School's Out!

The first year of high school is finally over and six whole weeks of holidays beckons.

After getting a good report card, Cheyenne celebrated by hosting a sleepover with three friends last night.  Due to our current limited space due to the larger van taking up extra space in the garage, there wasn't really room in the rumpus, so they slept in a tent in the backyard.

A previous attempt at a tent sleepover ended up in several girls frightened of night sounds in the backyard, and a last minute relocation indoors.  This time they actually stayed in the tent.

A fourth friend came over today for a swim as she'd been unable to attend the sleepover. She changed schools last term, so they haven't caught up with her for a while.

It's good to see the girls enjoying their holidays.

Mum, I'm Bored!

Now that the Easter holidays are over and Term 2 has started, I finally have time to sit down and write about my experiences with Melted Pony Bead Suncatchers.  I actually made these back in February, but we'll pretend it hasn't taken me two months to blog about it, OK?

You know how it is...  You see a post on Facebook or a picture on Pinterest and think to yourself, "That looks pretty/interesting/easy enough, and would be a good boredom buster.  We've certainly got all the supplies to make it.  Why not give it a go?"

Sound familiar?  I know you're nodding your head.  So, here it is - part tutorial, part cautionary tale.  This is NOT one of those Pinterest Fails... for the most part. I'll get to that later.

Step 1. Gather your supplies.  
You will need cheap pony beads in colours of your choice (we already had a heap of these - they seem to be a popular gift for pre-teen girls).  Depending what you are planning on making, use either transparent, with or without glitter (for suncatchers) or solid colours (for coasters, placemats, etc), but don't, on any account, use those iridescent ones.  Their oil-slick colours will lure you in with their attractiveness, but just don't go there.  I'll show you why later.
 
You'll also need some old non-stick pans, shaped foils pans, or egg rings on an old pizza tray (basically use whatever shapes you're aiming for), cooling racks and something to do the melting in.  Don't use your good cookware. You will not want to use it for food after melting plastic in it.  Try thrift store for cheap pans and keep them for craft use. 
Most instructions tell you to use an oven, some have used a heat gun, but I recommend using a hooded bbq. Outdoors. Trust me. Melted plastic fumes are NOT pleasant.  If you have pets or people with sensitive noses, keep them away.  Consider yourself warned.

Step 2. Arrange beads in your chosen moulds 
Preheat your oven/bbq to 200 degrees celsius.
You could go completely random or try to make patterns. Totally up to you, but make sure you only have a single layer of beads or they won't melt properly.

Step 3. Melt beads.
Instructions for ovens says 200 celsius for 20 minutes, but as I'd cranked all the burners on the bbq and shut the hood, it got pretty hot, pretty quickly, so I didn't need 20 minutes.  Just keep checking them and remove when fully melted to a smooth liquid state.

Step 4. Allow to cool.
Place on a cooling rack and wait for the plastic to cool.  Don't freak out at the loud cracking noises it makes as it cools.. As it cools, it will come away from the edges, so that it should just tip out of the pan when completely cooled.

Step 5. Remove from pans and sand rough edges if needed.

These heart shaped ones used glitter beads.

Step 6. Drill holes for hanging, if required.

Step 7. Hang and admire. Wasn't that easy?

And now for that cautionary tale...  I had a bag of iridescent (yet translucent) beads.  The colours were dazzling, like a dragonfly.  Semi transparent, so I thought they'd turn out nicely.  Wrong!  Not sure if it's the iridescent coating or maybe they're made of a different plastic, but they just didn't melt properly.  Even after triple the time in the heat.  The result was a lumpy, oil slicked mess that resembled fake vomit and stained the pan.

BEFORE

(I used solid colours to form the C)

 AFTER

So now you know what to do and what not to do.  Have a go.  It really is easy. I'm very happy with how mine turned out and will definitely make more.

Experiment with colours and patterns, but if you do find yourself falling for the allure of iridescent beads... don't say I didn't warn you!

Collection or Obsession?

Ah, Lego. You never really grow out of it. In fact, I still have an ice cream bucket full of random Lego from my childhood.

Back then the Lego men (there were no women) came in city characters or space men (they may have just started to do a limited range of knights as well). They ALL had the same yellow heads with the same smiley faces, and that wasn't really a bad thing. It was just they way Lego men were.

Somebody at Lego finally came up with the idea of updating the figures. They now have awesome facial features. No more boring smiley face, lol.

Last year I was waiting in a checkout line at Target and saw a box full of packets of individual Lego figures in what appeared to be a “lucky dip” type arrangement. I bought one just to see which one I would get. That was Series 1 of the Minifigures. Had I known that in Series 1 each of the 16 different figures had individual barcodes, I probably would have gone back the next day to find the ones I wanted.   I didn’t.    I never saw another box of that series again.

Earlier this year I noticed a box or two of what turned out to be Series 3. (Not sure why I never saw any Series 2 figures.) This time I was determined to get several of them. I guess you could say I became obsessed, lol.

I spent a lot of time, in various stores, squeezing foil packets to try and figure out which figure might be inside. Random shoppers would give me odd looks (naturally) but several were intrigued enough to actually stand there and help me squeeze packets! (Lego had wised up that the identifying barcodes reduced sales because people only bought the ones they wanted, and they now had no obvious identifying marks). After many wasted hours a nice lady told me that, although they all looked the same, there were apparently some Braille-like dots on the back of the packs which would help. Five minutes on Google and I had the code breaker, so I managed to get the Fisherman, Biggles, Snowboarder and several others.

Series 4 has been harder to find. They were released in April but don’t seem to be stocked at the usual places.  The Braille dots are a wash this time round (damn you Lego), so I have gone back to squeezing packets again.  sigh...

At long last I have FINALLY found the Hazmat Guy that I’ve been searching for.  The expression on his face is priceless.  

Now I just have to find the urban skateboarder…

...sigh.

This could take a while.

Vege Tableau

I started collecting these shelf-sitter figurines a couple of years ago. They are available in both fruit and vegetable varieties, but I decided to go with vegetables. There are many different ones to choose from - cauliflowers, carrots, corn, peas in pods, chillies, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, garlic, potatoes... any vegetable you can think of, there is probably a figurine of it in the range.

For ages I just had the broccoli and the eggplant, co-existing happily on my kitchen window sill, above my sink. To me, it always seemed like the broccoli had been telling a joke or having a good gossip and the eggplant was leaning in to share the secret. Last year I bought the orange pumpkin, because, with a grin like that, he looked as if he belonged with the other two gossipers.

For Mothers' Day this year I received another to add to my set. I picked out the butternut pumpkin (...or maybe he's a marrow, I'm not quite sure) purely because of the cranky expression on his face and his folded arms. I knew he would be perfect to play the role of the "outsider", so I've placed him off to one side. I can't quite decide whether he's pissed off because the other three are gossiping and laughing about him, or just because they aren't sharing their secret with him.

What do you think?

White Water Rafting

Friday was an early start for Steve, but thankfully Cheyenne and I got to sleep in for a change! Steve, Helena, Jason, Robert and Brooks headed off to Tully to go white water rafting in Tully Gorge. It was another hazy day, but the sun was shining and there was a slight breeze.

Steve phoned later to let me know that the tour guide said they’d be having lunch at a particular vantage point, then after that, there’d be another good photo opportunity further down river.

Due to several back packers in hired camper vans, doing 80 km/h flat out on the single lane highway (God Bless the QLD Govt. – they’ve increased all our regos, why can’t they spend the money widening our main highway north?), Cheyenne and I arrived at the lunch area a little too late to see all but the last two groups of rafters. We did find the second vantage point further down river however, and waited for them all to flash past.

It was a really picturesque place to wait, and would have made a nice shady picnic spot, had we not been rushing out of the car to scramble down the track in case we missed the rafts again!

I did manage to get a couple of photos of them as they went past, and several scenic shots of the Tully Gorge as well. Just as well, since it would have really made my day (NOT) if I’d driven an hour each way along a narrow winding road and completely missed them…

Here they come!

There they go!

Steve bought himself a souvenir photo as well, so despite the difficulty of being at the right place at the right time, we did still end up with a few shots of the day's fun.

Hazy Days, Waterfalls and 20 Litres of Vodka

When the sun came up on Thursday, it revealed a smoky haze. Not the red dust storm that had hit Sydney and Brisbane, but it turned the sky grey nonetheless.

We had no particular plans, so decided to drive up towards Mission Beach, stopping along the way at Murray Falls. This is a very pretty waterfall, with a picnic area and swimming hole.

We decided to have a sausage sizzle for lunch, then headed to the water to cool off. There were a couple of nice deep pools, surrounded by smooth, water-rounded rocks, which some kids were sliding down.

These kids kindly let us take turns using their rock sliding boards – cut from plastic 20 litre Vodka drums. Such a brilliant idea! They’d climb to the top of the rock, pour a bucket of water down the side to make the sliding path slippery, then sit on the board and slide down the rock, into the icy cold running water at the bottom. It was heaps of fun, although I did manage to have a stack whilst trying to race Steve. Got a bit of air, banged my elbow and came down hard on the raised edge of the plastic (and boy, did I get a whopper of a bruise on my right butt cheek!)

(Hopefully, if Blogger does what it's supposed to do, this will be a short video of me sliding down the rocks on a "Vodka board")

After we finished swimming, we drove to Mission Beach, however the lousy visibility prevented us from having a decent view of the islands. Even Dunk Island was lost in the haze, so it isn't worth uploading any photos of that.

Still, for a completely unplanned, lazy day, we had the best fun.