She's getting older.

Funny how that works. Feed em, water em, teach em, and they grow. Crazy.

This year she decided to do a cooking themed birthday party. Since I was having a scrap night with some of my closest friends prior to this, we each made an invitation for her to send.

We are making 2 teams of 4, and pulling out the cake pans, making some buttercream AND fondant (more on that later).

Decorations are the most fun. I scoured and found beautiful after beautiful tutorials on cupcake liner garlands. Pom-Pon's. So cute and easy!!

Ingredients: (keeping with the theme, ya know)...
2 packages of different colored cupcake liners
1 package of small doilies
1 package of large (not cone) coffee filters
1 needle
1 package of colored floss
Time
Patience

Take a piece of floss and thread through a medium sized needle. String the materials, varying in pattern. Be sure to also thread them off center sometimes, it adds to the variety.



It's so easy, and that growing weed loves it!

I'm planning on making some cupcake liner Pom-Pon's, which I will feature next time. Wish us luck!

Valentine's Day!!

I really need to commit myself to updating the blog more often...
Valentine's Day is upon us here, and each year, I scour the wonderful blogs looking for cool, crafty ideas for the kids to hand out at school.

This year, we are doing these!



Uber easy, super duper looking treat. Instructions? Here ya go.
Box of on-sale smaller candy canes
Sucker sticks (found at the local craft store)
Plastic pretzel bags (also found at the local craft store)

Take your candy canes and arrange them on a parchment lined cookie sheet in the shape of a heart.
Bake at 300 for about 2 min.'s
Take them out, stick the stick in the bottom middle part of the heart. Squeeze the heart around the stick. Let cool


Drop them in the pretzel bag and Wahla! Done!

OMG. It's December.

And the time has as always slipped away. I am currently in the midst of some craftyness, but with a pinched nerve in my neck (how did this happen?!??!). So I surf, blog, and dream instead of crafting. I have so many projects awaiting me. Like this one

I have all the materials, and then BAM! Shooting neck pain, muscle relaxer, and heating pad

I did finish this one though...

Super easy and inexpensive gift for a co-worker. It's a glass ball, plain, and then I took sparkly rub ons and embellished. I topped it off with a pretty ribbon! :)

love this one!!

Having Crafty Mojo Rocks.

In the past month, I have completed:

4 dryer vent pumpkins,

Thirteen 12x12 layouts for my children's albums,

3 cards,

baked cheeseburger cupcakes,

decorated my house for the witching day,

made two glass cool things,

went dumpster diving for a really cool table,

spray painted a frame,

cut chicken wire for said frame (not easy!!),

painted a real ugly collector's spoon holder for my daughter that I found in Iowa while antiqueing with my cousin,

and made a cool frame/shadow-box thingy at Archivers.

Busy bee, I am! Buzz Buzz! :)

I love this weather, it's cool out, I'm not sweating while I work, and the paint dries a little bit better.

Crafty viewing pleasure...

Thank you Amnesty day for bringing me this crazy black painted old table. See the leaf that pops up? Underneath all this black paint I think there is pine. Yes, pine. Ah....
50 cent frame. Take off the back, paint it white (again), staple in some chicken wire, and you have a holiday card holder. It's a work in progress.

Oh, and one more thing - I watched my husband and daughter try out the new Easy Bake Oven. Priceless.

Fall!!

Boy, I got my crafty mojo back! Now if I just had some time! I saw this cool, inexpensive craft out there in blog-land, and thought it was so cute. Wanna make a cute pumpkin?? I have so much fall stuff out at home already, but I had to do this too - even for friends and for the office.

Go straight to Menards or Home Depot now. Buy a box of dryer vent. It was about 9.00 for 8 feet of the stuff. It's silver, and it's used to hook up to your dryer.

Cut it. Like so.

Hot glue the ends together. Be careful, it's hot!

Then you have this:

While you are at Menards or Home Depot, by a can of Rustoleum orange spray paint. I used to work for them (shhh....it's a looong time ago), and they rock. Paint that baby orange.

Once it's all dry (get the underside too!), stick some whole cincinnamon sticks in the center, tie it with some ribbon or raffia, and Viola! You have yourself a pumpkin! For about $10.00.

Happy Crafting!!

Autumn.

Can't believe that summer is gone. My last post was summer. Now it's autumn/fall. What happened???

Well, honestly, not much of anything. Not much craftiness. More home/work stuff. I did make something for my office, but I don't have a picture to share. Basically, I did this.

One acrylic stand up photo frame for a letter

Cut out lovely letters that will spell something - I spelled "LEARN". I used a pretty font on the cricut, so it was easy peasy.

Apply a co-ordinating color behind the cut out letter. Slip it all into the frame. Wahlah!

I'll post pictures as soon as I take them. I also have something else brewing up too, but can't post it here, as it might get to the person that it's for!!!

Happy Crafting!

Summer time fun!

Well, I am officially off work! Whoot! That means, time to play catch up - if I haven't mentioned that already. First up, office clean up.

5 bags of shredded documents.

I took a picture but then deleted it. It made my OCD go overdrive. We also put together our gazebo on the deck. 4 hours later, it looked like this. We had to take a trip to Geneva, IL for the rest of the parts. They only gave us the big pieces. FUN.

We also took in a Cubs game - we went to Cellular Field (sox home) where you can't get AT&T reception on your phone. Seriously. What a scam. Anyway, we had great seats, and Zambrano got kicked out of the game for fighting Lee. Good stuff!

So what if we lost? We haven't been doing good for 100 years.

In between all that, I managed to whip up 2 batches (that's 24 in 2 days) of Pancake Muffins. Can you say YUMMO? My fam LOVED them. The recipe (and my daughter helped me spell that, the little friggin' genius - she's 7) anyway, can be found here.

Also, I finished my beautiful basket. Now to put plants in it. BBQ is in T-minus 15 days. Lord help me.