Strawflower and Thyme

September 4, 2015September 4, 2015 | Allison

Megan, my sister had a gorgeous strawflower blooming in her garden, so of course I had to take pictures of it. (See her beautiful pictures, and Willow-the-photo-bomber here.) I also have flowering thyme in my garden that I took pictures of with an interesting bug on it.

One more thing – can any of you spot the hidden animal in one of these pictures? (Hint: It’s not the spotted orange bug in the last picture, actually, it’s not in the last picture at all.) If want to inspect a picture more closely, just click on a picture to make it bigger. It might take a bit for the picture to load completely.

***Allison***

Make Your Own Game! Part 3: Game Pieces and Finishing Touches

September 3, 2015October 28, 2015 | Allison

Today I will finish up the Make Your Own Game Series with how to make game pieces and a box for your game to live in. Let’s start with game pieces.

I think the most unique and customizable pieces can be made with polymer clay. You can make them to go along with your theme, or just make an odd assortment of fun things, like I did. I would recommend, though, that you make your game pieces more one size than I did, just so they look more uniform.

There are lots of other options if you don’t want to use clay: use different colors of flat-bottomed clear pebbles, buttons with handles made from beads stacked together, small toys like toy cars or plastic animals, really you can use basically any small item that doesn’t roll off of the board.

It’s important to have a good box that keeps your game from getting bashed up when it’s on the game shelf, but also provides easy access to the game when you want to play it. (In other words, don’t use a deep, barely big enough box or it will be hard to take your game in and out.)

I found the perfect box for one of my games: it is shallow, easy to open, and sturdy. Unless the box has no writing or graphics on it, you will want to make a label to put on top. You could just draw the logo on the label, or take a picture of the actual game and paste it on. Make sure to draw the logo on all sides so you don’t see a blank side of the box from the shelf.

And there you go! Have your friends and family test it out, and maybe someday you will even publish your game!

Until next time…

***Allison***

Willow Eats Her Namesake (And Lily Is Jealous)

September 2, 2015December 2, 2015 | Allison

“One bunny salad coming up!”

Yumm. I, Lily, love a good bunny salad. Our mistresses always make them with the freshest and most delicious ingredients: crisp parsley, fresh dandelions, sunny marigold petals… As I joined Mango and Willow at the bowl, I sniffed in all the delicious smells.

Mango and Willow were already scarfing down the salad. Diamond joined us briefly, and then hopped off in search of… I don’t know. A piece of straw or something. She’s a strange bunny.

“Awww, look at Willow! She’s such a cute little flufferpuff!”

Grrr. They’re always talking about Willow. Ever since I got back from the fair it’s been the same story: Willow is the star of the show, the life of the party, and I’m always just in the background. I once had a good life – I was a model, a cherished pet… but now, that life is gone. I don’t even see what’s so cute about a rabbit so fluffy you can hardly see her face. And another thing: my mistress always goes on about how Willow is so easy to hold, where as I, on the other hand, always scratch when she picks me up. What’s wrong about a rabbit that has a little spirit? It disgusts me how Willow just lets herself be taken over by humans. Speaking of humans…

“Hey, let’s give Willow a willow branch!”

Look. Willow is eating her namesake. How cute… NOT! I couldn’t take this any more. I huffed over to a corner where I could think about the troubles in life in privacy. Joy the cat was snarling and growling over a piece of Willow fluff. Suddenly she turned and looked at me.

“What’s wrong with you, Lily? You seem to be in a foul mood lately.”

“Humph. I’m not in a foul mood.”

“Yes you are. Really, what’s eating you?”

“Uh… mosquitos? Nothing, Joy, it’s nothing.” I hesitated. “It’s just… it’s just that Willow gets so much attention and I don’t get any.”

“Ahhh,” purred Joy wisely. “Well, think ahead – someday you will be a mother of a fine litter of baby bunnies, and think how much attention you’ll get then.”

Hmmm, that was so. After all, I am a purebred New Zealand, and Willow is only a mixed breed. Someday I would be a proud mother rabbit, and she would still just be a pet.

I looked back at Willow. The humans had finally went away, leaving peaceful silence behind them. She looked, I don’t know, a little droopy. She hopped slowly over to me.

“Can I snuggle with you, Lily?” she asked wistfully. “I’m tired of being held.”

I didn’t answer. But Willow hopped over anyway, invading my space with her fluffiness.

She sighed, “I like snuggling with you. I love you, Lily.”

She looked up at me with her fluffy little face and my heart began to melt. She was awfully sweet. But how did I know she wasn’t just putting on a false front to get me under her paws? Finally, I sighed.

“You know Willow, I love you too. Even if you are cuter and cuddlier than me, and even though you do get more attention. I guess I don’t get much attention because I choose not to be cuddly. Maybe you could give me lessons sometime, how about it?” But Willow was already asleep, tired out from being cute and cuddly. “Sweet dreams, little flufferpuff,” I whispered, “sweet dreams.”

***Allison*** (With Lily and Willow)

The Amazing Chicken Egg

August 31, 2015February 14, 2016 | Allison

School starts for us this week, only it didn’t really start: we don’t have much time for school, because we have to gather eggs. 😦 We recently got a new flock of chickens for our chicken houses, and we have to weigh almost every egg they lay. And there are thousands of eggs per day. I’m not kidding. We have about 24,000 chickens right now and we have to gather about 16,000 eggs a day. That’s A LOT OF EGGS! And it takes A VERY LONG TIME to pick them each off of the conveyor belt, weigh the ones that might be too heavy or too light, and put them in egg flats. Thankfully our family only has to do it for about 3 hours a day, because we aren’t the only ones working there. (Speaking of family, my sister Megan made a post about the actual chicken houses and chickens over on her blog. See it here.)

Anyway… during all those hours we find some pretty strange chicken eggs. I’ll bet you never even knew that chickens could lay eggs like the ones I’m gonna show you, but I assure you, they do. All of these eggs were found in one of our 3 chicken houses, from the same breed of boring ‘ol white chickens. Shall we begin the science lesson for today?

Let’s start with size. There are big eggs, and there are small eggs. And then there are HUGE eggs and tiny eggs. Here are the two latter sizes together for comparison.

The big ‘ol guy weighed in at a hefty 4 oz. (The eggs you buy at the store are about 2 oz.) The tiny egg is only 0.2 oz.!

Now for shape. Some eggs are almost round, some are pointy. Some eggs are short, and some are long. Here’s a long one.

Eggshells are also different textures. There are a few wrinkly ones, a few warty ones, but mainly smooth ones. There are mostly hard-shelled eggs, but once in awhile we get a softshell one (or two).

Another strange one:

Not only are the eggs strange on the outside, but they can also be strange on the inside. Remember the huge egg in the first picture? This is what was inside it:

two yolks and a tiny softshell egg! I have never seen this before. Two yolks are pretty common – we call eggs with two yolks “doubles,” and those are mostly the eggs we eat. (Sometimes this is problem, like when you make a recipe that calls for 3 eggs. Uhhh, one and a half doubles? ☺) But I have never seen an egg with two yolks AND a softshell!

Here is a picture of what’s inside a double.

Pretty boring, right? But here is an egg I found already cracked open on the belt:

A softshell with another softshell inside it!

And last but not least, we have the triple. A fairly rare egg that has – can you guess? – three yolks.

The list could go on and on, but those are the only kinds I took pictures of, so I guess I’ll stop there. 🙂

So are you surprised or what? It’s astounding what diversity there is in one kind of chicken egg, let alone in the whole world. What an amazing God it took to create everything!

***Allison***

Woodland Birthday Party

August 30, 2015February 14, 2016 | Allison

My sister Megan’s birthday was yesterday! She chose to have a woodland themed party with hedgehogs as the “life of the party.” (Hee-hee!) I thought I’d go through the decorations for the party and how we made a few of them. (Megan didn’t especially want to do all the decorations, so I got to make most of them – hooray!)

The colors of the theme were green and brown. For the decorations, I hung up twirled green and brown streamers and green balloons.

I also drew and cut out some forest floor type things like toadstools, grasses, and pebbles. It would have been better to make the toadstools out of red paper, but we didn’t have any. 🙂

Meet Mr. Hedgehog, the gift guy. I designed him; Megan painted him. Megan also had the great idea to use him to show the guests where to put gifts.

The table was really fun to decorate. We got the tablecloth, plates, napkins, and cups at Party City (which was FUN, by the way!). My mom made the cute cake, I made the hedgehogs, and Megan made the labels for the “Dew Drops” (water) and “Twigs” (pretzel sticks). I found the ideas for twigs, dew drops (which was originally named “Morning Dew”), and hedgehogs from Pinterest.

Here’s a tutorial on how to make this cute little hedgehog for snacking on. (Poor guy!)

For one hedgehog you will need

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A pear

Whole, black olives

Grapes

Toothpicks

Whole cloves

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First, peel the top of the pear for the hedgehog’s head.

You can try sticking a whole olive on the tip of the pear, but it worked best for me to cut the olive in half.

Stick two whole cloves above the nose for eyes.

Now make him prickly! Skewer a grape onto a toothpick, then stick the toothpick into the unpeeled part of the pear. I put the skewered grapes on in rows. I started with a row next to the head, then progressed all the way back to give him the proper rounded shape.

Such a prickly little guy!

Now for the party favors. I like to make things out of polymer clay, so I made clay hedgehogs for favors, along with little bags to put them in. At the end of the party, the guests each got to “adopt a hedgehog.”

So there are a few ideas for a woodland party. I hope I’ve given you some inspiration! (And thanks for letting me decorate for you Megan!)

***Allison***

The “Favorite Meals” Planner

August 28, 2015 | Allison

Sounds exciting, right? A meal planner! Wahoo! Ok, maybe not so much. But this isn’t just your ordinary meal planner, it’s a way to keep track of your family’s favorite recipes, see how you modified the recipe, where it came from, and more, all at a glance. Let’s take a looksee, shall we?

Let’s use the chocolate pudding page for an example. (The pudding is delicious, by the way!) At the top we have the title of the recipe, then we have a dot with the category of the recipe (whether it is a main dish, side, dessert, etc.). The little book symbol shows where to find the actual recipe, whether it’s from your stash of 50 cookbooks, or collected from the internet. The little hearts show you how much your family likes the recipe – a little or a lot! My family rated the chocolate pudding 5 stars, er hearts. I told you it was good! The little wavy line underneath the hearts is where you’re supposed to write the date you first made it, but, uh, I couldn’t remember, so I just wrote a little wavy line. 🙂 Next we come to the notes section. This is where you write down any changes you made to the recipe, the best way to serve it, etc. And we’re finished with the tour! Here’s an example page just in case you didn’t catch everything.

Happy planning!

***Allison***

Tutorial: Personalized Name Photo Card

August 27, 2015 | Allison

Today I will show you how to make a name-letter-photography-accordion-card-thingy. Umm, let’s try that again. Today I will show you how to make a personalized name photo card. Much better. See, it’s this neat card that you accordion-fold, then paste pictures of letters onto it so… *sigh* this isn’t going too well. I guess I’ll have to show you a picture.

Ahh, there we go. That ↑ is what we’ll be making today. If you want to make another name or word besides “Grandaddy,” you may have to fold and assemble more or accordion folds, depending on the number of letters in the word. As you can see, “grandaddy” has nine letters (I know right, I can count all the way up to nine!) so I needed nine blank rectangular sections of paper – one for each letter.

Let’s get started!

You will need:

• Paper – if you have any long, stiff paper like brown craft paper or thick wrapping paper, you could use that, but I will show you how to make this out of just plain cardstock.

• A camera

• A printer (or some method of getting your photos on paper)

• Scissors or a papercutter

• Tape or a glue stick

• Colored pencils, markers, etc. if you want to decorate or write on the front of the card

Now then, here’s how to make it.

Take pictures of things that look like letters. I found my “n” on an inside wall of a barn, the “a” from the lower half of a pair of vicegrips, and the “g” from a bungee cord. For some of the letters I used a beach towel for the background. (Please don’t use my actual pictures, but I certainly don’t mind if you use them for inspiration. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me in the comments.)
Turn the pictures black and white. Black and white or sepia tones just make the pictures more uniform, and lets you focus on the letter instead of the background. I turned mine black and white on my camera, but you can use a photo editing program if you want.
Print and cut out your pictures. I pasted my pictures onto a Microsoft Word document. Then for each picture I right clicked on the photo, clicked “size and position” on the pop-up, changed the height to 2 inches, and pressed enter. And hopefully you already know how to cut out pictures.
Prepare your card. For this step I cut a sheet of cardstock into 3 equal pieces, and accordion folded each piece into 3 equal sections, with a little extra tab on the end.
Assemble your card. Put tape on the little tab at the end of two of the accordion folded sections, and cut the tab off of the last one. Use the taped tabs to connect all of the folded sections into one long piece. Now tape or glue the letter pictures onto each blank rectangle on one side of the paper strip.
Decorate your card. Using whatever materials you wish, decorate the other side of the card. The front of the card, the part that you see when you fold it up, will be on the back of the first letter (in my case on the back of the “g”).
Put on the finishing touches! Fold the card so the message is the first thing you see (like in the picture above), with all the letters following in order when you open it up. And you’re done!

This is a great gift for anyone, and you could even do the words of a bible verse, random words like “family,” “I love my cat Snuffles,” whatever! It would also be neat to take pictures for all the letters in the alphabet (which would be super hard) and leave the letter that begins your name colored instead of black and white. Have fun with this!

***Allison***

Cuteness Overload!

August 24, 2015December 2, 2015 | Allison

I finally got around to posting some very exciting (and cute!) news – I got ANOTHER BUNNY! Yes, I know I already have two bunnies, but I saw this little gal at the fair and I just couldn’t resist. How could you resist such sweet fluffiness? I named her Willow. And here is her profile:

Breed: Mixed Breed (3/4 Jersey Wooly, 1/4 Mini Lop)

Color: Charcoal

Name: Willow

Gender: Female

Age when bought: ???? Maybe about 2 months?

Unfortunately, Honeybunny despises Willow, and she kept nipping her, so I had to pen Honeybunny up in a cage all by herself. 😦 And now Honeybunny is really mean to all of the other bunnies, so I am going to sell her. She really isn’t that bad when you hold her, she just does not do well with other rabbits.

This must be the time to buy bunnies, because my friend and her mom each got a Holland Lop Rabbit. SO CUTE! Don’t worry, I took pictures of them too. ☺ Now enough of me talking, let’s get to the pictures!

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♥♥♥ Willow ♥♥♥

She is absolutely adorable, and easy to hold. Unfortunately my camera doesn’t take superb pictures of her, maybe because it has a hard time focusing on all the black fluffiness. At least you can enjoy what’s here, but trust me, she is better in real life!

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And now for Snickers and Yoshi (they’re both boys by the way), my friends’ bunnies. I took these pictures with my dad’s phone which has a really good camera.

~•~•~Snickers~•~•~

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►◄►◄Yoshi►◄►◄ (I didn’t get as many pictures of him because he was mostly in hiding. ☺)

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And here they are snuggling together.

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I might make a slideshow of these pictures and put them on my YouTube channel. Are you overloaded with cuteness yet?

***Allison***

P.S. This is my 100th post! Hooray!

Make Your Own Game! Part 2: Spinners, Spaces and Cards

August 20, 2015October 23, 2016 | Allison

(See the first installment in this series here.) Today we’ll look at some ideas for the spaces on the board, as well as cards and spinners for your game. Definitely change the symbols and graphics if you want to, and uh… be sure to make your spaces and board neater than I did here! ☺

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This is a fun little space I call a “spring space.” When you land on it, you get to move your playing piece ahead to the next spring space.

If your board game has cards, you can make spaces where you pick up a card when you land there. Just draw a square with the graphic on the back of your cards inside it. (You’ll probably want to make a more interesting graphic than my boring ol’ “T.” ☻)

It’s fun to have money, coins, or tokens in a board game. They can be the point of the game (whoever gets the most by the end of the game wins), you can buy something with them to help you, whatever! You can have a specific way to earn coins, or have coin spaces on the board.

A board game can’t have only good spaces – it needs some suspense! One “bad” space is a go-backwards space. Write how many spaces you’re supposed to go back on top of an arrow pointing backwards.

A really exciting space is the shortcut. The shortcut spaces (there are two) are where you find out if you can use the shortcut or not. On the first space, write the numbers 1, 2, and 3, and on the other one, 4, 5, and 6. When a player lands on a shortcut space, they must roll the dice. If they roll any of the numbers shown on the space, they get to use the shortcut, but if they don’t, too bad for them. Sometimes using a shortcut is bad, because if you land on the space at the far end of the shortcut and you have to use it, the shortcut takes you backward.

You can either have the player jump to the other end of the shortcut all at once, or divide it into spaces so that they still have to roll their way across.

A few more spaces I didn’t draw here:

Roll again

Pit (which makes you lose something like a coin or a turn.)

Now for cards. I can’t really help you much here, because the kind of cards you make really depends on your game. They could make you answer a question or do a certain thing in order to move ahead on the board, they could be superpowers to help you, they could be anything! But as for making the actual cards, I think the best way is to either cut them out of cardstock with a paper cutter, or print them onto cardstock from your computer. The nice thing about printing them is that you can design a nice graphic that will look the same on all of your cards.

You can make a spinner by printing out a pie graph divided evenly into the number of spaces you need, and pasting it cardboard. An alternative to printing a spinner is drawing one. Cut a square piece of cardboard and divide it evenly into the number of spaces you need. Trace a circle onto the square, and cut it out. For the spinner, cut a rectangle that comes to a point like an arrow at the end from cardboard. Punch hole in the middle of the arrow and the spinner-board. Put a brass-brad through the hole, but be sure to leave some room between the head of the brad and the arrow.

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Whew, that was a long post! Hopefully it helps if you ever want to make your own game.

***Allison***