Do It Yourself – Page 8 – 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.

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)

Canning Applesauce

I’ve talked before about my love of making applesauce from scratch, but can you believe I’ve never canned applesauce before?!

In fact, I’ve never canned any food before! Despite our intention to cook most meals from scratch, I make each component from scratch each time we cook. What a waste of time!

This past week, with friends guiding the way, I discovered how easy canning can be!

Here’s how we made our applesauce:

We gathered and washed lots and lots of apples.

(How lucky are we to get free apples from our friends with fruit trees in their backyard?!)

We cut out obvious worm holes, but ignored bruises, and piled whole apples into stock pans filled with some water. We brought the water to a boil, lowered the heat and then simmered the apples until they were mushy.

(We’ve found the applesauce tastes much more flavorful when using whole apples, so resist the urge to peel them!)

We then used a food strainer to process the apples. Alternatively you could use a food mill.

We all took turns turning the handle on the food strainer. This is definitely an instance of the more the merrier. After all, many hands make light work!

We filled sterilized jars with the applesauce, covered the jars with Tattler reusable canning lids (BPA free!), and boiled them in a water bath to seal the jars.

What fun we had working together! It feels so good to use your hands and make something incredibly delicious.

I now am eager to put up more: preserves, condiments, salsas, sauerkraut, and, of course, more applesauce before apple season is over.

Next summer we are going to can jars and jars of blackberry jam. Nom nom nom!

Picking a New Roof Color For the Dollhouse

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.

We spent yesterday in negotiations over what color we should paint the dollhouse roof.

To refresh your memory, here is the current state of the roof:

Originally I wanted to go with a sage green (mostly so we could use the leftover paint to repaint our kitchen chairs; you know, have a two-for-one type project). Our daughter wanted purple. We decided to do a quick mock up with Photoshop to see what the roof might look like.

Good thing we did this mock up because neither of us liked the colors we had originally picked!

We ended up agreeing, fittingly enough, on a color that’s a variation on the red roof we already have: the Red Delicious color that’s part of the Land of Nod collection by the non-toxic paint company (and locally available), Mythic Paints, shown above as #6.

What do you think? What would you have picked?
(If it were only up to me, I would have gone with #1. Love that magenta!)