Mother's Day leaves me stumped every year. What can I possible give my mother to show my gratitude for the insane amount of work she did raising 7 children? All the laundry that I threw down the 3 story laundry shoot (it was fun to throw things/siblings down that thing) that weren't really dirty, just too lazy to hang up. I shudder at how much laundry she did. All the meals she painfully prepared (and they weren't the heat up a frozen lasagna & pillsbury rolls dinners). These were gourmet, by ANY standards. Fresh fruit? Always! Fresh baked rolls & bread? What? You didn't have that? Oh, I thought that was on every dinner table. Fresh baked pies? Atleast twice a week. Fresh cookies or brownies? Um, daily! Lasagnas, chicken pot pies, Homemade chicken noodle soup, enchiladas, stir fry's. EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. We never ate out. We never had store bought frozen dinners. She never asked us what kind of cereal we wanted for dinner, like I may or may not have done on occasion. What I didn't realize until I became a wife and mother is how much time, planning and talent it takes to pull off this amount of work! And how incredibly thankless it is! I'm stumped mom, why did you do it? It couldn't have been because you had children who appreciated any of it! We just assumed that's how everyone lived.
Now that I'm a mom of 3. My standards are getting lower and lower. Dinners are complete in 20 minutes prep time or it's cereal. Dessert? No way, unless it's icecream or left over Easter candy. Yes, I was raised well but came up lazy when it comes to the insane amount of work I'm willing to sacrifice for my children who won't notice for another 20 plus years! So in order to thank my mom for the amazing dinners we had & she would still make me if I lived closer. Oh, how I wish we lived closer! My sister & I decided to make these fun napkin rings. My mom still throws fun dinner parties and we thought it would be fun to jazz up her table setting with something interesting. A conversation starter.
I wish I could take credit for coming up with this fun idea, but I'm pretty sure every idea has been taken and I'm happy to recreate the genius ones, like this. Renee and I found these forks at Canton flea market and we knew just what to do with these. This amazing blog, a brooklyn limestone, gave me the idea and here's my take on recreating it.
Step 1: Make a mold guide. Use a pipe or in our case different socket to round the handles. My husband drilled the sockets into wood and clamped down the wood to the counter. You could use any plumbing pipe. We tried two different sizes but ended up using a 1.5 inch pipe, roughly.
Step 2: Stamping the forks with the word EAT. We should have done this before rounding the forks but it worked in the end. We purchased a metal stamping set for around $10 at Harbor Freight.
Step 3: Darkening the letters. This is where I tried using a sharpie to fill in the stamped EAT word. It makes the word pop a little more. I had a hard time wiping off the excess sharpie on the fork though. That's when I remembered my scrapbooking trick. I wiped on craft paint, shoving paint into the crevices & wiping off the excess. Worked perfectly!
Step 4: Using your mold, guide the fork handles around the pipe using clamps to hold onto the fork and a hammer to make it smooth.
Step 5: Wrap them up with a cute set of napkins and wash away the years of resentment that your mother SHOULD have towards your incredibly unhelpful self. But because she's your mom & she used up all her mental capacity raising you during your teens, she's (hopefully) already forgiven you. Because you're 30. And you've moved out of her house. Hopefully. And if not, she still really likes you and finds you incredibly thoughtful & talented & stand up comedy worthy. Yeah, mom's are like that. One minute you've caused them complete and total public humiliation. The next minute, you can do no wrong....... I think remembering Mother's Day is the least I can do. I wish I could prepare a nice meal to go along with this, but let's be honest, her cooking skills didn't rub off on me.
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