Super Hero Capes

I am the lucky Auntie to 5 nephews. Yep, 5! They are all little superheros to me! 

To celebrate them I made some unique capes. I wanted them to jump off the couch, fly off the dresser, and soar across the coffee table feeling like real superheros. 

"What?!? That sounds unsafe Auntie Jess!" Remember, I am the Auntie, not the Mommy!

I went to the fabric store and picked the material based on its feel and ability to "float" like a cape should. I am sure it is 100% polyester! I bought 1/2 meter per cape. But I had lots leftover so you could probably get away with less. 

I came up with a pattern by extrapolating from a bib.

I figured a cape is really just a big bib that is worn backwards!

So I laid a bib down on my fabric along the fold and just followed the shape making it much longer. I made the capes 32 inches long. 

I cut out a neck hole, just following the bib and then rounded the corners at the top and bottom. 

I zig-zagged the edge all the way around. I like the contrast of the black thread on the yellow cape, kind of like a cool trim. 

Then I repeated these steps for the other capes. 

When I looked closer, I didn't like how "chunky" the zig-zagged edging looked, so I decreased the stitch width and length and went around once again.

This looks better to me, nice and neat now. 

I just trimmed off the first edging.

A bit more professional for my amateur superheros!

I took some contrasting fabric, leftover from cutting the other capes out. 

(Remember, I said I had lots leftover!)

Using a dessert plate I traced (with a pencil) and then cut out one red and one blue circle. 

I drew the first letter of their name using a pencil on the blue circle.

With the blue and red circles layered together I sewed along my pencil lines for the letter. I now had two circles sewn together by a block letter. I carefully cut just the blue layer along the inside of the stitch line and removed the blue fabric revealing a red "L". 

I then pinned the initial letter "emblem" in place on the cape and sewed around the edge. 

I was thinking of Edna Mode when I decided to used a small piece of Velcro at the neck to hold it closed, just like the bib. I thought a tie at the neck may be a bit risky for flying boys in capes and the Velcro would easily break away if it got caught.

This yellow cape is ready for it's superhero boy! 

I just repeated these simple steps for each cape. 

I think Edna Mode would be proud of me!

 

~ Jess

Nutchos

My mom isn't s huge fan of chocolates and candy in general, but she loves Nutchos and she always made you forfeit a couple Coffee Crisp at Halloween. Coffee Crisp are still available, but Nutchos have been discontinued by Nestle, so I thought I'd try to make some for her birthday.

A quick Google search for "Nutchos recipe" turns up a plethora of results and most of them reference the Best of Bridge. So I read through several of the options and this is the recipe I used.

2 - 10 oz (300 g) of semi-sweet chocolate

1 - 10 oz (300 g) of peanut butter chips

7 oz (200 g) of roughly crushed ripple chips

2 cups peanuts

Melt the chocolate chips and peanut butter chips in a double boiler. Stir in peanuts and crushed potato chips. Drop on wax paper, allow to cool. Store in the refrigerator or freezer. Makes 48. 

Super easy, right? The only challenging part was figuring out what "roughly crushed" actually meant. I crushed them so they were the size of the crumbs that you get at the bottom of a normal bag of chips, and I think next time I'd go just a little smaller as I thought some of the pieces were still a little big. (Does that mean they'll be "medium-ly crushed"?)

When you're making this, be sure you use a big enough bowl. The chocolate and peanut butter chips together is about 5 cups before melting and the crushed chips were 4 cups, plus the 2 cups of peanuts. The glass bowl I used is 2.5L and it was big enough, but just barely.

Since I don't actually own a double boiler, I just used that glass bowl over a pot of boiling water. A couple things to be aware of when doing it this way - you don't want the water in the pot to be high enough to touch the bottom of the bowl (since the purpose of a double boiler is to use the heat of the steam to slowly melt the chocolate) and to just be mindful of where the steam is coming out between the pot and the bowl so that you don't burn yourself.

I just kept stirring the chocolate and taking pictures of the process.

It took maybe 10 minutes to get it completely melted. Toss in the chips and the peanuts. You can see here why I said the bowl was barely big enough. I had some stuff jumping out of the bowl when I was stirring the peanuts and chips in.

Drop this on wax paper so they cool. There seems to be a bit of melted chocolate that was pooling a bit at the bottom of the bowl, so I just had to be sure to keep mixing it up again as I was going. I actually got 62 chocolates from the recipe, not just 48, and I thought I still had a pretty good size chocolate. They'd all have to be 30% larger if you tried to make only 48.

Make sure you have lots of space as this pretty much took up my entire work space. Admittedly, my kitchen doesn't really have a good counter space for working. "Must have been designed by a man" my Grandma O said when she came to see my house after I moved in.

These do tend to be quite soft, so you'll want to store them in the fridge or freezer until ready to use. They don't fall apart or anything, they'll just melt on your fingers and face quite easily, as evidenced by my niece.
:-)

~Lisa