Mom's Birthday Gift

For those of you who know how to crochet, you could pretty much figure this out, but here is a tutorial anyway.

I made the towel, just two simple pieces of fabric sewn together, with ribbon and patterned fabric trim. Pretty easy!




The Card

Father's Day Cards

Here are the cards I made for the special Daddys in my life!

Sienna's Artsy Birthday Party!

Wow, this was a fun and inexpensive party to plan! Since it's a theme all around being creative, it worked that I really had to be creative to pull it together! So here's some of the things I did:

First off, as posted before, here are the invites


Sienna's Artist's Beret
I made it without a pattern, but I basically just measured a radius of 2-3 inches bigger than her head, Then cut a 2-3"Xthe end circumfrance of the big circle length of a strip, sewed elastic to one of the long ends of the strip, then sewed the other end to the cricle, wrong sides out, then turned it inside out to reveal the simple beret!

Here are some random pics of the food and decor

Click Here for a tutorial on the Pom Poms.

Ribbon garland on the table

The cheese and grape skewers were made by using cookie cutters. Make sure the cheese is thick enough, they tend to break apart if they are too thin.

Here is the pallet cake I made (two round cakes stacked, then carved out and frosted to look like a pallet.

The table cloth, I splatter-painted myself. You could use a variety of paints, but I used watered-down acryllic paints, and a sylicone baster.

The activities:

Play dough station (homemade)Click Here for the recipe, with a handprint station next to it


Drawing on the wall (Freezer Paper on the wall with crayons so kids could draw on it)

Noodle and Fruit Loops Necklaces (Penne Pasta painted with watercolors)

And of course, The party favors... A Do-it-Yourself Sock Puppet kit!

Karen's "Kim Anderson" Baby Shower

I know I've posted quite a bit about this already, but I just wanted to post how it all turned out and came together. As I said before, the theme was the Kim Anderson photos of little kids with roses and adult clothes. It was a fun theme to do, because we had to stretch our minds to think up different things that we could do for it. As posted before, I did the Invites, the party favors, and I made a fun little dish. Shawnte', my sister-in-law, did the cake, and Shasta, my other sister-in-law did the games. It was a lot of fun, and I think it was a success! Here's some pictures of the event:




This is the cake Shawnte' made. It's a little newsies cap, to go along with the theme!


I made the dish in the middle, they are snails made from refrigerated breadstick dough, and rolled up like a snail. Before you roll it up, you brush marinara sauce over the breadstick lightly. You have to roll a little bit in front under for the head too. Then you poke holes in the head once they are cooked, and put carot slivers in them. It helps when you cook it, if you put a couple of toothpicks in the "shell" to avoid tip-overs.

Sienna's Birthday Party Invites

Here they are in all their glory. Pretty simple and straight forward. I splatter painted them, and took her picture myself. The rest is probably easy to figure out.


Below is the the picture under the vellum:

Mosquito Net

This one I've been done with for quite some time, but I realized it was on my "to-do" list on this blog, and that I hadn't posted about it yet! It was really pretty simple. This project was for Sienna's "room". Right now she's still in a corner of the office, but this summer she'll have her own room, so I've been starting a line of projects in preparation for this. I've always loved the look of mosquito nets in little girls rooms, but unfortunately they are really expensive even for plain white ones. So I decided to make one myself. This saves TONS of money, and you get it just the way you want! I used 6 yards of tulle for this, ribbon of choice, and an embroidery hoop. First, you need to cut your tulle. It will already be folded in half length-wise, so fold the height in half, so it is now 3 yards tall. Cut along that fold, then cut along the length-wise folds on each 3 yard peice. You should have 4 9-foot peices. Next, loosen the embroidery hoop to where you can easily place fabric between the 2 circles. Place the 4 peices of tulle in the embroidery hoop, around the edge. There should be one piece of tulle per quarter of the hoop. You should have about 2 feet above the hoop and the majority left hanging below the hoop. Fold over the top in half, and tuck tuck that edge into the hoop, so you have about one foot above the hoop. Then, you get some ribbon or string, and string it through the fold that you just made at the top. Sinch it together and tie it together in a bow, so you can hang it from it's loops. You may want to double knot it. Straighten out the cone at the top, so it's to your desired tightness. Also, since the embroidery hoop has the bigger part on the back, you will need to make sure you tighten the top so that the knot is closer to the back as shown in the picture below, so that the balance is even. Then, trim the hoop with ribbon however you like!

Party Favors!!!

As promised, here are the party favors for Karen's shower. To my dismay, they don't even make the tradition candy bars anymore... the kind that have foil wrappers with a paper wrapper over it. I made due with what I had though. I used Kit Kat Bars, wrapped them with paper with the little saying, "Thank you for sharing this special occasion with us!" on it. Then I cut several squares of plain white fabric for the diaper (after measuring how much it would take to cover the Kit Kat Bar, they're about 6 inch squares) which I put on just like you would a cloth diaper. Something that made it easier was glueing the corners down onto the front BEFORE pinning them, then just putting the safety pin on for garnish. The roses were from 2 mini rose wreaths from the dollar store. When I pulled them off of the wreath, I was left with only the buds, but I wanted a full stem. So I pulled off the fake baby's breath and cut the tops off of them, and I used their stems to hot-glue to the rose buds. Then I just slipped the roses into the diapers. And that was that!

Karen's Baby Shower Invites

My Sister-in-law, Karen, is expecting a baby boy in August. Together, this is her and her husband's 7th child. But it's been awhile since they've had a child, and of course, now have gotten rid of all of their baby gear. So, of course we found it necessary to throw her a shower! The theme Karen wanted was the Kim Anderson photography, the black and white pictures of the little kids in big-people clothes. I was in charge of the invites and favors (I'll post about the favors later). I really wanted to incorporate the pictures in the invites, and not just the color scheme we were going for (Black, White and Red), so that when people got the invitations, they knew what to expect. I couldn't think of a way to do this, since I'm pretty sure it's illegal to just print them off of your computer and use them, plus I thought that wouldn't look great anyway. I also thought about just getting a bunch of the pictures, but that would get kind of spendy, plus probably a lot of time to wait for them to be delivered. After studying the pictures for awhile online, I figured out what I would do. I figured, "Hey, I've got a little boy, why don't I just re-create these pictures?" So after narrowing it down to two that I liked, I decided to sort of mix them into one for the shot I would take of Breck.

Here are the two pictures that I chose, first of all:


And here's what I came up with:


And here are what the invites turned out like:



It was pretty fun, and now I have a super-cute picture of Breck from it!