Another music video with paper cutout animation: Away With These Self-Loving Lads

This one has some moments that really make me laugh, amusing myself as usual. It didn't take as long to put together because the song is shorter and there are fewer "scenes." It's a challenge figuring out what to do during the instrumental breaks. In this case, I took the original songbook cover from 1587, cut the images out of it and blew them up and colored them. The idea was going to be, they were going to hop out of the cover, and if I had fancy software I could have done that, but my end result is so simplified I fear the idea was lost. It was fun, anyway. The song was recorded in my living room in 1990. At that time I had a four-track machine and a two-track machine and the cuts were edited with a razor blade and tape. A tiny sliver of the first verse was just - blank space - on the cd, which astonished me. Had I really not noticed this, way back when? Or did I just forget? I thought maybe it was a manufacturing error so I went up in the attic and dragged down some boxes of these 33-year-old cds and tried some others, the silence was on all of them. I tried to paper it over by copying a smidgin of the instrumental break into the hole and then singing a half-word over the top. It was not very successful but I think it's better than the sliver of silence. I paid my granddaughter 6.5 cents per angel for her artwork! The angel in the last scene is doing a dance modeled after "Toto ballerino" which my sister-in-law sent to me.

Music video with paper cutout animation: Turpin Hero

Another in my series of recordings of songs nobody ever wanted to perform with me. I learned this one at a house concert in Durham NC featuring the wonderful Brian Peters. I've loved the song ever since, and taught it to my grand kids. I tried lip syncing in this one. I took pictures of myself making the different sounds and put the shapes on the puppets' mouths. It was only partially successful.

Music video with cutout animation: The Day We Went To Rothesay-O, a Scottish folk song

 My grandkids came to visit and while they were here I got my grandson to sing on the choruses of two songs, this was the first. A song I could never get anybody to record with me before! As usual, making the animation took almost a month, and so far, only 51 views on youtube. I keep reminding myself I do it for my own enjoyment. I chuckle over my own jokes and figuring out what I can actually manage to pull off is good brain massage. I spent more than a whole day on a tableau that appears on the screen for like a second and a half.

The best part of this video is the bugs we all drew together when I was in Manhattan with them. "There were several different kinds of bugs, some had feet as big as your clogs."

Grandma Peppler's coconut custard pie

This was one of the first recipes I got from my grandmother when I was in high school and so inexperienced that I didn't realize (and she hadn't thought to tell me) that you have to cook a cornstarch mixture in order for it to jell up. I put it all together, uncooked, and refrigerated it in hopes of a miracle that never occurred.

Lately I had to increase the amount of filling, pie pans are bigger than they used to be.

Grandma Peppler's coconut custard pie 

scant 1/2 cup sugar plus 1/4 cup for meringue
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 cups milk
1-1/2 tablespoons butter
4 eggs, separated
2 teaspoons vanilla
2-1/2 cups flaked, sweetened coconut
baked pie crust

1. Mix the sugar, cornstarch, and salt in a non-stick saucepan till there are no lumps. Add a tablespoon of the milk and mix it in as well as possible, then add milk just a tiny bit at a time till you have a stiff lumpless gook. Then turn on the heat and add the rest of the milk gradually, stirring constantly. Cook until it thickens.

2. Add the butter and melt it. Then add 1-1/2 cups coconut, give the pot a few good stirs, and turn off the heat.

3. Meanwhile, separate the eggs. Put the yolks in a smallish bowl and whip them smooth with the vanilla.

4. In a separate bowl beat the egg whites stiff, gradually adding 1/4 cup of sugar as you go.

5. Drop a few dollops of the hot custard mixture into the egg yolks and whip them together (this is called tempering) - then add the egg yolk mixture back into the custard mixture and cook a little longer (so the egg yolks cook a bit).

6. My grandma would fold all the egg whites into the custard, but I've taken to folding only half the beaten meringue into the custard. Then I dump the custard-mixed-with-meringue into the cooled (well, supposedly, but actually I never wait and dump it into the baked pie crust when it's still hot) pie crust and spread it evenly.

7. Spread the remaining 1/2 of the meringue on top and cook in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10-14 minutes until the meringue is a bit browned. Please do not eat this pie hot. If you put it in the freezer to hasten the cooling, don't forget you put it in there.