{Handmade Christmas} Dog Biscuits

Yep, in our house even the doggies get homemade treats. Not that we have any dogs in my house. But we know a lot of people who do. Among them my mother-in-law, who's dog the kids love. They've know this dog all their life. With both kids I went back to work when they were eight weeks old, and they've been staying with my mother-in-law for one of my two workdays per week.

I'm getting sidetracked here. We started the dog biscuit tradition the year I first started making Christmas gifts. I use Matha Stewart's recipe and have slightly tweaked it:

• I don't use mint, just parsley, and I add a tablespoon or so while my kitchen aid is still running. 
• I always make the double batch. Yes, that makes a lot. A LOT. But it's not that much more work and you can always just roll it out and cut the dough into rectangles for your second batch. I don't think the doggies are going to care about the shape...
• If you do make a double batch and own a stand mixer: use the dough hook. Really.
• I bake mine much shorter, about 20 minutes or until they are just golden brown.
• I never let them dry in the oven overnight! I take them out when done, put them on racks until cool and then wrap in cellophane bags. I do leave the bags open until I'm ready to give them, though. They last forever. Unless you let the dogs anywhere near them, that is.
• For my German readers: I use Leinsamen for the wheat germ.  
• If you make a double batch, you might not need that much water. I didn't.

Every year, I get help making them from my boys. Because they love dogs. They take turns measuring the ingredients, which is great because most of most ingredients you'll need 1 and 1/4 cups - so they each get one measuring cup. Here it's the cornmeal.

And in the bowl it goes.

The dough is one of the best ever, it's really easy to work with and you can re-roll countless times. It's sticky, but not too sticky. And little brother loves getting more flour. Everywhere. I actually bought one of those bone shaped cookie cutters, but anything will work here. We have done stars for Christmas, and those looked nice, too.

All the ingredients are things you can actually eat as a human, mostly it's different sorts of flours and grains, plus some butter, sugar, eggs and a little salt. So it's ok to have little brother try some of it. He didn't like it, by the way, but that's because he loves only sweet things. Big brother actually liked it, and my mother-in-law sometimes steals biscuits from her dog.

So you basically just do a lot of cutting, re-rolling and more cutting. We worked with three sheets at once.

When the first batches are cut out, have your helpers brush them with egg wash.

While I was working on the second batch, big brother made some star and dinosaur cookies from sugar cookie dough.

Here are the finished biscuits. Again, I've made these often and in large quanities and I never let them dry in the oven overnight or anything like that. I don't think you need to.

And here's this year's attempt at nice packaging. Uhm, working on it. Last year I did labels on the computer which also held the bags closed, but this year I was going for a handmade look. Hmmmm. 

So if you have an afternoon to spare (haha, funny, I know), some helpers and some dogs in your house or neighborhood - these are really great. I haven't met a dog who didn't like them. But that's the reason I do dog biscuits and not cat treats: it's a fairly easy audience!

Does anyone know a good cat treat recipe that does not involve canned tuna and a kitchen smelling like cat food?

Swenja

Get your kids real books. Beautiful books.

In a world where even a classic like A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh gets turned into an all smiley-faced Disney version, I love books that take kids seriously and dare to be a little different. So here's a list of books my kids will be getting for Christmas.

Well, actually they already got one of them for Nikolaus. Nikolaus, or St. Nicholas or whatever he is called in the English-speaking world, comes December 6. As a kid, you clean your boots and put them out the front door, and if you're lucky, the next morning they're filled with chocolate, tangerines, nuts and maybe a small gift or two. It's sort of like your Christmas stockings I guess, just earlier. It's the perfect time to give Christmas books, because really, who needs Christmas books for Christmas when all the fun is already over? So this year my kids got two Pettson & Findus Christmas books. And this one:

It's called The Lion, The Unicorn and Me (obviously I have the German version, "Der Löwe, das Einhorn und ich") and it's by Jeanette Winterson. The story is told by the donkey and it starts with an angel coming to earth trying to find the one animal that can carry Jesus and his mother in the night that he is born.

The angel talks to every animal (using the list that was left over from Noah's arch), and ends up choosing the donkey.  Love the so very pregnant belly in this picture.

The donkey tells the whole story, including the holy night, and how he sings along with the angels and how an angel's foot touches his nose. The story is very calm and quiet but also full of funny details. I loved it and big broher also liked it, but little brother was a little too fussy the last few days to really listen at night. But that's ok because this book will be with us for quite a while.

Then I have a pile waiting for Christmas, and I want to show you three of them. I love Children's books with real illustrations. Not your standard, cutesy children's books that seem to think kids don't deserve better. Books that are different.

Like this one. It's called Die große Rallye by Jochen Stuhrmann, and I haven't found it in English.It's about a big animal race. They all gather at the start, ready to go and race.

 On every page, something happens to one of them that forces them to quit the race.

They get stuck on the side of the road.

Or, and this is my favorite, Sir Henry Hanover. He's taken his convertible and his six cousins are travelling with him. Unfortunately, all their hats get lost.

So Sir Henry has to stop his car and get them all back.

In the end, only one of them makes it to the finish line. But surprise - he has picked up all the other animals along the way and so they all win.

In the non-fiction category (yes, we always have non-fiction books for Christmas, too) my favorite is Wo geht's lang? (Where do we go?) by Heekyoung Kim. The book's original edition is Korean. It's a book about how maps explain the world. Even if you can't find it in English, it's still worth it because the maps really do most of the talking.

At the beginning it explains the basic concept of maps and how they are used to depict a town for example.

Then it talks about the history of maps and of cities, like how in many large cities there is a big river running right through it. It's not a lot of text but the great illustrations are very well done.

It shows the same cities and how today the subway maps reflect what has changed.

I love this page, where it explains how navigation systems work. Because come to think of it, kids will still need to know about maps in school and all that, but in their daily life, navigation systems are much more common.

Here's another fictional one. And another one I love for it's illustrations and for the sheer craziness of the story. My kids love crazy stories. The ones that just tell a story, without the author trying to lecture them about something. Just a good story. Preferably one where even mommy and daddy can't tell how it's going to end. Enter Oops! by Jean-Luc Fromental (it's called Oups! in Germany, btw). The title basically sums up the storyline.

Don't you just love the inner lining of the book?

 
A family is ready to go on vacation and on their way to the airport, when something goes wrong.

And then, everything goes wrong. Really everything. And they go from one mess to the next.

In the end, they miss their flight. But they still make it to their destination... 

So these are my current favorites. Would love to hear about yours, because, really, one can never have too many (good) children's books.

Swenja

{Handmade Christmas} Felt Flower Brooches.

Really, this post should have a subtitle: General rambling about not having enough time to blog. Or something like that. So if you just want to read about the felt brooches, scroll down. Scroll some more. Really, it's there, I promise. Anyhow, if you blog, this might sound familiar (I hope).

I always underestimate the amount of time that blogging adds to any of my projects. Before I started blogging I thought that when I'm doing these things anyway, I might just as well blog about them, right? Wrong. At least for me, it's a challenge to get the things on my list done before I need to pick the kids up AND take decent pictures of the progress. Or the end result. Or the nicely packaged result, since that would mean I would actually have to nicely wrap some of the things just so I can take a picture of them.

And when I do get around to taking pictures, well, imagine me running around the house trying to remember what I need to photograph, trying to find a decent background, spending half an hour I don't have making cute gift tags for the prototype package of dog biscuits and telling myself that I really, really need to learn how to use this camera properly. And of course on those days it's always dark. Always.

Oh, and then the kids get sick. So even if I work around the times spent at home with little brother because he can't go to preschool or the doctor's appointments and all that, there are still the nights. You see, I've learned that blogging during the (kid-free) morning usually results in nothing else getting done (the beds upstairs are a mess as we speak and I'm trying really hard to ignore the crumbs on the floor or the Christmas cards I need to write), so I avoid my laptop, telling myself I'll do that at night when the kids are asleep. Except that they don't really sleep well when they're sick. Surprise. Oh, and little brother doesn't fall alseep without mommy. Never. Ever.

Take yesterday: I was downstairs at 8pm, all kids asleep. Record time. I was feeling crappy, but hey, how can I let a night that starts at 8pm go to waste with something like sleep?! So I made some tea, took some migraine medication, turned on the laptop and started Blogger. Before I could type the first word, little brother was crying. By the time he was back asleep it was 9pm and I decided to go to bed and read some blogs on my phone instead. Pathetic.

It's been a week since my last post and I have so many projects to share! I can't believe I'm not getting any posts done about them. So I'm taking some time off from my to do's today (I have a migraine so technically I could declare this as relax and drink tea, I think...) and start posting about them, regardless of how bad the pics are. I promise I'll take better pictures next year. Really.

So here we go: Felt flower brooches.

If you saw the yarn wreaths, these might look familiar. For the felt flowers, I followed Dani's tutorial. She uses a felt circle that she cuts like a spiral and then rolls it up. See the full tutorial at klitzeklein. I found her method of using a tiny piece of double-sided tape at the beginning of the spiral really helps keep it together. Being lazy, I use fabric glue instead of the hot glue. For me, the small tip on the fabric glue bottle worked really well. I also made some flowers from denim (literally a cut up old pair of jeans, washed, of course) and while with denim the glue needs more time to dry, it still works.

For the leaves I used a trick I had seen on I am Momma Hear Me Roar. She cuts out a leaf (or petal) shape and then cuts a slit at the bottom, folding the two ends over and glues them in place. Works like a charm. What helped, especially with the denim leaves, was to use pins or clips to hold the leaf together until the glue is fully dry.

I ended up doing some flowers and leaves here and there, letting them dry completely overnight before I glued the pins on and then let that dry overnight, too. I guess it would work faster if you use hot glue, but the fabric glue worked just fine for me. So my desk looked like a mess for a while, which is fine since it's a desk and not a dining room table.


For packaging, I used cardboard scraps from boxes just like I did for the clay ornaments. And here we go, all packed up and ready to go. Well, except for the one not pictured with the blue felt that I just did last week. And of course haven't packaged yet. It's on my list. For today, actually. Instead I'm blogging...

I like how they turned out and how customizable they are. I used different combinations of felt and denim and different color combinations for each recipient. In fact, I like them so much, I'm keeping two of them for myself. But don't tell Santa.

A quick look at my watch reveals that it took me two hours to write this. Including taking and downloading some more pics. And some pics of books I really want to share with you. Oh, and I did make the beds meanwhile. I just can't stand unmade beds. I think I'll take of those crumbs on the floor after lunch (really, what is the point of vacuuming when you have preschoolers about to have lunch?!) and try to squeeze in a post about the books... Wish me luck for the weekend, because I have more things to share - dog biscuits, toffee, sibling gifts and my favorite Christmas cookies to name a few.

Anyone out there with advice about how to actually get Christmas posts done before Christmas is over and still get the actual Christmas things done, too?

Swenja

{Handmade Christmas} Clay ornaments

We did these last week. As in the kids and I did them. Me! Craft! With my kids! They loved it and took it very seriously. After all, these are going to be Christmas gifts for their Kindergarten teachers, some of their friends and family. And I love how they turned out.

I got the idea from here and it was just what I was looking for, something simple, cute, inexpensive, somewhat useful and easy enough for the kids to make (who am I kidding, after the almost Memory mishap, low skill level applies to me more than my kids....). Then Belinda posted something similar but I decided to go with the original one I had seen because I liked the look. Oh, and I later saw that Yvonne also made something like it using them as tags for her Advent calendar. I've bookmarked that idea!

In the end, we did a combination of several things. We did rectangular shapes that the kids pressed stamps into. Big brother cut his rectangles himself (and he's as good at this as mommy is... thank goodness he's only 5 yet!), for little brother I did the cutting and then gave them to him to finish. They added the hole using a toothpick and then stamped snowflakes and stars on them.

We also did quite a few mini Christmas trees that I later ended up tying to the larger ones.

For packaging, I used scraps cut from simple cardboard boxes (I live in the middle of nowhere and I hate dragging my kids to the nearest city for shopping. So a lot of things get bought on the Internet and shipped here, resulting a never-ending supply of boxes), punched a hole and tied the ornament to the cardboard.

But my favorite part is my new stamp that says "handmade". I got it as part of a set of stamps on sale when buying supplies for all my planned Christmas crafts. Love it.

Then I wrapped the whole thing in cellophane and added a twine bow and a tag. Now I only have to do that for the other millions of them.

We also made snowflakes, but only three of them. I already bought more clay to do some more snowflakes. They would be a nice addition to our Christmas tree.

So this is what I ended up with. Not bad for one package of clay and maybe a good half our of nice, peaceful crafting with the kids, if you ask me.

Oh, and I'm going to mention again that making as many gifts myself or having the kids make them is part of my Christmas strategies. I'll just keep mentioning this until someone finally clicks over to that post and reads it. And leave a comment, maybe. But don't feel pressured to do so. Really. Totally up to you.

Have a good weekend,
Swenja

{Handmade Christmas} DIY Memory

I love giving gifts. I read an article this week that I couldn't have agreed with more: giving gifts is about thoughtfulness, paying attention and being generous. It's not about money, and at the same time refusing to participate in this consumerist madness around the holidays does not mean you have to stop giving gifts. Not being able to surprise each other or find something you know the other one will love is sad. I know many married couples these days stop getting gifts for another. "We just do something for the children at our family" is something I frequently hear.

I don't agree with that. I mean, it's everyone's choice and I wish them all the happiness in the world, but there has got to be something you could wrap for your husband or wife. Even if it's a good old fashioned love letter, a thrift store find, a painting, a favorite cake or spice mix.

Anyhow. End of rant about not getting each other gifts for the holidays.

So let's start again. 

I love giving gifts.

Even if I'm just sending cookies and toffee (just finished my first batch! Post to follow. Hopefully.) to friends. And since many of my friends have kids, I wanted something small to put in the package just for them. I don't know about your kids, but mine seem to get plenty of toys from Santa, so something simple will do here.

One of my Christmas strategies is to make as many gifts as I can.

Since I had two days off from work this week, I tried to get a lot of my handmade gifts done, especially the ones that require mailing. I did quite well actually, especially since I tried to stay away from my laptop as much as possible. I love blogging and reading blogs, but it isn't really helping me getting anything done.

A Christmas memory game was what I had bookmarked for small kid gifts. I got the idea and the gorgeous (and free!!) printable from Rebecca at simple as that. Go get it here.

I had downloaded the file ages ago. Today I was going to print it, and laminate it for more durability. Sounded easy enough.

And that was where the fun started. After ruining several batches trying a few techniques I was pretty ready to just give up and go curl up on the couch with a blanket. I tried sewing a different project on my list to distract me. Well, my sewing machine and I had a severe disagreement over this, so that landed in the garbage (the project, not the machine. And it was just paper, not fabric). Oops. Seems like just not my crafting day. Or maybe it was all just beginner's luck this week?!

So after a frustratingly large part of my free time little while I finally found a method that worked for me.

Relief.

Not that this is rocket science. But I told you I am bad with crafts. Anyway, what I ended up doing is printing the memory on both sides of a sheet of paper, laminating that one sheet and then cutting the pieces out, repeating that process for the second set. And then again. And again. And again. And...

You get the idea. I wrapped the whole thing in tiny brown bags I had on hand (haha, I can't believe I just wrote that. Sounds like I have all these cool crafting supplies on hand, right?), glued one side shut with some of the leftover material from my stupid mistakes previous attempts and used some stamps on the other side to add the recipient's name.

Please tell me I'm not the only one messing up seemingly simple projects!
Swenja