Carrie – Page 55 – The Creative Salad

Making Sugar Skulls

What could be more fun on a quiet Sunday afternoon than making sugar skulls in anticipation of our family’s Day of the Day celebration later in the week?!

Since we want to decorate our sugar skulls on Tuesday, we needed to make them ahead of time so they’d be fully dry before we adorned the sugar skulls with paint, feathers and sequins.

Here’s a simple sugar skull recipe for you to try at home.

Mix 1 cup sugar with 1 teaspoon merigue powder (available at Michael’s or your local cake decorating supply store) and 1 teaspoon water.

Mix fully with your hands until every granule of sugar is moistened (about five minutes).

Mound sugar mixture into the mold, scrapping off excess with the a knife to ensure the back of the mold is smooth and level.

Place a stiff piece of cardboard over the mold and immediately invert. Tap the top of the mold to release the sugar mixture onto the cardboard and carefully, slowly lift the mold off. Let air dry for eight hours or overnight.

In a few days, after the sugar skulls are fully dry, paint and decorate them with feathers, colored foil, and sequins.

Look for photos of our decorating activities here on the blog later in the week.

Note: even though this sugar skull recipe could be edible, it doesn’t taste good because of the decorations! In other words, this is a make but don’t eat project.

Looking for supplies to make your own sugar skulls? This website has everything you need including the skeleton bride and groom chocolate bar mold we used above.

Savoring the Fall Things

Discovering stars in apples,
climbing giant hay pyramids,
feeding baby animals,
collecting acorns and leaves,
amassing gourds,
taking crunchy walks,
cooking warming foods (such as the Brazilian cheese bread shown above),
creating artistic leaf activities,
loving autumn in wine country.

Dollhouse Sized Modern Seating

We’re restoring a family heirloom, the dollhouse made for my husband’s grandmother when she was a little girl. Click here to see all the posts about our Dollhouse Redux Project.

The mad dash for dollhouse furnishings has begun. While on a shopping trip in Berkeley we spied these adorable wire ornaments at CB2 that happen to be miniature modern chairs:

Costing $4 a chair, they are significantly less expensive than other modern chair options and super cute. Score!

Dollhouse DIY Decorating Inspiration

We’re restoring a family heirloom, the dollhouse made for my husband’s grandmother when she was a little girl. Click here to see all the posts about our Dollhouse Redux Project.

David’s been busy painting the dollhouse using Mythic zero-voc paint:

While the paint is drying, I thought I’d share some more fun dollhouse decorating ideas. Here are some DIY ideas that I find particularly inspiring:

Featured above:
1. HeyDay Living Dollhouse
I love the craft papered walls contrasted with the bright green paint, those framed little craft silhouette stickers and how she printed out the image of a chandelier from the internet and glued it to the wall. Brilliant!

2. Lonny Dollhouse
Elegant painted stripes. Couldn’t be much easier than that!

3. Lonny Magazine Feature
This particular photograph isn’t of a dollhouse, but a little girls room. I think giant, over-sized photographs of our daughter above a bed would be such fun in her dollhouse!

4 and 5. Atelier Dollhouse Project
Look at this intricate faux tile floor made with textured cardstock and paint! Love the finished product. Now would I have patience to work on that particular project? Maybe our daughter would. LOL!

(images obtained via Pinterest)

Record Player Tunes and Memories

Did you have a record player when you where a child? One of my treasured memories involves my sister and me dancing around the house while Beethoven’s Eroica played on our record player. We had many beloved records that we loved to listen to (more on that later!), but this particular one was our favorite. When we placed this record on the turner, we would transform into ballerinas and gracefully (dramatically!) bob and dance around the den, completely entranced by the music.

Our daughter now has her own record player (many thanks to the in-laws!) and is quickly forming special memories of her own. She can change and play the records entirely by herself (how empowering!). She can choose what she wants to listen to entirely on her own, selecting one of the dozens of records of children’s music that once belonged to her great grandmother, a nursery school teacher.

To my great surprise, I found that many of these records are familiar to me. I too owned them as a child. Imagine my delight at discovering that twenty years later I still remembered all the lyrics to…

Sesame Street Sing-Along,

Burl Ives’s The Best of Burl’s For Boys and Girls,

and, of course, the beloved Mary Poppins album staring Julie Andrews.

Do you remember these records from your childhood?