Making It

TEST KITCHEN: "Don't bring anything to Thanksgiving dinner," they said. 

Well, you know me. I'm not arriving empty-handed. Plus, you know the saying ... there's always room for Jell-o.

Annabelle and I decided to have a little fun in the kitchen trying to construct a multi-layered, retro (and horrific, might I add) Jell-o mold. Consider it a gag gift. Literally, in this case.

The first layer, alone, was enough to make us shudder. Those are egg whites, in case you're wondering.

And then came olives, carrots, and Spam. Lots and lots of Spam. Fancy Spam!

The process took hours, because you can only do one strata at a time. You put a thin layer of gelatin in, let it set, put stuff atop it and repeat. I honestly lost count of the number of layers we made. It was over a time span of about eight hours.

Did I mention the mold made us shudder? 

Did it work? We won't know until the unveiling, er, unmolding, tomorrow. Stay tuned. ... 

Oh, and while we were at it, we made a bonus item. We didn't want the cranberry log to be lonely on the Thanksgiving table, so we tried making it a friend. Hopefully, if the recipe is right, we'll have a 'lovely' gellied pineapple log to go with it!

We made a bit of a mess in the process. 

Will it work? We'll find out tomorrow.

I told Annabelle the thing I found most disturbing about the gelatinous pineapple in a can was that in the comments on the recipe I found, people were raving about how wonderful it is. Shudder.

PRETTIER: Fortunately, not everything we made in the last 24 hours is horrifying. 

We're getting a jump on holiday gifts, and whipped out a custom t-shirt this morning. There's a fashion trend right now that features four names on a shirt. I think the first time I ever saw it, it was "John & Paul & Ringo & George." (The Beatles, obviously).

CJ has a shirt like that that features the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' names (Leo & Don & Raph & Mikey).

We decided we wanted to make a Queen-themed shirt. We found a font that matched the typeset usually used on such shirts (Arial Nova in bold, if you're wondering) and Annabelle formatted it to the size it would fit on the shirt.

We'd chosen a bright red shirt and gold rainbow foil iron on.  Annabelle used her Cricut machine to make the magic happen.

Then, it was a matter of finding the proper placement on the shirt.

And then, we ironed it on. That's always a nerve-wracking process. Fortunately, it went just fine.

We hope the shirt's a hit with gift recipient!