My husband loves this bread. Correction, loved it. The last time I made it (3 days ago), it was gone in less than 1 day. I got half a slice. Believing it to be a rousing success, I made an even larger loaf yesterday. Unfortunately, my husband watched me make it this time which, inevitably, caused WWIII a little distress seeing as how, you know, it used sugar. Cue horror music now.
There were snotty rants discussions of how sugar is needed for bread, sending him bounding to the fridge to look at our other bread’s wrapper (because “bread does NOT NEED SUGAR!”), and him swearing off the bread only to cut another 1/4 slice (which he took directly from the loaf, leaving it oddly disfigured) 20 seconds later. To which I may or may not have responded, with all the grace of a cranky 12 year old, “DON’T YOU DARE EAT MY BREAD! THAT’S MY BREAD! It’ll just make you SICK anyway.” Because arguing about how I, apparently, cook bread entirely incorrectly and how said bread is going to kill my family thanks to the completely normal inordinate amount of sugar in the recipe, may have ticked me off perturbed me, just a tad.
The Boy and I liked it, anyway.
So, if you’re up for making over-sugared, death causing whole wheat bread for your family, the following is the recipe I used. It’s for an Oster 5811, 1 1/2 lb loaf bread machine. This is for the full 1 1/5 lb size.
1 1/4 cups water
2 Tbsp butter, softened
3 cups whole wheat flower
1/4 cup packed brown sugar (or “poison in sweetened crystal form”)
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 3/4 tsp bread machine yeast, quick-acting active dry yeast, or regular active dry yeast
I really enjoyed working on this one and, thanks to the Boy’s current obsession with WordWorld
, I am able to explain my process this time.
Here is the original photo:
The Process (in Photoshop CS3 – No actions used):
I began by cropping and leveling the picture. I manually level because, most of the time, auto level gives me entirely too harsh of a photo.
I decided to bring out the eyes, just a tad. Using the burn tool (set to Shadows, 9% with a small round brush), I lightly darkened around the edge of the iris. Then, using the dodge tool (set to Highlights, 12% with a small round brush), I lightened up the area around the pupil. Back to the burn tool (Shadows, 5%), I lightly darkened the eyelashes and top eyelids.
I applied a Gaussian Blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, 4.2). I created a layer mask and filled with black to hide the layer. Using a medium sized, soft round brush at 25%, I painted with white (on the layer mask) over the face. It softens the skin just enough so that the next step doesn’t cause it to become too harshly sharpened. I, then, merged down and named the layer “Girl”.
With Unsharp Mask (Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask, 154%, 2.6 pixels, 13 levels), I sharpened up the image, just a bit.
Duplicating the “Girl” layer and renaming it “BG Blur”, I desaturated (cntrl/option U) the image by -84 and Gaussian Blurred the image by 10. After creating a layer mask, I painted (large, soft round brush, 100%) around the girl with black (on the layer mask) so that only the was blurred and desaturated.
I duplicated “Girl” layer again, renamed it “Blue”, and changed the hue (cntrl/option U) to a nice turquoise-y blue color (Hue: +140, Saturation: +66, Lightness: +23). With the “Blue” layer selected, ntrl+click the “BG Blur” layer mask and create a new layer mask for “Blue”. This will clear out the same area as is clear in the “BG Blur” layer, leaving just the blurred/desaturated layer blue. Using a large, soft round brush, paint black (on the “Blue” layer mask) over the brown object to the left, lower the layer opacity to 42%.
I created a Curves adjustment layer to bring up the lights and down the darks, just a tad.
With a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, I brought up the Saturation by +9.
Again, duplicated the “Girl” layer and this time renamed it “Color”. Using Hue/Saturation (Cntrl+U), I turned the saturation up to +50, turned they layer opacity down to 36% and created a layer mask. After filling the layer mask with black, I cntrl+clicked the layer mask on the “BG Blur layer”. With the “Color” layer mask selected, I filled the selection with white. This should leave only the girl with higher saturation.Then, using a medium, soft round brush at 25%, I painted (on the layer mask) her face and shirt with black, to reduce their saturation. I went back in with white (on the layer mask) over the lips and eyes.
With a second Curves adjustment layer, I brought up the eyes just a touch more. Then added a black, white and pink border, and, voila!
Literally 30 minutes post talking my mom out of spending $85 on a beautiful table and chairs set from Babies ‘R Us, I found this sucker at a thrift store. After chasing away some men examining some strange totem on it (seriously, do people really think oddly cut, fake wood eagle and bear totems are a cool thing to have in your home if you’re not, I don’t know, some sort of Appalachian bear hunter?), I checked the price tag. $5. FIVE DOLLARS! Are you impressed yet? Wait! There’s more!
Upon taking it to the cashier, and squeeling talking about what an amazing price that was, she said, “You do know that furniture is half off today, right?”
To which I screeched, “SERIOUSLY?! I’M GOING TO GET THIS THING FOR $2.50?!” thereby officially terrifying the teenage girl behind the counter and solidifying myself as a raging dork. Again.
The table did have quite a few scratches and cracks on the top but, for $2.50, who can complain? I decided to paint it and cover it with contact paper when I got home. We began with a car idea that, regrettably, turned into a stripe idea. Which I hate, but more about that later and onto the “how to stripey paint a $2.50 thrift store find so that it, hopefully, looks less like hell and will last your nearly 2 year old toddler longer than a week” semi-tute.
I began by washing down the table with soap and water. Then I used masking tape to mark off the areas for the light blue.
I painted the light blue lines, then removed the tape and re-taped for the darker blues.
After painting the darker blues and removing that tape, I hand painted the yellows. It was too much of a pain in the patooty to re-tape and, at this point, I’d begun to decide that I hated the stripes and was giving up.
The table and chair, painted and dry. Next step is to cover with clear contact paper so, despite what the toddler may drop, draw, paint or purposely spill all over it, it shouldn’t take much time to clean up.
Measure how much contact paper you need and then some. The contact paper has many nifty little squares that make it darn near impossible to cut unevenly. Make sure to mark the end of the line you are cutting. thinking, “I’ll cut to the line the number 2 direction is on” is great until you forget if it’s the 3rd repetition of that #2 direction or the 4th. Cut the contact paper about 1-2 squares over exact size as the paper occasionally shrinks and overhang is ridiculously easy to cut off.
Then peel back one corner of the contact paper backing and, beginning from one corner of the table, align the contact paper as squarely as you can muster. Then slowly, slowly, slowly peel the backing as you lay the contact down. if you see an air bubble, gently lift and re-press. Be careful, however, lifting will generally tear up a bit of your paint.
Once completed, take a hard, rounded edge and workout all the tiny bubbles. I used a photo album because every single item in my house is some form of multi-tasker. I know that they have items specifically for this purpose, so if you happen to have and/or find one, it’ll probably work quite a bit better than my method.
Now to work with the overhang.
Pull out your trusty craft knife and slowly cut around the edges. Use a ruler if your table has no obvious indentations to cut into.
And, voila! It is done.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, I hate it. If I’d had any additional time, I’d have repainted it. My son was over me fawning over his table and was ready to get to working on it, so I left it as is. The great thing about contact paper, is that it’ll probably pull up most, if not all, the paint when I go to remove it. Which should make the process of redoing the whole thing a bit easier when I’m able to.
For now, at least it looks slightly less like a $2.50 thrift store item. I’m shooting for $5. At least.
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