Long time no see...

By not posting in such a long time I have saved you all from a lengthy list of profanity in regards to dang crappy sleeves and the idiot who first came up with the idea of attaching sleeves to shirts. Also the fact that satin and organza fray like a house on fire, which is making it necessary to basically glue ALL cut edges on the whole stinking thing. All you ladies with sergers are now laughing at me.

And to add insult to injury my fancy camera went south on our trip to California. So it's at the Nikon repair place for the next 2 weeks. So I'll have to rely on my old film SLR and a compact digital camera to capture the magnificence of all my hard work. This angers me greatly.

The upside.. my niece will be here to help me get these things finished. I may torture her by having her work on the wig.. hehe. ALSO.. she'll be here to help get the kids ready for the school Halloween parade! Yay! Our new school is a bit weird, they don't let the kids come to school all done up. They give you 15 minutes after lunch to get them in their costumes and make up done before the parade. And when you have TWO kids with extensive make up and fake eyelashes.. 15 minutes isn't NEARLY enough! Not to mention... who is going to save me some good seats in the auditorium to watch said parade? So.. I'm very glad my niece will be here to help me.

Ok... back to sewing.. ugh.

California

Last weekend we went to California to visit Leisel & Daryl & the little cousins Mia & Bruce. Thank you to Leisel and Daryl for their spectacular hospitality and 5 star accomodations! The girls had a ball. Mia's room was trashed within the first 10 minutes of arrival. It looked like a Barbie convention blew up in there.

Leisel makes a mean Quesadilla. I had requests for them for the first few days after we got home.

We went to Disneyland with Leisel, Mia & Bruce for 2 days (thanks again K&J and Leisel & Daryl). That of course was a ball. Poor Leisel got stuck going on a lot of kiddie rides with Olivia and Bruce while Matt and I gorged ourselves on "big kid" rides with Riley, Sammy & Mia.

I have to say my all-time favorite rides for the trip were Space Mountain and California Screamin. It's hard to scream in a "wow-this-is-fun-and-not-at-all-scary" way so that you don't scare the kid you're sitting next to even more than they already are. For example.. on Space Mountain while Mia is squeezing my hand with all her might.. I'm trying to scream in a "woo-hoo.. how fun way, instead of the Holy S**t way that I'm actually feeling. I figure the last thing the poor kid needs is to hear her Aunt screaming like she's just seen the seven horses of the apocalypse waiting for us at the end of the ride, with Freddy Kreuger, Jason & Leather-face standing by as backup.

We spent another day just hanging out with Leisel & Daryl at their house. Pardon me, at thier spectacular home with all the most up to date computer, gaming and theater gadgets one could ever hope for, thanks to Daryl and his ninja-like wiring and electronics skills.

Then we went to Manhattan Beach pier and just let the kids play. The trip was over way too soon for me. I found myself wishing we had a couple more days just to hang with Leisel & Daryl, but I guess you can't play forever.

Pictures of the trip are on our frandsenfamily.com website.

Updated frandsenfamily.com

I've finally put some new galleries up on www.frandsenfamily.com. The password is listed in the link on on the right side of this blog.

Et tu, Brute?

I took Sammy to Joann's the other day to get "stuff" for her Evil Fairy costume. I was thinking some wings and a little fabric to make a skirt. Once we got there she proceeded to describe a very intricate costume design that she had created on Pixie Hollow. Ummm.... yeah.. no problem... "a piece that goes here and crosses, you know, like this..." (all of this done with very vague hand gestures).

I could see that she had her heart set on something very fancy, and as this was the first year she actually asked for something that might take a little extra, I didn't have the heart to nix it. I mean, why should Riley always get the fancy shmancy stuff?

I was able to explain to her that I didn't think I'd be able to duplicate her "vision" with my limited sewing skills, and talked her into looking in the pattern books. Luckily we found a nice fairy pattern that she liked ALMOST as much as her own design. Oh so lucky for me it involves a satin under-dress with a filmy, see-through (organza?) layer over the top. YAY... basically that's 2 dresses in one.

So now, Melinda the not so talented seamstress, gets to make 2 whole costumes from scratch! Oh yeah, don't forget the wig.

Now I'm just waiting for Olivia to turn on me too. She'll want to be Marie Antoinette or something. No biggie, I think they have a pattern for that too. Anyone want a 3 piece suit while I'm at it?

Aaaaugh!

Well it's Halloween time again and Riley has yet again picked an awesome, but difficult costume. She wants to be Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas. In an effort to save money (snort - yeah right), I decided to make the costume rather than buy it. Well after buying all the fabric, thread and yarn (for the wig) I've spent more than the costume would have cost. Oh well, at least it will look "just way cooler" than the store bought version.. I hope.

I'm not much of a sewer, the last thing I made was a Xena costume for Riley when she was 18 months old, (I'm sorry, but I thought it was hilarious). And before that I made a shirt in Home Ec in high school. So... yeah... what am I thinking again?

It's not bad enough that I have to make a dress, but I'm also making it out of patched together pieces of fabric. Piece of cake... yeah right.

And as if my previous wig making experience (Corpse Bride costume) wasn't painful enough, I've signed on to make another for this year. So I can look forward to spending hours and hours crouched over some sort of head form while I thread strands of yarn one at a time into a mesh cap. Oh joy.

I'm complaining... but, anyone who knows how much I love Halloween and dressing up, also knows that I really love this and actually make more hard work myself because I'm so picky (anal). I've always felt that if you're going to try to do a cool costume, you can't go half-way. You've got to go all-out so you can get it as authentic as possible.

As evidence I submit the Xena costume for which I made my own pattern because the ones at the store weren't accurate enough (or small enough.. hmm.. why wouldn't they make a Xena pattern in 18 month size? Crazy.). I also did extensive Google image searching so I could get the bronze embellishments just so.



Then we have the Lara Croft Tomb Raider costume at age 4. I SWEAR Riley requested this all my herself. How did she know about Lara Croft? Well her mom was a bit of a Tomb Raider video game player and she liked to watch me play it. We opted to pattern that costume after the movie rather than the game. So I searched high & low for just the right items. I transformed an old watch into the cool leather wristband watch, take a teen sized belt and cut it to fit, make leg-strapped holsters from black vinyl as well as buckled straps to go around the boots, spray paint some colorful water pistols black & silver, Matt made the skull belt buckle out of clay, baked it and painted it gold. And last but not least I got a long blonde wig, cut it off and fashioned it into an extension which I french braided into her own hair.

Then we have the Corpse Bride. Luckily the costume you could by was pretty cool, but the veil and wig that came with it were... LAME. So obviously we had to buy the deluxe veil and I had to make a wig. Yeah... that wig making turned out to be a lot harder than I had originally thought. And.. have you ever tried putting fake eyelashes on a 10 year old? You would have thought I was using a hot glue gun by all the noises she was making.

Luckily Sammy usually picks something fairly easy such as Hello Kitty, then Hello Kitty Witch, Princess Leia (what?.. yep that's what I said), and now this year she wants to be a fairy. I can at least go a little crazy with wings and a skirt on this one.

So now... here we are at Halloween again. I'm sure I'll be totally diggin' it on the day.. but right now I'm just looking at a bunch of pieces of fabric and wondering where in the world to start.

My day in Jam Hell...

So I happened by a roadside fruit stand today and decided.. "Hey, I should really make some jam." I've made jam before, it's a fairly easy thing, but I've never really been on the purchasing and planning end of it since my dear sweet dad always just "happens" to have bought a bunch of berries right before I visit.

So I ask the lady at the fruit stand how much jam would one flat of raspberries make. She tells me 12 pints. I'm thinking.. ok, I'll buy some strawberries too just to stretch it out to a few more pints.

I go to the store to get the correct amount of pectin and Karo syrup. I go home and begin. I decide I should just mash all the berries up first thing and put each kind in it's own bowl. (I had strawberries, raspberries & blackberries) I start making some interesting combinations of jam, but after 4 batches it's pretty apparent that 12 pints was a GROSS underestimation. I've now used ALL my Karo syrup and am out of lemon juice, but I still have a plethora of mashed berries.

So I run back to the store for more pectin, Karo & lemon juice. A few batches later and I'm out of jars... still many many berries left.

Back to the store AGAIN to buy 12 more pint jars and 3 more pectin boxes and another Karo syrup (hmmmm... I wonder if I should have bought that super-size Karo the first time I came..) .. surely this will be enough to finish off the berries (it didn't help that I got fancy and threw some peaches into the mix too). On the way to the cash register I grab a tray of Fish Egg Sushi Rolls so the girls can at least have something to eat for dinner since their mom is all grouchy and sticky. Oh did I mention that I brilliantly picked a day Matt was out of town to tackle this little project?

I'm on my LAST batch and... no - more - jars! I start scouring the fridge and cupboards for jars. I found a jar of olives which I dumped into a tupperware and cleaned out.. the lid still smelled like green olives.. so we'll see what that one tastes like. I cleaned out a jar that was used to hold bugs... REALLY WELL. And had to stoop to a tupperware for the rest of it.

And so... 6 hours, 40 pints (yes,that's FORTY) and 3 trips to the store later, I finally finished all those crappy berries! 12 pints my butt!

I don't even want to think about how much I spent on the whole process. I think I have my 5 year supply taken care of. This is good because I don't want to see another box of pectin or mashed berry for a looooong time.

Heeeere snaily snaily snaily...

Apparently my poor allergy ridden kids are so hard up for pets that they now keep several baby snails in a jar. Sammy and Olivia even take them out and 'play' with them! Wouldn't you think 7 crabs were better than a jar of snails?

Hmmm.. I wonder if they'd like some pet cockroaches too?