Bassinet

Finally, the finished bassinet and quilt! It took my mom and I a few weeks and lots of hours to get this done (in the knick of time!)And here is my super pregnant niece (three weeks to go!) with the bassinet.


Sadly I didn't get any pictures of the inside, but my mom sewed it so that the green flannel lining it was tufted (so cute!) and there was a bumper along the front made out of the jungle fabric.

Now all I have to do is wait for this baby :)

Dusting off the old sew machine!

Suddenly my craft desk feels very small!

Until last night, my poor sew machine had been banished to the shelf ever since I got my Cricut last September. I had to dust it off because this weekend is my Niece's baby shower (that's right folks, I'm going to be a 24 year old GREAT aunt! So weird, but I'm excited!). There is a wicker bassinet that has been in my family for 43 years, and almost every sibling, niece and nephew and a few friends and cousins has spent the first month or so of their life in it, and every baby gets new bassinet decor.
This baby's (still nameless, but a little boy!) nursery theme is jungle, so my Mom and I decided to go with that. After hunting through the fabric stores and coming home empty handed three times, we finally decided on a jungle baby print with green flannel lining and a jungly quilt. Yes I made up the word jungly. Deal with it.

So, I made the skirt that covers the legs last night.I can't wait to show you the completed bassinet. Heck, I can't wait to see it myself! It's going to be pretty stinking cute.


And tonight, I'm making (my first ever!) cheater quilt. I bought the top fully assembled at JoAnn's for 50% off, thanks to the nicest counter cutter I've ever encountered there (say that three times fast!) and I'm both nervous and excited to get started.I'm going to add satin tags along the edges of the quilt because I know how much little boys love silky things :)

Wish me luck!

The Camo Cake

Last weekend my husband turned 25, and as is tradition, I had to make him an awesome cake! (see Last year and the year before).
This year he asked for chocolate, extra chocolately. One of the things that would make me a bad food blogger (if I were one) is that once I find a recipe that I like, I stick to it. But since this was a birthday cake I knew I couldn't use my old faithful Black Magic Cake recipe, and I opted to go with this Dark Chocolate cake that I had bookmarked awhile back.
I did use my old trusty Ganache, butter cream and fondant recipes, though.
I wanted to make this cake camo because, as some of you know, DH is a big bird hunting fan, and, like any good redneck, has a green truck, a brown dog, and lots of camo. (He doesn't wear it in public though, only for hunting! I'm thankful for the little things :)


This cake was *really* tasty. Now choosing which chocolate cake to make is going to be hard!

I love my office

So, as many of you know, I am considered an "administrative professional" and Wednesday was administrative professionals day. Well, pretty much everyone in my office completely forgot (including me!), except for my student assistant Jaci, who placed this on my desk that afternoon:
Awww!

Anyways, today I came in to find a package from my supervisor Karen wrapped on my desk (along with a box of Jujyfruits, she knows me so well!):
How adorable are these pink and black tools in their adorable case?! I'm super excited.

I've had a paper piercer on my wishlist for quite awhile now, so I'm most excited about . Maybe having some pretty new tools will get me back in my craft room!

I have awesome coworkers :)

Something Different

Aside from being Mini Eggs season (3 bags down, so far), Spring is when my yard really starts to come alive. The yard was the one thing that really sold us this house, and we LOVE it. It's a little worse for the wear since we got Bill, but the two of them (the yard and Bill) are starting to get used to each other, and I'm really happy with how it's looking now! I'm not gonna lie, though, that first year when Bill was a puppy the yard wept for it's future :) We had to remove most of the plants because he had a tendency to eat them, and some are poisonous to curious puppies.yeah, I have a creepy lawn gnome. He was less creepy when he was new...but oh well. Oh, and he's got brothers.

Anyways, we've been working (playing) in my yard all weekend, so I thought I would share some of the prettiness with you! I did also make a card (yes, just one lol) this weekend, but I'll save it for another post.

Looks like I need to get some slug poison around my tulips, the slugs are really going to town :(

Have a great week!

Birds nest cupcakes

Anyone that knows me knows that Spring is Mini Eggs season for me. I don't care about anything else, but mini eggs.


On Thursday we finally got our oven fixed after a few weeks of it being non operational, so I had to celebrate with cupcakes! I had seen these cute cupcakes at a local shop where the baker had made tiny chicks out of mini eggs and put them on a nest of toasted coconut. Now, I didn't have the patience for the faces, but I thought eggs in a nest would be just as cute!
So, here are my recreations! They were super cute and tasty, and I'm beyond thrilled to have an oven again ;)

Those cupcake liners are from Paula Deen and they say "A balanced diet is a cupcake in each hand", lol! My mom bought them for me and I was excited to get a chance to use them.

I finally filled up my cupcake stand that I got for Christmas!

p.s. if anyone is local and wants to know the name of the business I got this idea from, shoot me an email or leave me a comment, and I'll email it to you! While I'd love to support her, I don't like to share with the interwebs exactly where I live~

Cranes for Kids

Many of you probably saw this yesterday, but if you make a paper crane and post a photo to OshKoshbGosh's facebook wall, they'll send an article of clothing to a child in Japan.

Here are some simple instructions

This is such a great way to get involved, even if you are super busy this only takes a second and could mean the world to a kid (you never know...). I made mine using copy paper at my desk at work :)

Tuesday Treat: Lining an envelope

It's my turn for a Tuesday Treat over at Card Cupids, and I made a little video that shows how I line the envelopes for my cards. This is my very last Tuesday Treat for the Card Cupids design team, I hope you enjoy!

Scraplifter!

A few weeks ago I watched Sarah, of Live, Love and Scrap's, youtube video where she made what I thought was the cutest card EVER. She used the new Scrappy Mom's Kids Incorporated set, along with the Sweet Treats cartridge, both of which I happen to have, so I knew I needed to make something similar.
Now, Sarah is amazing (if you've never watched her videos, you should) and she has a patience with her cards that I will probably never posses...so I could never duplicate it exactly. I would go nuts with all of those eensy details! So I did eliminate some of the details and make my cuts a little larger, but I love how my card turned out.

So, thank Sarah for the inspiration! I hope you continue to make videos for a long time :)

p.s. sorry for the crummy iPhone photo, apparently I've become too lazy to dig out my camera and cord lately!

a wee little update

Remember a few weeks ago I posted that Monkey card for the Card Cupids challenge? I liked that card...but I didn't Luuuurve it. So I decided to play with it and doodle on it, and I'm much happier with it now.


I just thought I would share! Sometimes I'm not "finished" with things I think that I'm finished with :)

Challenge: Green Cards

The challenge at Card Cupids this week is to come up with a Green colored card, which is the perfect challenge for St. Patty's day week.

Our awesome sponsor this week is Copic (!!!) and they sent us some really neat Spica glitter pens to use on our cards, I used mine on my leprechauns shoes, in his mouth, and on the sentiment. It's really hard to capture how amazing spica sparkle is, but if you look at my last week challenge card, his guitar is colored with the black spica and you can see it glitters gold.

This is a really easy challenge with an amazing prize, so I hope you enter!

New Challenge at Card Cupids

This weeks challenge at Card Cupids is anything goes, which is the easiest of all challenges! I made my card really simple, using the stamp Max by our sponsor The Stamping Boutique. The back ground paper is DCVW and the ribbon is from Target's $1 spot, the stamp is from Michael's $1 spot. I find my self using that stamp on most of my boy themed cards because you can mix and match the words "hero" "star" "guitar" "super" and "rock" for a bunch of different variations that are all boy :)
The guitar is colored in with a black spica pen and is super glittery in real life, I just love the way it turned out.

So that's it! I hope to see your name among the HUGE amount of entries at Card Cupids this week!

New set up!

Last weekend my 6 year old computer, that I got up at 3am to buy on Black Friday 2004, finally decided to die. Well, actually the router died, but because the computer had long since rejected it's own disk drive, I couldn't install another. So, I finally got a new computer!
It's quite the difference from the old one. For one, the monitor isn't the size of my desk, and doesn't weigh 450 lbs. yay! For two, it's super fast and just plain gorgeous.
Why I am sharing this with you? Because hopefully, having a new faster machine for me will mean more posts for you to read!

Also, I think it's time for a new desk. When I was a teenager I was obsessed with antiques and all things "Shabby Chic", and I found this desk and an antique mall for $40 and scooped it up. Over the last ten years it's been moved 6 or 7 times and the paint has been picked off... even as I was waiting for the picture to load I was absent minded chipping away at the paint with my nail, oops. And it's one of only two "antique" things in my house. Now I like my stuff new and shiny. oh well, it works for now.

Hope you are having a great week!

Buttons and Ribbon: New Card Cupids Challenge!

This week at Card Cupids our challenge is "Buttons and Ribbon". I made this simple card:
using a digi stamp from our sponsor (and one of my most favorite Digi companies!) Bugaboo. And the winner of this weeks challenge will get SEVEN free digis from Bugaboo! If you've ever browsed their store, you know this is an awesome prize :)

It's a super easy and fun challenge, so I hope you enter!

Zebra Cake aka the cutest cake I've ever made!

Yesterday my best friend turned 26, and today we're having her big birthday bash! She asked me to make the cake (I'd already been planning to do so!) and mentioned she liked purple fondant. This was the first thing that popped into my head:




I LOVE how it turned out. I'm seriously proud of this cake and I hope she loves it!



Inside is black magic cake with chocolate ganache filling and this buttercream, which is my new favorite buttercream recipe!

I know that pedestal looks bad, but the cake wont be served on that :) It was just for decorating purposes!

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!

The winner from my giveaway was number 16: Samantha! Thank you all so much for entering and Samantha, you have an email ;)

psst!

You still have a few hours to enter my little giveaway at the bottom of this post. I'll post a winner tomorrow morning!

Card Cupids Challenge: Red, White and Blue

I had a hard time with this weeks challenge at Card Cupids, and I'm not gonna lie: I don't love my card. When I hear Red white and Blue I think:



And it's really not the season for flag cards, and I think making one would have been a cop-out. But I DO love my little bear digi stamp from Bugaboo and my Cherry printed paper from DCVW and my "Little Sunshine" stamp from Pink By Design...so I think I will try to make another version of this card in the future.

What did YOU come up with?

Card Cupid Blog Appreciation Tour

Welcome to the Card Cupids Appreciation Blog Tour!

Be sure to start at the beginning at Card Cupids, so you don't miss a thing! If you're coming from Christy's blog, then you are in the right place.

Our Blog Tour theme today is Valentine’s projects for children! I'm going to show you how I made Chocolate Dipped marshmallows on a stick.



To make chocolate dipped marshmallows, you will need:
Marshmallows (these are strawberry ones, om nom nom!)
Lollipop sticks
chocolate (I used semi sweet chips)
Sprinkles (optional)
Hideous Green Counter tops (also optional, but it would make me feel better if you had them too)

I made a stand using a block of Styrofoam, red ribbon and paper to hold up my sticks.

First, dip the tip of the sticks in melted chocolate, and then put the stick in the marshmallow. Let these cool.

Then, holding the stick, dip the marshmallow halfway into the chocolate and top with sprinkles. Let cool.
Put the marshmallows in a tiny bag and tie with Ribbon.

And display however you want! So easy and cute! Your kids can help with almost every single step of these adorable treats and they will LOVE to make them! (I know I did!) It would also be really easy to cut tags and add them to the ribbon so everyone knows who they're from.

The secret word from my stop is SMILES. Remember, to win the Blog Tour prize you have to email the secret sentences to info@cardcupids.org by 11:59 pm February 14 with subject: Blog Tour Prize.

Card Cupids is collecting handmade cards, new stuffed animals, coloring/activity books, crayons and markers for Absolutely Incredible Kids Day on March 15 as well as cards for Kate and Christopher and their siblings. If you would like to donate handmade cards or care package items, please visit Card Cupids for more information.

Your next stop on the blog tour is Heather. Have fun!

Card Cupids mission is to provide encouragement and joy by sending Card Cuddle Care Packages to children who are facing difficult challenges in their young lives regardless of their economic background. Card Cupids believes that every child needs to know that they are loved. A stuffed animal to hold, along with cards that share a positive message can help lift the spirits of children that are faced with difficult challenges. Card Cupids collects handmade cards to be sent to children along with new stuffed animals, coloring books, activity books, crayons and markers. Card Cupids hopes to provide numerous Card Cuddle Care Packages to children in hospitals, foster care, homeless shelters as well as children facing difficulties.
Now, if you've read this far, here's a treat for you! Follow my blog and leave a comment on this post by 8am PST on 2.19 to enter to win a $10 gift card to either Michael's or JoAnn's (winner will chose!) be sure to leave me an email address where I can reach you!
I will draw a winner using Random.org on Sunday, February 20th!


Happy Valentines Day!

New Design Reveal!

Happy Thursday everyone! If you're reading this in a reader, I invite you to hop over and see my SUPER cute new blog!

Do you love it? Because I do!

Thanks again to Brittany at Brittany Garner design for this adorable header, I think it's perfect for Pumpkin Butts :)


Want one of your own? You can find Brittany's Etsy shop here.

psst: Be sure to come back Saturday for the Card Cupids Blog Tour! I'll be having a giveaway!

New challenge and news!

This week's challenge at Card Cupids is to create a boy themed card. We needed to use a digi stamp from Fresh brewed Designs and I chose "Squeakers Ride".
Most of my cards end up girly. I can't help it! I always use glitter or pearls or some sort of non-masculine embellishment. So I kept it simple using mustard and brown paper (both from Stampin' Up) and a scrap of red patterned paper. I thought it sort of looked like Squeakers was going to a picnic, with his cheese strapped to the roof, so I love the picnic blanket looking paper.

On to the News:
This weekend Card Cupids is having a Blog Tour! It starts Feb. 12th at 8am. It's going to be HUGE with nearly 20 stops and prizes and tons of Valentines day projects. Hope to see you there! You'll want to stop at Card Cupids first so you can get the correct order, because there's going to be a secret word at each stop you'll need to collect to be entered in the grand prize giveaway.

And in Pumpkinbutts news: Pumpkinbutts is getting a mini makeover! My talented friend Brittany is working on a custom blog header for me and I'm so excited! Brittany has an Etsy store here, where you can find adorable digital art, custom monograms and labels, wedding invitations, and all sorts of fun stuff. Super excited for our mini makeover! Hopefully I'll have it up in a few weeks.

Card Cupid 3D Challenge!

The challenge this week over at Card Cupids is 3D or pop up cards, sponsored by Bugaboo Stamps. I have to admit, it was stinking hard to pick my stamp for this challenge because their stamps ARE SO CUTE! I want them all!
But, I chose this little boy with the giant adorable cupcake, and I love him :)

I made a stair step fold card. The dimensions are 10.5X5.5 and it's folded at 1 1/4, 2 1/2, 4 1/4, 6 and 8 1/4. You can find a great tutorial of how to make this card on Split Coast Stampers. Just be sure that if you are not using a scor-pal, you follow the second set of directions on where to score! I messed up the first time.
patterned papers are from my scrap stash
cupcake is from Sweet Treats, cut at 3 inches (made from all scraps)
stamp is from Michael's $1 bin
ink is Distress Ink in Black Soot
Boy is colored with Crayola markers and accented with a Spica Pen!

The winner of this challenge will get to pick SEVEN free Bugaboo images! That's an awesome prize!

Exciting News!

Now that the announcement has been posted, I can share that I've been selected, along with a ton of other talented ladies, to be a guest designer over at pinkcricut.com!

I'm a huge fan of Sarah's, and of her design team (Erin Lee Creative is one of the first cricut blogs I ever followed!) so I can't tell you how excited I am to work with them. I'm not sure yet when my day to be featured is, but I will let you, faithful two readers, know when it is!

Want to see the card that landed me the spot? :)It really is one of my favorite cards I've ever made. When I cut that tiny cupcake out and put it together, I may have actually squealed from delight. It's SO cute!

Recipe:

Bird from Create A Critter, 3 inches
Cupcake-Sweet Treats, 1 inch
heart and scalloped heart-welded and cut from gypsy
Face Stamp-Peachy Keen Medium Critter Faces
White gel pen
Diamond Glaze (makes the eyes glossy)
Patterned Paper- We R Memory Keepers Holly Jolly collection
heart brads-LSS
"Eat Cake" stamp-Studio G
Black ink- Tim Holtz distress ink in black soot
Red ink- Studio G
Pink Ink (around the edges of scalloped heart)-Stampin up Pink Passion
Ribbon-4 for $1 bin at Michael's
Blush-People Blush! I wanted him to have pink cheeks, but I don't own chalks..and since I'm on a spending freeze I had to make do. My own blush on a Qtip was the perfect touch and free to boot ;)

I hope you like my card and I cannot WAIT to see what this group comes up with in the next few weeks!

I'm also entering this card in the Getting Cricky with K Andrew Challenge to use a bird in a card!

Card Cupids Challenge!

This weeks challenge over at Card Cupids is Cards with more than one fold.
I made a Z-fold card and used the digi stamp from Sweet and Sassy Stamps called "Cocoa's Latte". Isn't it adorable?! The winner of the challenge will get three free Digis!

You have until Sunday to enter, and I hope you do!