Playing with your Food

My girlfriend and I make a monthly trip together to our favorite thrift store. It's about a 45 minute drive and we take one car so that we can catch up on our lives. Because once we get in the store, we usually don't see each other until it's time to sort though our carts and make final decisions.

Last time we went, she found a set of salad tools - a wooden fork and spoon with a pineapple topping each. While the price was under a dollar for the two, she decided not to keep them. So they went into my cart. She asked me what I would do with them, and I told her I was going to give them some character.

I gave them a fresh painting, then used paint markers to draw on a face for each. I remember when I was a kid, my mom had a wooden apple hanging on her kitchen wall. The back of it was hollowed out and she put a ball of string in there and it fed through a whole at the bottom of the apple. My Kawaii salad utensils remind me of that apple and all the great family meals we had together. Those memories are especially precious since we just lost mom, especially since that apple didn't make it through the years.