Fancy Fruit!

I brushed up on my creative food skills this summer by making a fruit bouquet for a friend of mine from high school. She got married this summer and asked if I would make a fruit bouquet for the rehearsal dinner. Of course I would! I love playing with food!

She even provided the fruit so I only had to worry about finding the time and cookie cutters to make the  arrangement!

I looked up what fruit arrangements can cost, and it is insane! This is way cheeper than hundreds of dollars! Ya it may take some time, but thats what makes it special!

So here are some things you will need if you ever want to make a fruit arrangement! It was super easy and fun to do!

 For fruit I used watermelon, pineapple, canalope, some other mystery mellon, grapes, strawberries, and I used kale for a filler.
You will need wooden skewers to hold up the fruit, and obviously cookie cutters, knifes and a cutting board!

Start slicing up fruit about an inch or a half an inch. I made the pineapple probably to thick so you can probably get away with only a half an inch.

Once you have fruit cut and ready to assemble, slice off the top of the watermelon. First I figured out what side it was the most stable on though so it wouldn't go rolling around!

To make flowers, cut a flower shape out of pineapple and a circle from a melon, stick a toothpick into the pineapple and melon to attach, and finally a skewer into the pineapple. I found it to difficult to just put a skewer into both. You can cut out letters, and stick a row of grapes on skewers for simple creativeness! I also sliced a small piece of strawberry and cut it into a heart shape to go inside of a heart shaped pineapple to make it pop.

When You start to stick things into the watermelon, work back to front.  I started with the letters and then added kelp. I slowly added flowers and mellon pieces, always adding kelp. You may need to stick toothpicks into the kelp to help it stay down. Once you have a simple design stuff it with strawberries and grapes to create the full fruity effect!

Soap and Splatter

I have done a horrible job of blogging over the summer! You would think I would have the time, but alas I don't! I continued to do Wacky Wednesdays in my community for the month of July, which was a blast! I am determined to play catch up and blog about the projects. So without further procrastination, this was one of the days we made soap sculptures and splatter art!

Telling parents that kids were going to make soap sculptures, I got some quizzical looks. There was no way I was going to trust little kids with knives! But I was going to trust them with a microwave! Turns out you can microwave Ivory soap, and it will grow and turn into this really cool blob of coral looking soap! I got the idea from Pintrest which came from a blog called, Our Best Bites, you can see their post here.

So I had the kids take turns helping me blow up the soap in the microwave, the look of awe on their faces was so rewarding! We would place the soap on parchment paper, and microwave it until the bar of soap was no longer a square. Afterwards I had them color their sculptures with food coloring. I mixed it with a bit of water to be thrifty. They used brushes and eye-droppers to 'paint' the soap. Kids and things that squirt water are dangerous, proceed with caution!

The really great thing about this project is that it has a good use! They could use their sculptures for a fun, and very bubbly colorful bath time! One of the moms told me her bathroom has never smelt better!

We also made some splatter art by putting some paint on a page and using packing squares, and straws to splat it all over the paper.