Sunday Update

Just a quick weekend blog post to let people know what I've been up to. I'm hoping to do these every Sunday, or at least fairly regularly.

The new job is going well. I worked on brainstorming new product ideas this week and fleshing out my ideas to figure out which ones are feasible. If you have any brilliant ideas for dietary supplements that you wish you could find but seem to be sold nowhere, feel free to let me know. (I make no promises.) I'm looking forward to everything picking up a little now that the holidays are over.

Christmas vacation was lovely, and involved driving to my parents' house, visiting with them and a brother and sister, drinking fresh orange juice every day, going shopping, and relaxing. And we brought back tons of oranges, grapefruit, and lemons to prolong the enjoyment! Speaking of citrus, I also received a dwarf Valencia orange tree for Christmas from my mother-in-law, so I'm excited to have my own (small) source of oranges at some point. It currently has 4 on there that are still a ways off from being ripe.

I've been trying my hand at origami as of late as well, since I go a big stack of origami paper for Christmas too. Here's what I've done so far:

box, elephant, crane, more complicated elephant, another box

I really like the pink elephant, and the box on the right currently holds perlers that I drop on the floor and don't pick up until later. Now the question is what to make next...

Nathan and I have also been working on a super secret project that we should have more information on soon (like, in a week or two), so stay tuned! It's related to our etsy shop, but that's the only hint I can give yet.

In other news, we went shopping last Saturday to DSW (my favorite shoe store) and Joann's, and I just have to show off one of my receipts from the purchase I made...

That's right, I got a pair of pink heels for a penny. Not too shabby. I also got a ton of remnants at Joann's for under $5, which was also very exciting, but I'll spare you another picture.

I've been playing through the newest Zelda game (A Link Between Worlds), and finally beat it on Friday, only to start over on hard mode yesterday. In case that wasn't a big enough clue, I really, really liked it. If you have a 3DS or 2DS, you should totally buy and play it. Super clever puzzles, decent plot, and really pretty graphics. And, in fact, I do turn on the 3D (especially in dungeons) to help with the platforming bits, which is more than most games manage. (It is playable without 3D, just easier in certain parts with it.)

This is the first week of a new term for Nathan, plus his interview for an internship with Microsoft is on Friday, and I of course will be going to work as per usual, but hopefully I'll have some fun/interesting updates for you next week. Happy new year to all!

Silk Painting

Final post about my family reunion, I promise. :) But silk painting was cool enough that it definitely merited a post all to itself.

In a nutshell, silk painting is where you take a piece of silk and paint a design onto it. The Estes Park craft cabin had tons of designs they had created that you could choose from, or if you were really ambitious you could draw your own. Being not-so-artistically-inclined in the drawing realm, we opted for an abstract design they had on display (abstract so that, as Nathan said, if we messed up nobody could tell).

Once we chose a design, we got our piece of silk (11"x60" I believe) stretched onto a wooden frame, and we began tracing the design with this liquid wax substance called resist.

Drawing the pattern with the resist.

It was a two person job. Well, it could have been one person but it went much faster with two...

Next, we had to let it dry for about an hour. It was conveniently lunch time, so that worked out well. Then came the fun part: painting it.

Here it is about a third of the way into it. Nathan's side is on the bottom of the picture, and I'm working on the other end.

There are a few different techniques you can use during the painting process, but it's pretty straightforward for the most part. You can either put the fabric dye onto dry silk for a deeper, richer color (but it's harder to get it even), or get the silk wet first and then paint it for a more even paint job but not as deep colors. We mostly did wet painting, because that also allowed you to do cool techniques like making gradients where the colors shaded from one to another.

We kind of went crazy with gradients. But they were really awesome. You can see my sister's in the background too; it looked absolutely amazing when it was finished!

The last technique we utilized was salt - if you put table salt or rock salt on the paint before it dries, the salt sucks up some of the paint and makes cool patterns (big ones with rock salt, and small ones with table salt). We used rock salt primarily on the black background to add some fun textures (and disguise our uneven paint job). It ended up looking very cool. In fact, the guys working in the silk painting room kept coming over to see how it was coming and exclaiming over how sweet it was. (One said it would make an awesome cover to a Coldplay album.)

Once it dried, the silk painting guys washed out the resist for us, and it was ready to display!

The lighting is not doing the colors justice at all. Oh well. They're much more vibrant in person.

Though we would have loved to hang it in a window, there weren't really any that would have worked well in our basement apartment. :) So we opted to hang it over the entryway connecting the living room to the rest of the apartment instead. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I did the side on the left, and Nathan did the side on the right, and miraculously the two sides mesh very well. It was more fun for me doing it together with Nathan than it would have been doing two smaller ones separately, especially since it allowed us to get a bigger project done in a decent length of time. (It probably took about 3 hours for us to make, 4 if you count the time for the resist to dry, but it was projected to take 5-7 hours if you made it singlehandedly.)

I also want to add that 3 of my nieces and sister also made silk paintings of their own, and they all turned out lovely. I wish I had pictures of the final products for each of them to show you how talented they all are.

So final verdict: I'm glad Nathan convinced me to do this with him rather than make some jewelry, which I do at home anyway. Hooray for trying new things!

How to Survive 9 Hour Car Trips with Six Children

To save money on gas, we opted to drive with my brother's family to get to the family reunion last week. It was in Colorado, an 8.5 hour drive. The situation in a nutshell: 1 twelve passenger van, 4 adults, 6 children (well... 5 children and 1 infant). Overall, it went quite smoothly, but I thought I'd share the games we came up with to pass the time.

Game 1:

Starting with A, go through the alphabet letter by letter and find something outside the car that starts with that letter. Examples: A - airplane, B: bus, C: car, D: deer, etc. It must be something visible (we didn't let them count "wind" for W, but "valley" was okay for V). Once you reach Z, go backwards. Then look for numbers (primarily on license plates, trucks, and signs). We got through A-Z, Z-A, 0-13 before they lost interest.

Game 2:

Earn 1000 points to get a prize (in this case, the prize was watching me play Plants vs. Zombies on my iPod Touch for an hour). The rules of how you earn points will vary depending on your location, but essentially you earn points by finding certain things outside the car. Here are a few examples of things we used:

- speed limit signs (10 pts)
- passing a semi (20 pts)
- counting 10 moving semis going the opposite direction (20 pts)
- lakes (10 pts)
- rivers (5 pts)
- livestock (1-3 pts per animal)
- trees (1 pt each)
- fire hydrants (20 pts - but they are worth 100 pts if the 2 year old notices them!)
- motorcycles (50 pts)
- absolutely nothing (20 pts) (We drove through Wyoming. It was really empty.)
- road signs (15 points for every 5)
- not whining if it's not your turn to earn points earns you bonus points (up to 100) for when it is your turn.

The point values shifted somewhat depending on how rare something was; they also all decreased after the total points earned got over 900. Once they reached 1000 points, they had to do a finale. The finales we had them do were:

- all say "oooooooohhhhh" every time we went around a curve for 5 consecutive curves in the road
- find semi trucks with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple cabs
- figure out approximately how many semis we have passed going the other direction (and counted) throughout the day (at least 200, probably more)
- get the 2 year old to say "fire hydrant" even though there weren't any for miles and miles in any direction

When it wasn't their turn to play the points game, the rest of the children read books, worked on puzzle books or Sudoku, or played with travel Tangrams. Poor baby S got the raw end of the deal, having nothing at all to do the entire time. When she was really bored I held a rattle in front of her and turned it back and forth, which was apparently fascinating enough to keep her content until my arm got tired. Young T took a lot of naps (to the detriment of bedtime) and worked on a block puzzle when he wasn't spotting fire hydrants.

What were your favorite games to play in the car as children?

Family Reunion Recap part 2

Back for more? It's time for the rest of the family reunion recap. I bet you're super excited to read about our other adventures. This one's a lot more picture heavy - apologies in advance!

Wednesday: The first activity on the agenda after breakfast was mini golfing. Estes Park has a mini golf course available for any guests to use for free. So we rounded everyone up and headed down for a round of mini golf. Of course, it would have taken far too long to go in one big group, so instead we opted to split into 5 groups of 4 and go from there.

Group 1: my sister, Miss M, E1, A1

Group 2: E2, T, me, Nathan

Group 3: Mom, PMJ, Baby S, Young T

Group 4: PJJ, Miss E, Young M, R

Group 5: Dad, A, G, A2

We all had a lot of fun, and nobody got heat stroke. I didn't get the lowest score by a long shot, but I did respectably well. (The final scores in our group for 18 holes were T: 58, N: 59, me: 62, E2: 156. E2 was very meticulous at counting every stroke.)

Here are a few of my favorite action shots:

T helping E2 hold the putter correctly

Young T playing shuffleboard.

Wednesday afternoon we had a private archery lesson scheduled for the older kids and any interested adults. It was probably my favorite activity.

PJJ, G, Nathan, Mom

Miss M, A1, me, E1

I didn't do that great, but at least on one set I got all four arrows in the target. Someday maybe I'll figure out how to aim.

Wednesday evening we rented two puzzles from the game lodge and did one of them in the cabin, staying up til 11:30 to finish it while it thundered and flashed lightning and poured rain outside.

Proof of puzzle completion.

Thursday: Thursday morning we had someone T&G knew come to Estes Park to take professional pictures of our family. It was supposed to be Thursday night, but we moved it up when there was a 50% chance of showers that evening (remember the campfire incident?). Turns out it didn't rain that evening after all, but we were still glad to have gotten it done in the morning.

After pictures, we finally got around to visiting the craft cabin, which is chock full of fun things to do that cost money. My niece Miss M wanted to do everything, of course, but if she had to pick just one, it was the most expensive one - silk painting. First hearing about it, silk painting didn't sound all that thrilling, but I soon changed my mind... Nathan and I ended up spending a good chunk of the day doing one of our own together. I think I'll make a post about that on its own so I can do it justice.

A little preview of A1's silk painting for the impatient. You can also see E1 working on hers in the background.

Once we finished our silk painting (and I resisted the jewelry station), we finished the second puzzle we rented. As we left to take both puzzles back, we passed my nephew outside the cabin who immediately exclaimed "you can't take them back, I wanted to help with them!" with a quivering lip. So we took them back and got another one he could help with instead. Of course, he chose the 1000 piece one that was in the shape of a deer instead of a normal rectangle... and then when we opened it up we discovered pieces from two other puzzles mixed in, so we had to sort them first before we could start working on the puzzle we actually got, and then by the time we began working on the deer it was time for dinner. And then we decided to forget it and took it back (with the extra pieces in a separate bag, so it wasn't all fruitless). We played more Poohead instead and packed all our stuff up. We all stayed up way too late (E1 and Miss M, who were in the same room as me, Nathan, and my sister, were up til at least 10:30 talking), but you know, that happens on the last night of a family reunion.

Friday: The morning was spent eating breakfast and packing the cars. We headed out around 9:30 and arrived home (home at last!) at 7pm, by which time I had a splitting headache and was pretty much useless the rest of the evening. But it was so nice to have a weekend to recover before having to jump back into the daily grind.

Family Reunion Recap part 1

Sorry for the long hiatus; I've spent the last week in Colorado at a family reunion and was too busy having fun to post anything. :) But don't worry! Now you get to read all about it in my painfully detailed recounting!

Saturday: woke up at 7ish with a goal to leave by 8am. We all knew it probably wouldn't happen. Miraculously, Nathan and I were ready at 8, but the van wasn't packed completely, nor were all the kids totally ready. (We rode with my brother's family. The ride itself merits a post of its own.) We ended up heading out around 8:45 am - not too bad, really. We only stopped twice on the drive to Longmont, CO, and made it in 8.5 hours. T&G fed us dinner, we talked a bit, and then we all crashed for the night. My other brother arrived earlier that day, meaning there were 17 of the 20 that were coming to this shindig gathered at that point.

Sunday: Church at T&G's ward (including a Sunday School lesson by my brother T - we all sat on the back row and tried not to be too disruptive :P) followed by lunch. Then we had a rather uneventful afternoon of talking, game playing, and children only getting a little bit hurt as they played in the backyard. We also went for a walk.

Us on a walk.

My niece E1 made tasty Norwegian pancakes for us to eat for dinner (and I definitely want to get her recipe!). They're similar to crepes but somehow more delicious. 

Monday: Nathan and I decided we both needed haircuts badly. We actually meant to get them before leaving, but 1) ran out of time and 2) didn't know of any good places in our area that were not expensive. My brother recommended a place that was decent. 

Taken Tuesday on our hike. I got mine cut super short in an A line and Nathan just got a few inches off the back and cleaned up the sides a bit.

Mom and Dad and my sister got in soon after we arrived home from that little adventure, thus completing the gathering of the Jenkins family (with the exception of one brother and his family who couldn't make it).

We packed up and left around 2:30 to drive to Estes Park, a YMCA park in the Rockies where we were staying. Monday evening was spent settling in to our hotel rooms, playing on the playground, eating dinner, and having Family Home Evening in the small cabin we rented as a gathering place. (I made some of those yummy granola bars as the treat, and helped G make some gluten free brownies too as an alternative. Both were a hit!) Some of the adults stayed up late playing Poohead in the lobby of the hotel as well.

The view outside our balcony.

The cabin. And some people, too.

Tuesday: Tuesday started with breakfast in the mess hall (yes, they fed us 3 meals a day as part of our package, and yes, I ate too much every single meal) followed by a hike in the mountains. First we hiked up the service road on accident (past the manure dumping ground from the stables), then half the group peeled off to head back while the rest of us hiked Bible Trail.

My dad took the picture.

On the service road we saw a garter snake, which elicited many screams from my nieces (something I found vastly amusing). On the actual hike, we didn't see much in the way of wildlife, but I did get a good workout hiking up the relatively steep trail.

After lunch, some of the kids went to participate in some activities/classes that the YMCA people were doing. Nathan took a nap, and I read in the hotel room and watched the ground squirrels tussling and running around on the grass below our balcony.

Pictured: one ground squirrel.

Dinner was followed by a brief respite (and an elk sighting!) before heading over to the campfire pit we rented to build a fire and roast some marshmallows (and make s'mores). While we were getting the fire going, it began to storm (well, it had actually been raining off and on all afternoon, but now it started to thunder and lightning). Then it started to pour, and hail, and we all looked at each other and laughed at our bad timing. Fortunately, the rain/hail stopped after 15 minutes or so, and the weather cooperated after that. (No pictures of the campfire though.)

We played more Poohead that evening in the lobby of the hotel, rounding out the day quite nicely.

And that concludes the first half of the family reunion. More to follow.