Christmas DIY

After reading this blog I decided to try and make some personalized gifts. We have two international students living with us (and for a month we had three!). So I thought the painted mugs with both English and Chinese characters would be nice.

I picked up the pens at Home Depot (5 colors for around $13) and got a box of Cynthia Rowley mugs at Home Goods (8 for $15). Plus one extra mug to practice on. The stickers were from AC Moore and I think they were about $8. These were the most expensive stickers they had but I wanted the initial to be big.

After applying the stickers I began to dots the paint around each letter.

I did red, black, gold and finally silver.

Since we have a Chinese student with us I had him write each student’s name in Chinese. Then on the others were, Mother, Grandmother, Oldest Son, Strength and Perseverance. If you have a little mess up just clean with alcohol and a Q-tip, very carefully.

The blog said to peel off the sticker and bake the mugs.

Well, taking off the stickers proved to be the most annoying and arduous part of the whole process. It might be the stickers I purchased but the stickers came apart and had to be slowly and carefully scraped off with an Exacto knife.

Of course the paint had to be completely dry so it wouldn’t smear. Ugh. Suddenly this became a multi-day process. Some of the paint leaked under the stickers, I just carefully scraped it off. I would not use alcohol at this point since it is super easy to smear the paint.

Finally my mugs were finished and ready for the oven.

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes and then just leave them to cool. The whole process from painting to baking can be a little smelly so have some ventilation going.

The mugs came out GREAT. The red got a bit darker but otherwise the colors all stay true and bright. This gift takes a bit of planning but it is well worth it.

UPDATE: Sept. 2015. Sadly the paint did NOT turn out to be permanent. The dishwasher did take off the paint after several months. Hand washing was better and the gold lasted the best of all but, sniff, I'm still looking for easy to use, PERMANENT, paint!

Happy Merry

Well, one family down yesterday (on the Eve) and one to go today. Everything yesterday was fine, nice dinner and everyone was in a good mood.

Today's festivities started before dawn but we made him wait until we had some coffee. Here he with his "big" gift.



Yes, it is a drum set (thank you once again Craig's List!) and it's not that loud.

Don't Get Jarred!

So the other night Bruce brought in all the equipment he needed to collect a frame's worth of honey. This is about 5 or 6 hanging frames in one level of his bee apartment building. Here is a photo of what the frame looks like filled with capped honeycomb.Of course the honeycomb is capped so the honey stays fresh. It amazed me that the frame sat in the den for several days without leaking honey on anything. When you examine the honeycomb in detail you can see that, in each frame, the comb is tilted slightly up as it is built. This prevents the honey from flowing out before the bees can cap it (duh!)

The next step is to break off the caps so the honey can come out (this is prior to placing it in the extractor.) The low-tech method here is just dragging a pointy multi-prong fork across the caps to break them up.

Bruce actually got around 30 lbs of honey from one frame. By breaking the caps and extracting he can place the frame (with the comb intact) back into the hive. This way the bees can refill it without expending the energy to make new comb.

And this completes our Christmas shopping! I hope everyone likes honey!