paul bunyan christmas boxes

You've already seen some of the things I packed into this year's Christmas boxes, including the Paul Bunyan Towel-endar . . .

. . . the saved mammoth sunflower seeds . . .

. . . and the woodsy snow globe ornaments.

So let's look at some of the other stuff that went in the boxes with these goodies. Here's some coconut candied peanuts. I packaged them in triangular treat bags and added gold ties and vintage-style labels. (I should have chosen tree nuts to stay on theme, but I had a momentary lapse)

And here are some bar coasters I printed with a log slice pattern (for fun, some also had a bark pattern on the backs).

These little Paul Bunyan books (Paul Bunyan Comes West, originally published 1928) were my favorite, though. I'll talk more about them in a future post, but here's a sneak peek at them after I bound  them but before they were wrapped and put into the boxes.

I packed everything into a treat box with a window on the top. You'll notice I also enclosed a box of packaged tea and a little parchment paper package of birch branch paper straws.

Then I added some colorful paper shreds I reused out of a Pijon Box delivery. They use a lot, so I had plenty for twelve boxes.

I tucked the Paul Bunyan towels in on top of everything . . .

. . . then sealed up the boxes (bought during last year's post-Christmas clearance) with the towel wrap showing through the window.

Finally, I used some recycled brown paper to print some wrapping paper using the same block I used for the coasters. I tied the packages shut with baker's twine and added more wood veneer tags on top. These ones say, "Paul Bunyan says, 'Merry X-Mas'" in gold pen.

Positive feedback from family and friends! I had a lot of fun, and some frustration, and a few late nights putting everything together this year. I even got boxes in the mail in time for Christmas for those I wouldn't be visiting. Now to start planning for next year . . .

p.s. make photos larger with a click!

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heirloom clothespin dolls & a love story

My paternal grandparents were married in the midwest in the early 1940s, as young college graduates. Grandma's dress was  long and made of ivory silk, and her smile glows and her eyes shine from happiness in the photos I've seen of that day. I think most days with my Grandpa, they probably shone just the same.

She was on the shorter side of our family tree, and birdlike in so many ways (I remember her laugh like birdsong, her light hands and their feathery movements). She was small enough that the seamstress overestimated the length of her gown, and several inches had to be trimmed from the hem. Several inches that she, a saver like me (only with more attic space), stashed away through fifty-six years of life after their wedding day, and which Grandpa, unawares, stashed away for an additional fourteen long years after her death.

And so the trimmings of Grandma's silk wedding gown lay undiscovered until, cleaning out some hidey space after Grandpa followed her into the unknown, my dad and his siblings found them again. The pieces must have been labeled, or they might not have recognized what they were. Or possibly Grandma stored the pieces with her dress, and my dad and aunts and uncles knew them on sight. Somehow it came from my dad to me, to split in some way between my sisters and I.

They came as two oddly shaped pieces, maybe five inches at the widest point and tapering, at the ends, to nothing. I imagine the nervous hands of the person making the alterations, wanting to get it just right in one try. This was someone's wedding dress, after all. No room for error.

Though long, the odd shape of the two pieces made it hard to decide how to use them. I sat on the project for another year, cut a piece to try to make a silk flower, and abandoned the project as too ugly to live.

Thrown off by my craft fail, I stashed the silk away for another six months before inspiration struck in the form of clothespin dolls.

Grandma was crafty like me, too. Really, a number of us (aunts, sisters, cousins) share the affliction. For Grandma, it was mostly knit and crochet. An afghan for each grandchild was our birthright, and I remember very clearly a baby blue sweater she once made for me when I was a kindergartner. It was knit in a checkerboard weave pattern. I loved it. I have exactly one photograph of it. This one. (We were camping with some cousins, one of whom is, in this photo, regretting her offer to share her chair with her stocky five-year-old cousin with the bloody knee.)

I have more photos of my Grandma and Grandpa than I have of this sweater, but not many. After marrying, my grandparents moved to Southern California where my Grandpa made a name for himself as an aerospace electrical engineer. Grandma raised five kids and managed a house using her degree in home economics, and she did a good job on every one. One of them (my dad) married and moved north to pursue a career as a a civil engineer. After that,  they saw him (and later, us) only once a year or so. I don't have as many photos or memories of them as my SoCal cousins do, and I didn't get as much time with them while I was growing up, but oh, there was so much love. We felt it from a distance of hundreds of miles. 

I made the dolls first, carrying their bouquets of buttons from Grandma's button box. It came time to cut the silk for their dresses, and my hands weren't sure I meant them to do it. Seventy years that silk sat untouched. Seventy years since it had been cut from the hem of her wedding dress. Back then, the act of cutting this fabric had kept my grandma from tripping on her hem. Now? I was cutting into her dress again. Her wedding dress. There was no room for error.

I kept my cuts as few as possible, sewing six little wedding dresses (two-layer tubes, really, cinched at the waist) from the remnants. I had painted the dolls' hair and eyes to match Grandma's on her wedding day: dark hair, blue eyes; and now, I dressed them one by one. 

One of my step-sisters got married a month ago, and my younger sister will be getting hitched in a couple of weeks. It's all a cycle, you know. This has happened before, and it will happen again. Seventy years from now, some grandchild will be chopping up some memento of one or the other of them to make into something new. Just in time. 

Thanks for reading.

(p.s. you can make these photos larger by clicking on them.)

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I'm Crafty!

recycled crayon eggs

Hey all! I've got a little recycled crayon project redux for you.

A month back, I posted about the rupee crayon party favors we made for the kiddo's Zelda birthday party. Big success! But, I did have leftovers. Both leftover rupees, and some leftover old crayons. So I decided to take some of the leftovers and recycle them again, this time into a little treat for the kiddo's Easter basket. (Should we call it tri-cycling? Or re-recycling?)

Easter egg crayons are pretty simple to make, if you have one of these Jello egg molds. Mine is a few years old (so it looks different from the one I've linked to), and the eggs come out with a patterns instead of being smooth. And of course, you should plan on retiring your mold from food use after using it for crayon eggs. FYI.

The process is slightly different from making the rupee crayons, because that was an open mold, and this one is closed. I could still have pushed crayon bits into the hole, but it would have been harder to get the entire mold filled to the top.

So I improvised a double boiler for the microwave. You can see the glass jar in the background there.

I put the crayons (broken into pieces) into the jar, then placed the jar into a bowl of water about two inches deep. The whole thing went into the microwave. Note: I've had good success with this method and have never been injured, but microwaves can cause hot spots, fires and occasional water eruptions. Please proceed knowing these risks, and remember: the crayons might be for kids, but this project is not. (In fact, if you have a standard double boiler you can use exclusively for crafts or candles, I'd recommend that over the microwave method any day.)

Once the wax was melted completely, I carefully poured it from the jar into the molds (using a silicon hot mitt to hold the hot jar). After letting it cool for a couple of hours, the mold popped right open, and the crayon came right out.

You might need to babysit your project a little. Wax contracts a little as it cools, so you may need to fill in your mold a little more to prevent hollow spots.

Once the crayons are out of the mold, they'll have little stumps.

If you leave them intact, the eggs won't fit into an unmodified egg carton. Luckily, the stumps are easy to remove with a serrated knife and a gentle sawing motion. Then, you can smooth the cuts by rubbing on a hot piece of aluminum foil.

Done at last, you can package them in an egg carton and stick them in the Easter basket!

Like a lot of the projects I do, this one is very versatile. You can make crayon hearts for Valentine's Day (I've seen them all over Pinterest), crayon shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day. You can find a Lego figure mold and make party favors for a Lego party. Think outside the (crayon) box!

(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)


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