lights after dark.
14. Go outside with blankets to look at the stars.
15. Have a bubble bath
16. Have a family dance party
17. Have breakfast for dinner (I’ll make Snowman Pancakes. So freaking cute!)
18. Have hot chocolate with all the fixings
19. Make a card for a loved one and send it in the mail.
20. Make gifts for teachers.
21. Make ornaments for the tree (I’m thinking salt dough ornaments.)
22. Purchase a present for Toys for Tots.
23. Read a Christmas book together.
24. Recycle some toys to share with others.
25. Set up the Christmas tree.
26. Sing Christmas songs while dad plays the guitar.
27. Tell everyone in our family why you think they’re cool at dinner.
28. Watch a Christmas movie before bed.
29. Write a letter to Santa.
30. Write a list of 5 things you are thankful for this year.

A lot of these activities are things we do every year  and some are ideas I’ve collected online (sources: Kiddley, Kid’s Craft Weekly, Family Fun and Ali Edwards). I repeated a lot of the activities from the list I came up with last year, but I’ve added a few more and removed some of the ones that just didn’t work for us. I don’t really schedule the activities in advance and I’ve put more than 24 activities on the list so I have the flexibility to choose things that fit with our schedule from day to day. I also anticipate adding fun ideas and events in as I hear about them. For example, last year a local organization trucked snow into a parking lot and I quickly added playing there as our activity on the day I heard about it.

We use this little advent house thingy that I got on sale at Target a few years ago for our advent calendar. Last year, I just wrote the activities on little pieces of paper but since we’re repeating so many this year, I decided to make something I could print out year after year! And while I was at it, I decided to make it cute. And since I did all that work anyway, I thought I’d share them with you so you can download them and print them out for your advent calendars if you like.

Page 1:

Download Advent Activities Page 1

Page 2:

Download Advent Activities Page 2

(These were made with the Echo Park Holly Jolly Christmas Elements #1 pack purchased from JessicaSprague.com)

Just print these out (they look great on photo paper) and then cut the squares apart with scissors or a paper cutter. Not every activity will appeal to every family, of course, so I’ve included five blank spaces on each sheet so you can write in your own activities. I’ll be using these for impromptu activities myself.

Is your family going to have an advent calendar this year? Are you planning anything fun?

At some point in junior high or high school, I became really interested in learning how to sew with my mom’s sewing machine. My mom took the time to walk me through the basics of how to use it, but she didn’t have much time to spare beyond that, so she set me loose to learn on my own. When I asked her for a place to start, she told me, “I learned to sew by making Barbie clothes. Why don’t you experiment by making some doll clothes?” So, armed with a bag of fancy scrap fabrics and a couple of glamorous 80′s Barbies, I set to work.

Most of the clothes I made at first were glorified tubes. Who am I kidding? Just about all of the clothes I made were tubes! But after awhile I got bored, so I started to jazz my tubes up with some interesting details. Let’s take a look at some of the fancier outfits:

This was my first foray into applique (though at the time I didn’t know that’s what it was called). I cut a rectangle of yellow taffeta along with a bunch of random geographic shapes. Then I meticulously turned the edges of shapes under using my fingers (No iron! Yikes!) and machine sewed them onto the rectangle. I finished the skirt off by sewing it into a tube and then made a little boat neck top to go along with it.

This next outfit seems to be the project I used to teach myself about ruffles and pleats. the skirt is a simple tube (see? I told you!) with a wide ruffle added to the bottom. I’m pretty sure I had a skirt like this at the time.  The top is a boxy v-neck with a quarter inch pleat all along the bottom. I finger-pleated this baby, too! No iron! Look at me with my crazy self.

This sequined mini skirt is a very special tube. Why is it so special? Because I hand-sewed every freaking one of those sequins on that skirt, that’s why! It took me forever. I worked on it for a few minutes every night after I finished my homework and I did a fabulous job, if I do say so myself. Granted, it hasn’t been handled very much in the mean time, but 25+ years later not a single sequin has fallen off. That, my friends, is quality craftsmanship! It is also the reason why I’ve never sewn a sequin on any garment since then.

And finally, I want to show you how I loosened garments that were too tight to fit over Barbie’s excessively wide hips. (Kidding!) Instead of measuring Barbie and the fabric as I was cutting dresses out, I always just eyeballed everything. So sometimes after I finished a dress it didn’t quite fit and I couldn’t get it on the doll. Usually I didn’t leave enough seam allowance to let anything out, so instead of discarding the dress,  I just attacked it with a seam ripper. This gold lame number  — so very pretty and reminiscent of Solo in the Spotlight from the front — needed it’s seam ripped in an unfortunate place.

Poor Barbie! How embarrassing!

How did you learn to sew? Did you make clothes for your dolls? Did you ever inadvertently make them look like sex workers like I did?

Remember last month how I told you I was going to make a special project for my 4oth year? Well, I’ve been busily working on it and I thought it was time to give you an update on my progress. I’ve been jotting down notes about stories I want to add to this book as I think of them, digging through boxes and adding bits and pieces here and there for the last month. I’m not really working on it every day like I’d hoped I would, but I’m still pretty happy with how much I’ve accomplished already.

Here are the pages I’ve completed:

This page has:

• a photo of me with my second cousin when I visited Europe in 1997 and a little story about a song I heard everywhere on that trip.
• an essay about my Starbucks problem
• a photo of me with braids in Hawaii a few years ago (I alway braid my hair on vacation when my hair is long enough)
• a picture of my feet from this summer
• a story about winning the book fair costume contest when I was Wyatt’s age (I’ve gotta find the picture that goes with it)
• a self portrait from earlier in the month.

UPDATE: After my dad saw this blog post, he dug out a picture of me in my Cat in the Hat costume and sent it to me, so I slipped that into the photo above the journaling card:

Man, I sure was cute! (And kind of surly looking.)

On this page:

• stuff about tomatoes
• a few recent Facebook status updates
• a note about one of my favorite end-of-the-day activities
• an insert from one of the series 5 Lego minifigs I bought recently
• a love letter to my mixer
• and a postcard from Iowa, my homeland.

One thing I’ve found as I’m working on this book: it’s way easier to find vertically-oriented things to stick in the pockets than it is to find horizontally oriented stuff. A lot of the printable cards and journaling prompts and most of the photos of myself that I’ve found are vertical so I’ve had to go out of my way to take horizontal photos and create journaling blocks in the landscape configuration.

Here are some more detailed photos of the pages above:

Here you can see:

• a photo of my messy desk.
• a bit about an album that was part of the soundtrack to my young adulthood and some of the memories that brings back
• the back of the Lego insert
• a photo of my new haircut
• a list of my favorite beverages
• some stuff about my besties who are far away.

And finally this page has:

• a bit about letterboxing and the stamp I carved last night
• a photo of me drinking a huge vodka and orange juice on my 19th birthday (shhhhh!) — this was one of a stack of tags I made a few years ago that was intended to be made into a sort of mini-version of this book. It was a little too small for the pocket, so I mounted it on a piece of coordinating paper and slipped that in the pocket. I’ll be adding the rest of these pages in too.
• a few little notes about my childhood nickname, my senior photo and my husband coming home from a trip
• a list of suggested pre-college reading that I tackled my pre-college summer. I highlighted all the books I read on the list as I completed them and kept at it all through college. Sad fact: I’ve only crossed two books off this list since I graduated in 1994!
• a photo of my best friends and me at our high school graduation.

So far I’m really happy with how this is coming together. I feel like I’m hitting a good balance of photos, memorabilia, stories from my past, trivia and stuff from my current life. I’d like to add a few of the bigger stories of my life still, but if I can keep this up, I’ll have a pretty good summary of who I am I think.

• My 40th Year Project
• Update: 40th Year Project
• 40th Year Project: Part 3
• 40th Year Project: Part 4

Wyatt turned seven years old yesterday and we had a Star Wars birthday party for him on Saturday to celebrate. This was the first time he’s had a “friends” party at our house and it went really well. I think the kids (and I!) all had a really good time! Here are some of the details:

Invitations

I made the invitations myself and I was super happy with how they turned out. In fact, this might have been my favorite thing I made for the party. The Clone Trooper was from an official Clone Wars desktop wallpaper that I downloaded (unfortunately, I can’t find the original source, but I’m pretty sure it was from lucasarts.com). I cut him out, flipped him and resized him to fit the card. I used a free font called Star Jedi for the Star Wars-y looking headers.

I’d love to make this available as a download, but because I used a copyrighted character, I’m pretty sure it’s not legal to do so. From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s OK to do something like this for personal use, but not OK to distribute it.

Activities

I planned three main activities for the party. The first was a craft project where the boys assembled paper Star Wars characters. I printed and cut the figures out before the party to save time and then coached the boys through the process of folding and taping the figures. It was a little tricky for some of them but we managed to make it work. The figures we used can be found here:

• Yoda
• C3PO
• Boba Fett
• Storm Trooper
• Darth Vadar

The highlight of the party for the boys were these homemade light sabers. I saw a lot of suggestions online to use pool noodles but they are almost impossible to find in late September so I had to search out a substitute. I finally found the brilliant suggestion to use pipe insulation on the fowlerfam blog. I bought six 6-foot tubes at Home Depot for about a dollar a piece and cut them down to a manageable length. Then I decorated the ends with duct tape and colored electrical tape.

I had planned to bring these out in the last hour or so of the party but Wyatt announced that we had light sabers in the first five minutes so I handed them out right at the beginning. The boys loved them and immediately started wailing on each other. In fact, they were hitting each other so hard that I felt like I needed to double-check that the light sabers weren’t hurting the kids. They assured me that they didn’t hurt at all though so I let them carry on.

I had also planned to have the kids play a couple games of tag but they were having so much fun with the light sabers that I couldn’t tear them away. The first tag game I had planned was Star Wars Tag, a variation on TV tag where you can prevent the person who is It from tagging you by yelling out the name of a Star Wars character and touching the ground. The other game was Dark Side Tag. In this game, one person is selected to be Darth Vadar. When Darth tags someone, that person has to “join the Dark Side” by linking arms with the person who tagged him. As more people are tagged, the blob of kids who are It gets bigger and bigger. I thought they would be fun, but alas! — it wasn’t meant to be.

Cake

The idea for Wyatt’s light saber cake came from Make and Takes. I baked a batch of cupcakes, then frosted some with grey frosting and others with green frosting and arranged them in a line.

Wyatt wanted red velvet cupcakes, so I baked up a batch with Martha’s recipe. While I was putting them together, he asked if I could make them green instead, so I swapped in green food coloring for the red called for in the recipe.

They stayed really green even after baking, which looked pretty cool. The boys labeled them “Yoda cupcakes” and made a number of jokes about Yoda’s butt being an ingredient. Not to surprising coming from a group of 7 and 8 year olds.

We also served “Milenneum Falcon” pizzas (just regular pizzas with a silly name) and “Yoda Sodas”. The Yoda Sodas were lime sherbet and Sprite floats. The kids were doubtful at first but once they tasted them, they were won over.

My big takeaways from this party:

1. Star Wars parties are really easy to put together because there are so many fantastic ideas out there on the internet already. The hardest part is picking your favorites.
2. If you give 10 little boys foam light sabers they will whack each other with them for 2 hours straight and will only stop to eat if you make them.

How about you? Have your thrown a Star Wars party? What fun stuff did you do for it?