Madame Cassandra, The Fortune Telling Machine

My favorite part of the party this year was the fortune telling machine we made.

Madame Cassandra is built from a mannequin housed in a glass-fronted cabinet, dressed and decorated with orange and purple globe lights, a purple lightbulb, silk fabric, a tablecloth, a crystal ball, tarot cards, a candle, and a skull.

Inside the cabinet is a card shoe loaded with fortunes.  When the button is pressed, a small rubber "finger" powered by a servo motor and a microcontroller reaches out and plucks the top card from the stack and drops it into the chute below.

Dev programmed the machine so that in resting mode the lit button slowly "breathes."  When the button is pressed, all the lights eerily jangle and flicker and the music starts up.  The music is a calliope rendition of Chopin's funeral march, "Trauermarsch," which we found here on YouTube.



Madame Cassandra in action:

The machine is loaded with approximately 300 fortune cards (I wrote a little more than 100 unique fortunes and printed three copies of each).  I was very pleased that the first fortune of the night was the simple message "Run."

 

 

Thank you, thank you so much to Amy Robb for finding the perfect thrift store cabinet and then dragging it home, to Sam Thompson and James Sarrett for staying up very late with Dev working on the programming, and to Lilli Thompson for helping me write the fortunes.

Halloween Village

After seeing several different Halloween villages for sale, I was inspired to make my own.  I wanted something that was genuinely scary, not childlike or cartoonish.

 

So I bought some papier-mache house forms from the craft store and spent a few evenings creating a village which, if I may say so, is about as scary as a paper village could ever be.  So much so, in fact, that I actually put it out of view of the children.

 

This one is built around antique photographs and letters, doilies, and lace.

The buildings are loosely themed, but mainly I just had fun gathering up the creepiest images and items I could find and combining them together.

This one is probably my favorite, the crypt.

The project also used up a lot of odds and ends I had left over from previous Halloween parties and crafts.   

 

Red sealing wax from last year's invitations

 

 

The "museum"

 

The "church" 

 

Assorted tombstones

 

Eventually I'll probably add some twisted wire trees and maybe some fallen leaves or other ground cover - and I can always add more houses, too, if inspiration strikes against next year.

With decorative gargoyle

Summer Baking

 

Now that it's more or less fall here in L.A, I wanted to round-up the best desserts I made over the past summer.

1. Peach pie*

I know I'm bragging here, but this was the best pie I've ever made and one of the best I've had.  I used the full five-hour Baking Illustrated recipe.  Some of their recipes are needlessly complicated (I'm thinking here of their Dutch apple pie recipe, where they add a lot of time-consuming extra steps that actually make the pie worse) but this time, it was really worth doing it the hard way.  I think one of the key things was using potato starch as a thickener instead of the usual tapioca, the consistency was really good.

2. Smores bars
By contrast, these are incredibly easy, and great for summer because they don't require baking.  It's just a Rice Krispy treat only made with Golden Grahams, marshmallows, and chocolate chips, perfect for parties and bake sales.  The recipe I linked to suggests dark chocolate chips but I prefer milk chocolate - I love dark chocolate but it overpowers these bars and besides, milk chocolate comes closer to the classic original Smores.

3. Pink lemonade bars
I loved these bars from Smitten Kitchen - the pink color comes from pureed raspberries.

4. Coconut thumbprint cookies with salted caramel centers
I made these for Hot Dish and they were a big hit.  I made the first batch way too big, though, they are very rich and a little goes a long way.

Now on to fall!  Tonight I'm making pumpkin cinnamon rolls.

* Page 193.  I'm too lazy to type it all out but if you want the recipe let me know and I can scan it for you.

The Borrowed Chicken

We have a chicken! Just temporarily. 

Our garden has been experiencing a grasshopper infestation.  They have done major damage to the grapes and blueberries, in particular, though pretty much every plant has been affected.  We've tried everything to control the grasshopper population, from sprays to netting, but experts agree that the only thing that really works is the presence of a duck or chicken*. 

So we got a chicken. Dev bought her for $10 from Peking Poultry in Chinatown.  We named her Lenore (Dev used to have chickens named Lindsay, Lolita, Loretta, and Lulu).

Our plan is to keep her in our yard for a few days to clear out the bugs and then situate her in a permanent home with our friend Luke who keeps chickens in his yard.

Meanwhile we destroyed all the grasshoppers' eggs by aggressively weeding and tilling their nesting area, so hopefully we won't have this problem again next year**.

Predictably, Dev is already attached to the chicken and wants to keep her long-term, but I'm afraid that with the dogs, a permanent chicken isn't really possible.  I will say, she's a very friendly, outgoing chicken, surprisingly unafraid of people, and the kids love seeing her in the yard.  Could we build a safe enclosure for her behind the garage and keep her? Maybe . . .

* Well, praying mantises work, too, and we do have a few naturally-occuring ones, but if you buy new praying mantis eggs from a garden store they can take up to two months to hatch and we wanted a solution now.

** Most farmers and gardeners suggest you basically wait out the current grasshopper season (since it's all but impossible to kill them even with strong pesticides) and work on killing their eggs so they don't come back in the spring.  But I couldn't bear to stand by and watch the grapes get eaten and we're at least a month away from the consistently cooler temperatures that will kill off the grasshoppers.

The County Fair

Another great year at the L.A. County Fair - Arthur is now the same age that Beatrice was when she first went to the fair.

 

We stayed the whole day and did it all, from goat-milking to pig (and turkey) racing to award-winning quilts and vegetables.  There was even a parade.

Novelty turkey racing

Beatrice milking a goat

Beatrice declared her favorites to be the stunt dog show and the rabbits.  She also admired the entries in the cake decorating contest.

Beatrice pets one of the stunt dogs after the show

Highlights for Arthur included the petting pen (where he held his own despite a goat-to-child ratio of 5-1) and the giant plate of chili cheese fries he shared with Dev.

 

 

Personally, I'm in it for the barbecued corn.

Know Thyself

Summer: Do you want to have a slumber party with Arthur tonight?
Beatrice: No.
Summer: Why?
Beatrice: Arthur will be upset because he won't have a pillow.
Summer: Why won't he have a pillow?
Beatrice: Because I'll take his pillow.
Summer: What if you don't take it?
Beatrice: But I know I will.

This Year's Halloween Invitations

 

Another year, another Halloween invitation!

This year's party is divination-themed, so the invitations are miniature crystal balls.

The crystal balls (large clear marbles) are set in a velvet jewelry box.

The invitation is printed on a strip of paper wound around the ball.

Then I added some gold star confetti inside the box. 

I sealed the boxes with a gold seal (stars, bees, fleur de lis, or other cryptic symbols) and then wrapped them in silky black fabric with silver stars.

The exterior box is lined in silver glitter paper, filled with yet more confetti, and tied up with gold or silver ribbon.

Only 32 days until the party...