In Which the Key to Happiness is Raclette (and Twinkle Lights!)

There were a couple of new-to-me festive holiday activities that I wanted to try this year, because after all, what is Christmas without a glut of too many holiday activities? The Christmas tree farm and five Nutcracker performances and White Christmas Family Movie Night and one or two Krampus street festivals clearly aren't enough to sustain one. If one is truly serious about thoroughly exhausting oneself re: Christmas, one must ALSO drive over an hour each way to visit a Christmas market and walk the grounds of the art museum to see its light display!

I didn't really know beforehand what one does during a Christmas market, but happily we all arrived at Christkindlmarkt hungry, because to the best of my knowledge now, post-visit, what I *think* one does is stand around in the lines for various food stalls, then stand around and eat the food you bought, then walk past displays of nutcrackers and ornaments and those German wooden cut-out things for sale, then buy some more food and eat it.

The lines for all the food were super long, so we divided and conquered, with my partner and one kid standing in line for these weird spiral-cut deep-fried potatoes on a stick things, and me and the other kid standing in line for raclette sandwiches.

As the kid and I were standing at the end of the long line, she said something approximating, "Ugh, I'll be glad when we get closer to the raclette stand so we can get away from whatever this disgusting smell is."

I said, "Uhhhhh...."

If you don't like to smell gross things, I'm afraid that I have terrible news for you regarding raclette.

But look how festive it is!

This was my first raclette experience, as well, and checking out the view of the hyper-efficient raclette assembly was quite a lot of the fun:

But was it worth the wait (and the lingering scent of raclette)?

Friends, I only hope that I smile at my partner sometimes the way that I am smiling about this raclette sandwich:

And when the weird spiral fried potato on a stick envoy returned with weird spiral fried potatoes on a stick to eat along with my raclette sandwich?

Y'all, this may have been my most favorite culinary experience EVER. My previous most favorite culinary experience ever was the yogurt with Nutella and sour cherry spoon sweets that I ate for breakfast every morning on our 2017 Greece trip, but raclette sandwich and weird spiral potato on a stick now reigns supreme.

Who knows what even more delicious food the world might offer?

So... yeah. You stand in line to get stuff to eat, stand around and eat it, walk around to looky-loo at the pretty decorations and Christmas stuff for sale--

--and then stand in line to get something else to eat. To even out the sublime raclette experience, this Belgian hot chocolate was DISGUSTING. It tasted very... buttery? I'm terribly upset by the idea of drinking butter, and it turned out that so is everyone else, as it took the four of us splitting it to finish it off.

And no, don't ask why we didn't just toss it if none of us liked it. That requires far more common sense than any of us have. 

Fortunately, this crepe was delicious!

I had just about pushed through as many crowds as I felt like pushing through by the time we left to get to the Newfield's Winterlights. Every year the Newfield art museum puts up this light show on their grounds, and I'd finally reached a critical mass of Facebook friends posting about it to make my FOMO severe enough that I was willing to shell out genuine cash money for the purpose of looking at twinkle lights.

They WERE very pretty! 

My favorite was the landscape below, which was set up to twinkle along to music. When we walked up, it was just starting the Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and y'all KNOW how I feel about Nutcracker stuff this time of year!

I should have brought my DSLR, but my brain was in Quality Family Time mode instead of Cool Photography mode and I didn't think of it, dang it. So just imagine how awesome these shots *could* have been if I'd taken them with a proper camera instead of my at least five-models-outdated phone:

My other favorite spot at Winterlights was this pathway with the motion lights:

I am a sucker for motion lights! 

Christmas is VERY important to me, and every now and then, as the kids grow up, it hits me hard when I realize that they've outgrown one of our Christmas traditions. No more public library story times with Santa, no more Children's Museum winter exhibit (with yet another visit with Santa, ahem), no more doing a little Christmas activity or craft every single day in December. I don't even take the kids shopping anymore to pick out gifts, because they've got driver's licences and Amazon accounts!

One of the things that I had not anticipated, though, is how fun it actually is to try out new family activities as the kids grow. My little kids would not have had the patience to stand in a bunch of lines at Christkindlmarkt and eat a bunch of food and walk around and window shop, but my big kids love that kind of stuff... other than the overwhelming raclette miasma, of course. They would have enjoyed Winterlights even as little kids, but my partner and I would have spent all our own attention wrangling them and making sure they didn't wander off into the dark art museum grounds and didn't trip over extension cords or fall off decorative pedestrian bridges into tiny canals filled with twinkle lights, etc. Or maybe one kid would have been pitching a fit instead of just sulking quietly like a teenager. 

So I dunno. I'm still trying to find my way with these grown-up beings who used to be so small, but I think this was a pretty fair approximation of a holiday win. 

I do think that I can kind of still smell raclette, though...

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

December WIPs: Grapefruit, Cinnamon, Wool Felt, and College Application Essays

Nutcracker is finished, and Christmas is on the horizon! 

Here's what I'm currently working on, trying to finish, or at least determinedly not abandoning:

SUCCESSES

Look at that Mouse King army, all sewn and stuffed, labeled with ribbons that read "Team Mouse 2023," and ready to be wrapped and handed off to a corps of little mouselings!

I sewed these mini Mouse King stuffies from the Nutcracker stuffies fabric that my teenager designed a couple of years ago. I also sewed a complete set of the mini stuffies for the teenager so she could hang them on our Christmas tree... but it turns out that the performance casting document that the ballet department sent out to the parents omitted one kid's name from the Mouse corps, and therefore I was short exactly one Mouse King!

Obviously, the solution was to give that kid my own kid's ornament, lol.

So technically this remains a WIP, as my own teenager's set is short a Mouse King until I upload a fabric panel to Spoonflower that's all Mouse Kings, have it printed and sent to me, and then re-sew that stuffie for her. That's an AFTER Christmas project for Future Julie to enjoy...

Also in the realm of Still-But-Not-Really-A-WIP is the stocking that I sewed for my Girl Scout troop's Elf Project kid. I managed to sew it start to finish during my mending group's monthly Mending Day at our local public library--

--then the next day the troop met to wrap all the presents they'd bought for our sponsored kid and stuff this stocking. I just have to run out today and buy a couple last things, have my teenager wrap them, and then I can pack up everything and drop it off for the kid's caregiver to pick up before Christmas.

Also at that meeting, we made a pretty epic version of these gnomes, which required me to score some faux fur remnants from Joann's, dig through my fabric stash for the body and hats and noses, buy five pounds of rice, make a sample project, then walk five Girl Scouts through their own versions. We had to do some on-the-spot trouble-shooting when their bodies came out weird and none of us could figure out why, but eventually five ADORABLE gnomes are now all sitting fat and happy in five Girl Scout homes.

FAILURES

Unsurprisingly, I suppose, after all the extra holiday projects I put on my own plate, most of my November WIPs remain WIPs. I haven't even touched the skull quilt block or the weaving loom or the England travel journal since then. 

That kind of project is what the cozy, relaxed week between Christmas and New Year's Eve is for!

CURRENT WIPS

I called my teenager in to take a process photo of my hands kneading this cinnamon dough for an upcoming tutorial, and while she was at it she also took a photo of me fighting for my life to keep my fuzzy monster foot slippers (I bought these in 2019 and still wear them allll winter every winter!) out of the frame.

These grapefruit slices took a LOT longer to dehydrate than I thought they would. I think I cut them too thick?

My goal is to write tutorials for both of these projects for my next couple of freelance writing pieces, in the process making a nice winter dried grapefruit slice and cinnamon cut-out garland for my kitchen.

Y'all, I only have SIX MORE LETTERS to sew to complete my niece's hand-sewn wool felt moveable alphabet! They are turning out as cute as they can possibly be! I still need to sew a carrying bag, print and laminate some sight word cards to go with the set, write my niece a holiday letter, and then pack and mail it all off to her. Do you think a Saturday mailing is too late to get it to California by Christmas?

Other remaining tasks: finishing up one last handmade-ish Christmas present, keeping an eye out for the last of the family presents to trickle in and then wrapping them, helping/prodding the teenager to finish up college applications and her Gold Award proposal, and picking my college student up from Ohio after she finishes acing all of her final exams. 

After that, it's nothing but cookie baking, movie watching, gingerbread house decorating, and board game playing for the rest of the year. I can't wait!

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Make Upcycled Embroidered Cardboard Ornaments

 

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

Clean out your recycling bin and your floss stash to make embroidered cardboard ornaments!

I am very drawn to patterns and geometric designs, and I’m always looking for ways to incorporate them into my favorite crafts. These embroidered cardboard ornaments are an easy winner, because although they lend themselves very well to creating spirals, mandalas, and other mathematical designs, they also lend themselves very well to… well, anything!

So whether you’re obsessed with soothing symmetry like me, or you like to make your stitching free-form or representative, you can stitch the design of your dreams onto these embroidered cardboard ornaments. Here’s how!

To make embroidered cardboard ornaments, you will need:

• upcycled cardboard. I know that I usually have a recommendation, but for this project, both corrugated cardboard and food packaging-weight cardboard work equally well. I prefer corrugated cardboard for smaller embroidered cardboard ornaments, just because I think the additional width keeps them from getting lost on a Christmas tree. Thinner cardboard is easier to work with, though, and works well, I think, with more intricate designs that require a larger diameter of cardboard. I prefer thinner cardboard for all the ornament backings, but more corrugated cardboard would work, too.
• measuring and cutting tools. You’ll want scissors, of course, and something to trace to make the ornament form (for these ornaments, I used a Mason jar lid and a saucer). For wheel designs, you may want a divided circle template; two templates that I often use are linked here and here. To poke holes in the corrugated cardboard, use a safety pin or thumbtack.
• embroidery floss and tapestry needle. A tapestry needle has a blunt tip, which will keep you from poking holes that you don’t want to poke through the cardboard. It’s also useful for stitching plastic canvas or cardstock. Even cheap cotton embroidery floss works perfectly for this project, but my favorite embroidery floss actually comes from my local thrift shop!
• tape and hot glue. You’ll use both on the backside of your ornament, so that nothing shows on the front but your beautiful stitching!
• ornament hanger. Ribbon, more embroidery floss, yarn, or anything that you have on hand!

Step 1: Trace and cut an ornament template.

Find a circle template, anything from a jar lid to a ceramic saucer, and trace it onto cardboard. Cut it out with sturdy scissors.

To make ornaments with radial symmetry, you’ll probably want to mark divisions around your cardboard circle. You can actually eyeball this up to a fairly high number! But it’s also not cheating to use a template. I use my DIY circle template to divide my cardboard circle into twelve, and I use the templates linked here to divide it into 50 or 100.

With these cardboard ornaments, you DO have to pre-punch the holes you want to stitch through. Sometimes, I just cut eensy little slits or notches around the edges of thinner cardboard. With corrugated cardboard, or in the middle of either kind, use a safety pin to poke holes where you want to stitch.

Step 2: Embroider the cardboard ornament.

Thread your needle, and either tie a knot at the end of the embroidery floss OR tape it down on the backside of the ornament.

Embroider your ornament however you’d like. When you reach the end of the floss or you want to change colors, tape the end of the floss to the back of the ornament.

The tape won’t show, and will keep the embroidery floss super snug on the front of the ornament. Nobody wants saggy embroidery!

Step 3: Add a backing to the ornament.

When your embroidery is complete, add a backing to hide the ugly side of the stitching.

But first, hot glue an ornament hanger to the backside of the ornament. I like ribbon, but yarn, twine, more embroidery floss, or anything that you have on hand is fine.

Cut another cardboard circle (I prefer thin cardboard for this) the same size as the first one. Hot glue it to the back of the ornament to hide the rough edges of the ornament hanger and the ugly side of your stitching.

You can also embroider this back piece, or write a name and date, or really just embellish it however you’d like. Or not! I personally like the look of the plain cardboard back to contrast with the fancy embroidered front.

I know I said that mathematical designs are my favorite, but any simple embroidery pattern works well for this project. Monograms are super cute, and a Google search will reveal all sorts of inspiring holiday patterns and other cute designs. Feel free to also experiment with floss weight, or even to switch to yarn for younger crafters or thread for making intricate, detailed designs.

If you prefer crafting with natural materials, get out the drill, because you can also embroider wood slices!

A Weekend Trip Was Planned in Community By Many Teenagers, and It Went Great!

The rule is that when you see your name in the wild, you take your picture together.

I have a folder where I keep TikToks that remind me of myself, and this is one of them:

To be fair, I can make a 17-page Google Doc for a weekend trip, but travel planning IS a lot! Budgeting, transportation, reservations, lodging, food, parking, wi-fi access, juggling the preferences of various travelers... yikes! 

Travel planning is a skill that my Girl Scout troop practices regularly, and it's been wonderful to watch how they've grown in this ability. Complicating the planning is the requirement that they also plan in community, taking into consideration each of their preferences, working through disappointment, developing their willingness to compromise. It's also really fun to see the kinds of things that they plan, because it's often stuff that wouldn't occur to me. Axe-throwing as an activity was an idea only very narrowly defeated when they planned a recent weekend trip, and only then because we can apparently throw axes more cheaply in our hometown--who knew?

So we didn't throw axes, but we DID do just about everything else that's fun to do on this recent holiday weekend trip.

FRIDAY

My Girl Scout troop has done our fair share of camping, but somehow we've never gone cabin camping... and it turns out that I LOVE it! Indoor toilets and showers! Hot water! Central heating! A refrigerator! A stove! Long tables to spread out across! There were something like 36 mattresses awaiting my six campers upon our arrival, so the kids immediately occupied themselves with creating an elaborate fort wonderland with elevated platforms to lounge on and private sleeping cubbies for each person. 

Seriously, it was epic. I NEVER sleep during troop camping trips, and yet this trip I slept all night, every night! Turns out all I needed was a mattress on the floor in a warehouse-looking group cabin.

The only downside to cabin camping is that I. Packed. EVERYTHING. I packed the crockpot. I packed the electric kettle. I packed cutting boards and knives and mixing bowls and measuring cups and parchment paper. I packed the beeswax crockpot and five pounds of beeswax and a jar of coconut oil and the teacups in case kids wanted to make more teacup candles (they did), and the rolled beeswax sheets and x-acto knives and cutting mat and heat gun in case they wanted to make taper candles (they didn't), and all the Model Magic and Sculpey clay in case they wanted to make clay pendants (they did), and watercolors (nope), and greeting card blanks and markers (yep), and the woodburner and wooden spoon blanks (also yep), and the hot glue gun and paracord and large-format drawing paper. I packed so much in the car that I could barely transport actual Girl Scouts--I MISS our giant minivan that could seemingly hold an infinite number of kids!

For Friday night dinner, I pre-made a double batch of my favorite pizza dough, then divided it into plastic baggies so each person could make their own personal pizza on site. The kids were supposed to each bring a favorite pizza topping to share but most of them forgot, so it was cheese and/or pepperoni pizzas for everyone!

In the evening, the kids worked on the Outdoor Art badge at their level (Theme: Christmas crafts!), while we listened to music and chatted. They prepped a breakfast casserole for the morning and put it in my crock pot, then hung out, gossiped, played games, and just generally had themselves a lovely evening together. 

SATURDAY

We were up and at 'em early on this morning, eating crock pot breakfast casserole and packing up for a day out and about. 

First up: a glassblowing workshop!

Each kid and both chaperones got to make a blown glass ornament from scratch:

I took OMG SO MANY photos of each kid making their ornament--because come on, how many times in your life are you going to go glassblowing? You need a full record of the occasion!--so then when it was my turn, my kid took my phone and made a full record of me, too!

I am very proud of my beautiful handblown glass ornament!

After glassblowing, we took the amazing opportunity of most of the troop being in the same place at the same time to get most of the shopping done for the four children we'd adopted for Christmas. The kids paired up and did the shopping for each of the older three children, while my co-chaperone and I had an absolute blast shopping for the baby. We consulted with the patrols pretty often to help them stay on track and make sure everything was about even for the recipients, but the kids did an awesome job with the shopping. Each child received a warm blanket, a complete outfit including socks, shoes, and undies, several toys, including some of the things they'd specifically requested, a book, and some snacks. The next week, another Girl Scout shopped for a car seat for the baby and I made each kid a personalized stocking. 

It was a whirlwind and not gonna lie, my nerves were a little frayed by the time we sat down in the ramen and crepes restaurant that the kids had chosen for lunch, but OMG was it a huge relief to have that HUGE task mostly taken care of! 

The Indianapolis Zoo has a yearly display of Christmas lights, so after our very late lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening at the zoo:

We left the zoo late, then went back to the cabin to have snacks/second dinner. The kids wrapped all of the presents they'd bought, discovered that we still needed to buy batteries for a toy and shoes for one child, did some more crafts, listened to more music, played more games, and had, I hope, as lovely a time as I did reading my book and hanging out peacefully.

SUNDAY

We got to have a leisurely morning on this day, and that meant waffles! Because yes, I did pack three waffle makers... The kids were also supposed to bring a favorite waffle topping to share, but again, most of them forgot. But fortunately, everyone likes blueberries and/or chocolate chips, and waffles are also delicious as-is, so it was fine.

The Girl Scout camp where we were staying has an old historic cemetery on site, with an accompanying fun patch program. You KNOW how I feel about old cemeteries, so indeed, I dragged all the kids on a hike to see this one, while the kids who were there the last time I dragged us to an old cemetery told everyone else horror stories of cemeteries under the lake and how long it takes bodies to decompose and the absolute lie that is "moving" a cemetery.

Gravestone rubbing is somewhat controversial, but this Girl Scout camp encourages it here, so my large-format drawing paper and my block crayons came in handy:

I think this was each kid's first time trying this activity, and they all seemed to enjoy it!

The other downside about cabin camping is that thanks to all the crap I brought, packing and loading the cars and cleaning the cabin took a LONG time. It wasn't hard, though, with so many hands to make the labor light. 

And once everything was squeaky clean and everyone had eaten their second and third lunches of sandwiches and chips and fruit (teenagers eat pretty much constantly, I don't know if you know), we were off to our reservation at a nearby cat cafe!

I REALLY want another cat, you guys. Can you each just please text me and tell me that I don't need another cat?

There had been a bit of controversy about our destination after the cat cafe. We knew we'd have about an hour-ish to kill before our dinner reservations, and I was a little reluctant to encourage the kids to plan another money-spending activity, but the kids couldn't seem to agree on what they wanted to do. Some kids thought it would be fun to wander around the art museum's outdoor campus, but other kids thought that would NOT be fun, ahem. Fortunately, that need for batteries and one more pair of shoes saved the day, because the bougiest Target I've ever seen was located just a couple of minutes from the dinner theater. So we went to Target, the kids finished their shopping, and then my co-chaperone and I let them wander around however they wanted for a while. Some kids finished up their personal Christmas shopping. Some kids hit up the in-store Starbucks. I, personally, browsed all the toys, because toys are amazing.

Our final event of the weekend was a genuine, honest-to-god dinner theater! This was another brand-new activity for some kids, and some kids even got to sit at their own table without chaperones, an activity some of them were well used to thanks to our troop trip to Mexico. Will and her personal bestie deigned to sit with me and my co-chaperone so we wouldn't be lonely, and for me it was a very precious chance to spend one last occasion with these two sweet kids together before Will leaves for college. 

Is there anything more exhausting than a weekend spent with teenagers? Probably not, but it was also an incredible amount of fun. And look what a wonderful job everyone did shopping for and wrapping all those gifts!

I was VERY excited to get all of that porch-dropped to their recipients so we could walk across the floor again!

As a whole, the weekend went great. The kids had a wonderful time together, a majority of kids loved each adventure, we had plenty of food, we didn't get snowed in, and there were absolutely no disasters. I barely had to get out my first aid kit! Next time, I seriously am going to print out that 17-page Shared Google planning doc, though, as even though most of the kids participated in planning the weekend, and some kids worked quite hard on the plans, nobody could seem to remember what came next on the itinerary. I was quickly so very over answering questions about what came next/what time some event was/when dinner was/what dinner was/where dinner was that I just kept the planning doc pulled up on my phone and anytime someone asked me a question whose answer was revealed within, I handed them the phone with the doc pulled up and let them research the answer themselves.

Next time I will print everything out and hand everyone their own folder with all pertinent information inside!