White Elephant: Crazy Wrapping

For Craig's office white elephant gift exchange, the theme was crazy wrapping. I had been wrapping gifts at home all day, so I decided to use the remnants to create his wrapping paper. I made a quilt, basically:






I tried different lacing methods:






And this is how the final gift looked:

Gingerbread Houses

Today, I decided to try making gingerbread houses. Aside from the resulting complete exhaustion, I think our first attempt went pretty well. Of course, I didn't plan ahead so we used the remaining Halloween candy and anything else we could find in the pantry to decorate our houses. Here they are:

Mine is mostly starbursts, mini starbursts, jolly rancher sticks, fruit roll ups, caramels, and coconut chips (on the roof). [Is it obvious that I grew up in a brick house?] Kai's is...well...everything I used plus most of her Halloween candy.

I used a recipe I found online for the gingerbread, modified for the fact that we only had fresh ginger (the equivalent is basically TONS of fresh ginger for powdered). I found a recipe online for the frosting too - egg whites, cream of tartar, and powdered sugar. 

I didn't use a pattern for the houses; I cut them out free form. Kai's fell in a couple times before I got it to stand. I think a pattern might be helpful, but our pieces got distorted a bit as Kai helped put them on the baking sheets. A pattern would not have solved that problem.