More than being really difficult, the trouble with going homemade is just how long it takes. First we made the dough. This was fun and Jillian was a big help. But then you have to bake the shapes three times for each house. The roof and long side get baked twice and the other side of the pan, the small sides and chimney, get baked just once. But you can’t bake them back-to-back because the pan is hot. You have to wait for it to cool and that takes hours. So, for each house it took me three days. I’d make the dough and then bake each side a night. Then repeat the process for the second house. I wanted my own house, but I was too lazy to make any more.

Once all of the pieces were baked I took another day to assemble the houses so they could dry and be sturdy enough for the kids to work with. We used a pretty standard royal icing recipe and it gave us structurally sound little houses.

Finally, a week later, we were ready to decorate these little guys. Amber bought a ton of candy and there was plenty to go around. Interestingly, even though we divvied everything up 50/50 some strange things happened. Some of Wesley’s candy bowls were empty even though hardly any of them were on the house. Where did they go?

To start with we let the kids go there own way. Once they had made good progress Amber and I each started adding little touches and giving the kids some more complicated ideas. They each came up with great ideas of their own and copied from each other when they saw something they liked.

They had fun. Here they are with the finished product. The houses had to be moved to the mantle almost immediately since pieces of candy were being removed even before the frosting was dry.

 

When we went for kindergarten testing another kid had his backpack… So I started to think of ways to make it more unique.  And since it is mostly white – I was worried that it would become mostly brown in no time.

So I decided to color it.  At first I was just going to color a few.  Then that evolved into coloring them all.  Then Wesley wanted the background area a color too…

Here is my finished product:

Wesley LOVES his Mario backpack even more now that when he picked it out from the store.  I have to say… I love it more now too. 

I can’t wait to see it on him tomorrow for his first day of kindergarten!

 

Mugging for the camera.

This past weekend Wesley got to try his hand at soldering. He really liked it. I picked out the Lux Spectralis kit from Makershed.com. The kit was cheap, had relatively few pieces and since it was a flashlight Wesley could actually use it.  Plus, what kid doesn’t want a flashlight that does 36 different things (changes color, fades, blinks, flashes, etc).

Blowing away the smoke.

Aside from the microchip (which I did, because they are heat sensitive), Wesley did all of the soldering and trimmed all of the leads.  He did get one little burn (he grabbed the wrong part of the iron), but soldiered through. He had a great time.  We used lead-free solder, even though it makes the soldering more difficult, so he could actually use the kit when it was finished.

Trimming leads from a resistor.

Soldering solo

Attaching the switch.

Soldering on the switch.

All done and it works!

Testing out some of the functions.

Finished product - front.

Finished product - back.

After Wesley’s was working I went out and made one for Jillian, too. She helped with trimming the leads, but Amber was cooking dinner so we don’t have any photos. Jillian is excited to do some soldering. She’s probably a little young still, but I probably won’t wait until 5 1/2 (like Wes) to get her going on the iron.  So much fun!

 

All ready to go!

#2

#5!

Jillian's

Wesley's

1. organic sugar – no reaction
2. flour – no reaction
3. kosher salt – no reaction
4. sweet n low – no reaction
5. baking soda – yes reaction
6. powdered sugar – no reaction
7. cornstarch – no reaction
8. baking powder – yes reaction

All done!

 

Our decorations

Jillian's Ready

Wesley's Ready

Trying to cut a gumball in half.

Taking a break from decorating for a little snack...

Even Redmond got some icing.

What a mess we made!

Jillian's house - front view

She wanted a dog.

Jillian's house - side 1

Jillian's house - back

Jillian's house - side 2

Wesley's house - front view

Wesley's house - side 1

Wesley's house - back

The sled Joshua made for Wesley's house.

Wesley's house - side 2

The kids waited a whole 24 hours to eat parts off.  They would have eaten it sooner – but they wanted to show Papa and Yaya.

 

The room is all set up for making recycled crafts.

Big things for the projects: boxes, milk jugs, egg cartons...

Lots of small items for the crafts.

I made these tape dispensers! http://www.instructables.com/id/3-Roll-Masking-Tape-Dispenser/

The cups are from Red Robin. They collected 22 cups for me that were going to be recycled in the 1 hour we were there for dinner.

Snacks - I reused items from past parties. Plates from Wesley's 4th birthday, napkins are from Becca's baby shower for Lila, blue cups are from Jillian's 3rd birthday party & the colored bowls are from value village.

Bug cake...again. He had this cake (with the same bugs) for his 2nd birthday.

Goodie bags are made from reused food contaners.

In each goodie bag is a shirt - monogramed for each kid. I got the shirts used from value village. And I made the stamp (several years ago) out of a block of wood and craft foam.

He's ready to party!

The kids are very ready to make their crafts.

Everyone is working so hard!

After creating for over an hour – they made some wonderful things.

Stellanne's creations.

One of Lily's.

Wesley's flying car.

Aidan made a ton of things.

Jillian and Kailyn worked on "Jillian's doll house"

This peacock Kailyn made is just amazing!

The kids are all eating a snack and watching Wesley open his gifts.

I asked him to thank everyone for their gift...and he fell over... As you can see by the mess - he got a lot of great stuff.

Time for cake!

Blowing out the candle.

Everyone clapped so W & J had to cover their ears.

Then it was time to say goodbye…

To Great Grandma & Great Grandpa

to Lily

to Ben and his creation.

to Grams

to Pat

to Stellanne

to Papa (& Yaya too)

to Aunt Dri

to Aidan, Kailyn & Derrick

What a fun and creative day!   Thank you to everyone who made the day so special for Wesley.

Happy 5th Birthday Wesley!

 

Apparently Corning made and sold these 20″ long tubes in the 1970′s. The date on my instruction sheet is June 1977.  Most of the posts say they were really popular and everyone had one “back in the day”. But, since they only sold them for a few years, I’d guess they weren’t really that popular.  It came with a full two year warranty, not that it will do me any good now.

The Bake-a-Round instruction sheet comes with a number of bread recipes (you can download a PDF of the instructions I created below).  It seems like the key is to avoid recipes that are sugary because it will carmelize and stick to the glass, and frankly you’ll never be able to get it out of the tube.  Instead of using an untried recipe I decided to make the white sandwich bread from Reinhart’s Crust and Crumb, because it is one of our favorites. And it has so much butter in it I figured it would slide right out.

I made a 1lb loaf and used the suggested waxpaper technique to load the dough into the tube. My instructions actually have a typo (2″ of wax paper). I looked at instructions from Neufie.com which made more sense (2′ of wax paper). It worked well, but between the buttered tube and the butter in the bread I probably could have simply slipped it in. I gave it a squish from both ends (again, per the instructions), capped the ends with plastic wrap and let it rise. The small 1lb loaf I used never filled the entire tube and in hindsight I could easily have gone with 1 1/2 lbs of dough.

The finished cooked loaf still in the Bake-a-Round:

Getting it out was a little tricky.  You have to maneuver the hot glass tube out of the hot metal holder and then tap the end of the tube with a potholder to get the bread to slide out. I did it though without any help or burned fingers. The bread had a nice even crust all around the loaf.

An unexpected side benefit is the phallic nature of the loaf. I hadn’t noticed, by my mom did!

Gallery with lots of photos including box, tube, bread and instructions.

Download a copy of my instructions as a PDF: Bake-a-Round Instructions (168)

 

Shortly thereafter she shared it with our friends Jessica and Nick, who by that time had taken Amber’s lead and were also entering their kids’ ages in each photo. So I rewrote the program for them to include their kids. Problem solved! But then they went and had another kid so I added her, too. Problem solved. But then they wanted to add other peoples’ kids as well. To make it more usable I decided to rewrite the program so that the user can add or remove anyone they want. I’m releasing that application as PhotoAge v1.0.0. You can download it below as a compiled Windows executable or as a Python 2.6.x script. Problem solved!

Features:

• Calculates ages in years, months and ages for everyone in the database.
• Automatically fills in today’s date.
• Copy the text (Name: year, month, day) to the clipboard by double-clicking for easy pasting anywhere on your computer.
• You can add or remove as many people as you like using the Add or Remove People window.
• Automatically sort the people you add by Name or Age, ascending or descending.
• No install needed. Just run PhotoAge.exe (or if you have Python 2 installed, PhotoAge.py).
• Full HTML help file.
• Checks to make sure all dates entered are valid. It knows how many days in each month and understands leap years.
• Properly pluralizes labels. Eg, 0 months, 1 month, 2 months.

A few screenshots (it only has a few screens):

To use PhotoAge, just download the file below.  Then unzip the folder and run PhotoAge.exe. You’ll need to add some people and birth dates to the database and then you are all set. For help on getting started, check out the web-based help from the Help menu.

PhotoAge is released under the GPL v3 license. You are free to edit, reuse or redistribute the code under the terms of the license. If you have questions, feature requests (we have a few things in mind for version 1.1 already) or anything else, just leave a comment on this post.

Download PhotoAge v1.0.0:

Windows Executable (just unzip and run): PhotoAge (71)

Python 2.6.x Source Code: PhotoAge - Source (62)

 

Last Christmas I had the idea that Jillian and Wesley needed their own special stockings. We looked at some while Christmas shopping, but didn’t find anything that we fell in love with. So in January I made a note to remind myself in August that I was going to have get to work making them myself. Because I loved the latch hook stocking Grandpa Joe made me (and the other Hunter kids) I wanted Wes and Jillian to have the same kind.

In September I ordered two kits from Shillcraft: A snowman for Wesley and a teddy bear for Jillian. The kits came with almost everything I needed: the pattern, yarn and mesh. I bought a latch-hook tool and set to work. Here is what the snowman kit looked like when I unpacked it.

Once I had it unpacked I realized I didn’t have a clue what to do. So I hopped on YouTube and found a few videos that were rather helpful. One key tip: count out your yarn for each row before you start. Following the pattern on the mesh is asking for mistakes. The actual process is pretty easy and you get much faster at as you go. Which is good, because I was very slow at first. When I calculated how long it was taking me to do each knot and that I had 1700 to do on each stocking, I got a little concerned that I wouldn’t be able to finish. In fact I posted this to Twitter:

“math can suck. at the rate I’m going it may take 22hrs for each stocking. about 1700 knots each. ignorance is bliss.”

I decided to share the process with the kids from the start. This was a very good idea. They were very interested in the whole thing and their enthusiasm kept me motivated. Another way I kept motivated was by tracking my time for each row of the stockings. Yes, I know I’m a geek. But I did it and it helped. I used a great free application called Klok to track my time worked which is how I know it took me 14 hours and 54 minutes to latch hook Wesley’s, but only 12 hours and 43 minutes for Jillian’s. I started onWesley’s first and that 2 hour difference is the learning curve for latch hooking (at least for me).

Being the kind of person I am I also took pictures of each few lines.  This is the time-lapse movie I made.

The only problem with the kit was putting their names on the top. My stocking from Grandpa says “Josh”. Of course mine is twice as big as theirs (and due to its enormous size I realized this year it has probably fetched me thousands of dollars of extra stocking-stuffers over the years. Thanks Grandpa!). And it didn’t take long for me to figure out I could shorten Welsey to Wes, but Jillian was going to be tough to fit on there. Just not enough little squares to make it happen. So after some back and forth I decided on initials. I’m still not thrilled with them, but they are stuck with them now. Sorry kids.

Yes, despite the fact that Jillian will likely get married and change her name someday. She’ll just have to limit her choices to people with last names starting with “H”. It worked for her mom after all.  This limited space is the reason Adrianne as called “Dri” for a bit there. I thought the stocking said Dri because that was her nickname, but no, her nickname was Dri because it fit on the stocking.  Who knew? (Maybe everyone knew this. I’m slow on this kind of stuff.)

Once the pattern and initials were finished I kind of panicked. Now I had to sew. Not a skill I actually possessed (or do now). So I basically did nothing for two weeks. Then panicked some more because I’d wasted two weeks. What to do? Back to the internet of course. I found this page and this page to be really helpful with types of stitches. Then the kids and I bought fabric. Amber said nope and we went back and got some different fabric.

A mere 11 hours and 20 minutes of hand sewing later and Jillian’s stocking was done.  Another 7 hours and 12 minutes and Wesley’s was done. An even steeper learning curve on the sewing. I had to redo multiple parts of Jillian’s as different stitches didn’t work the way I thought they would. In the end I ended up using whipstitches and backstitches for the visible parts and for the inside parts a whole bunch of stuff that I made up that would make people who know how to sew cringe deep down inside.

I am so glad to be done! And I’m done before Christmas! When I was ordering I asked Amber if she wanted me to make her one to match the rest of us and she said “no”. Thank you, thank you, thank you! If I had to do another one I’d probably break down in tears. Which would probably ruin the holiday for all of us, frankly.

I’d hoped to have included a bunch of nifty graphs using Open Flash Chart v2, but sadly there doesn’t seem to be a plugin built to make charts for WordPress that isn’t really lame. So instead of being able to show you all kinds of nifty data I collected while making these things I just have this one sad chart I made in, embarrassingly, Excel.  The big flat stretch there in October was when we went to my Mom’s wedding and then again in late November early December that is when I was pretending I didn’t have to learn how to sew to complete the project.

 

I use this little script (generate_mosaic_Pymos (430)) to set my configuration choices and actually generate the mosaic. It made it easy to play with the settings and try lots of different combinations, but you could run it from the command line if you chose. Settings:

• input_path: The path to the photo you want to recreate as a mosaic.
• output_path: The path to where you want to save your photo mosaic.
• collection_path: The path of a folder containing all your small photos.
• zoom: How much larger than the “input_path” photo do you want your output. A photo that is 1000 x 500 pixels would end up as a mosaic of 2000 x 1000 pixels if you chose a zoom of 2.
• thumb_size: How large do you want the small photos in the photo mosaic to be. The smaller the size the more “realistic” your overall mosaic will look, but the less detail you’ll get in each individual square. I find 75 works well for me.
• fuzz: The larger the fuzz, the more variation you’ll have in your mosaic. It lets the program pick a less perfect color match so that you don’t end up with swaths of identical photos in areas of the mosaic that are made up of one color.
• new_colormap: If you add or remove any photos in the “collection_path” you’ll need to set this to “True” so a new color map is generated. Otherwise it will fail if it tries to use a photo you’ve deleted or simply ignore any new photos that might be a better match.

The question is, Where do you get all those little square photos? For me the answer is Flickr. When you upload a photo to Flickr they automatically generate a bunch of different sizes of your photo for you automatically. One of those is a 75x75pixel square thumbnail that they use as part of their navigation scheme, but you can download and use however you like.  You could use PIL or some other method to create your own square images, but since all of our photos are tagged on Flickr I figured I could simply query our photos on Flickr for any tag or text I liked.  I searched online for a client to download square photos matching a given tag, but couldn’t find anything pre-built. So I reused some of the code from my Flickr Metadata Downloader and wrote a script to download what I needed (flickr_download_squares (450)).  Just download and enter in your Flickr API info. For more details see the Flickr Metadata Downloader post.

Since I started this near Wesley’s birthday he was my first choice of subject. A quick query on Flickr showed more than 18,000 photos tagged “wesley”. That is probably more than I really needed so I decided to grab only every 10th photo. Once they were downloaded which didn’t take as long as I’d thought because they are so small (each 75 pixel square photo is about 5KB)  I reviewed them all to make sure you could really see Wesley and that none of them were too embarrassing and then set to work making the mosaic. I just ran he generate_mosaic_PyMos script I detailed above and after a few minutes got something like this:

Overall Mosaic (click for larger view)

Zoomed in a bit

Individual photos that make up the mosaic

The image files that are created are rather large.  In my practice they have been between 60mb and 120mb.  Too big to be of much use except for making prints. Too big in fact to upload even to Flickr (they have a 20mb limit). I also learned that having variation in color and lighting is important. The more uniform your photo the fewer small photos will be combined to create it. This makes sense as each small photo is converted to an average color. Whichever photo has the closest average color for a given area will get used. If the area is the same color (like the wall above) the same photo is likely to be used over and over and over. To get more variation increase the “fuzz”, which I should have done with the mosaic above.

And another…