Blaze's New Tinsel Tree

This is the story of an old lamp that found new life as a tinsel tree.

I love the base of this lamp, it was the rest of the lamp that I didn't like, so I got rid of the rest.




Blaze has been bemoaning his lack of holiday decorations, so I decided to make a tinsel tree for his room.

The first level of "branches" are three old metal clothes hangers, straightened out and then cut in half. I then folded each of those pieces of wire in-half. Victorian feather trees often had a bead at the tip of each branch. I placed a gear on the tip of each of my branches, instead. I bent a bit of each wire down and wired the 6 branches to the tree using thin brass wire.




For the two remaining levels, I used floral wire, which was much easier to work with.
Then, starting with the area right under the first level of branches, I wrapped everything with antique, gold tinsel that I found at Goodwill.




It took 2 rolls of tinsel to cover a tree this size. I would have liked to build it up a little taller, but that was all the tinsel of that type that I had.




Blaze went to sleep while I was still making the tree, so I'm putting a few decorations on it tonight, so he'll have a nice surprise when he wakes up in the morning.



The design is based on the Victorian feather trees, the first artificial Christmas trees, but since the tinsel is flame resistant, I felt better about using clip-on candle holders for this tree. I don't leave the candles burning for very long, though, and never unsupervised.

Blaze's 10th Birthday

I made this little slideshow of Blaze's airship pirate birthday party, using the song "Across the Sky" by Emilie Autumn as the background music.



I only had two hours to turn a plain white room, with crayon marked folding tables, into a birthday party, so I ran out of time before some things got done. It didn't really matter, though. The kids had a great time. As DH said, "they don't know what it looked like in your head."

The Noah's Endeavor Christmas Party

Last night, we were able to take a break from all of the cooking for Blaze's party, which is later today, to go have fun at a Christmas party at The Boys and Girls Club.

Blaze was very happy to have his friend from school there to dance with. The two of them have been practicing their dance moves before school for about two weeks.





There was a potluck snack buffet



and then, more Christmas and dance music.





After a while, it ended up being mostly the girls dancing, while the boys ran off to play pool or Beyblades.





A good time was had by all!



Now, back to the frantic cooking. Blaze's party is tonight and I still have a lot to do, which is being interrupted at lunch time by a tenant's meeting about bullying.

The Airship Pinata

The airship pinata started it's existence as a football shaped Mylar balloon,



but then it was encased in newspaper strips that were dipped into paper mache paste, made from equal parts white flour and water (this first bowl of paste was 3 cups of flour to 3 cups of water).



When the entire balloon, except for the neck, was covered in newspaper, it was left to dry and harden.



When it was completely hard and dry, the balloon was cut



and pulled out of its paper mache shell.



The tail fins and gondola were cut from cardboard and attached with small amounts of duct tape, just enough to hold them in place.



Paper mache was then used to cover all the cardboard and it was again left for a couple days to dry.



To add the tissue paper to the outside of the pinata, gold tissue paper was cut into strips along the fold-line of the paper. Each strip was then folded in half.



Then each folded strip was cut into fringe.



For smaller children, the tissue paper can be cut into squares by the parent and then have the child squish them up into balls before gluing them on the pinata. That was how we decorated most of the pinatas we made when my daughters were little.

It is time for one of those "do as I say, not as I do" moments. I did not decide to paint part of the pinata, instead of covering the whole thing in tissue paper, until after I had already added a lot of tissue paper. Better planning and doing all the painting first, would have made this easier.

Next, the fringe was glued in place, each strip over lapping the previous strip, using Elmers glue.



Final decorative touches were added, using images I found on the internet.

I'll give it a day or two to be sure it is really dry and then fill it with candy.

Model Trains at the Matheson

Yesterday afternoon, Blaze and I went to our local history museum for the first time, so we could see a small show of model trains. The trains will be on display today and tomorrow, as well.









Although some of the local history displays had been moved out of the way to make room for the trains, there were still some non-train related things that I thought were interesting to look at,





but Blaze had eyes only for the trains, and I was not even able to read the complete passage under this diorama to him before he ran off, back to the largest train table.



As we were leaving, one of the model train operators stopped Blaze and gave him two old copies of Model Railroader Magazine. He was very excited and informed me that as soon as we got to the car, he was going to start studying these.



For more information about the Matheson Museum, the website can be found here:

http://www.mathesonmuseum.org/

Florida "Snow"

It has been cold enough to snow the past couple nights, but it hasn't really done so. Blaze and I had fun pretending it was snowing, though.

These fluffy white seeds sure look like snow when they're blowing around in the air.

My New Toy and Grandma

I have a new toy! DH gave me my Christmas gift early. It's a Nikon Coolpix camera. I'm very excited, because the LCD screen on my old Fugi camera hasn't worked in over a year and it was having increasing trouble focusing.



Now all I need is time to play with it. My schedule is kind of crazy. I'm in the classroom, teaching Language Art and Thematics (a combination of history and science) until 12:30p.m. four days a week. Blaze sits next to me in the classroom three mornings a week, but he doesn't work well when there are distractions of any kind, so even though I take school work to do, we frequently have more work to do when we get home. Then, two days a week I have to go back to school after work to tutor a middle school student. Blaze still has speech therapy two days a week and physical therapy once a week.

I would like to think that the holiday break will bring some much needed rest, but we will be traveling over the break. A couple months ago, my 90-something year old grandmother was placed in a nursing home and she has asked to see both her granddaughters. My sister was there over Thanksgiving and I will be going to visit right after Christmas. She's been a very tough and independent old lady, who still insisted on working in the garden even after she lost most of her eyesight and started having mobility issues. My father tried to get her live-in help, but she told him she would drive the person away, and she finally did. When she was diagnosed with a condition called "sundowners", a form of dementia that affects people mostly at night, it became obvious to her sons that she could no longer take care of herself. My parents have been divorced since I was ten, but my father called my mother when he moved Grandma into the nursing home to let her know what was going on and he explained that he believed that this choice was probably saving her life.

My mother called last night and told me about the visit that she, my sister, and my sisters family had had with Grandma. She says Grandma's happy where she's living now, although the food is not always to her liking (this is a woman who has always canned a lot of her own vegetables and has never liked trying new foods, so that's not that surprising).