Pinspiration

The past year has brought about a new love in my life: Pinterest. Every crafter/bakers dream, every dieters nightmare.
(You can follow me HERE )
Recently I've actually started making things that I find on there! My friend Amy over at Suburban Blender and I decided to do a Halloween swap and I knew immediately what I wanted to make for her. I had seen this Halloween wreath and fell in love with it, and I decided to recreate it! The whole project took me less than 10 minutes and I LOVE it so much! I couldn't be more happy with how my creepy cute wreath turned out.

Hopefully Amy loves it too!

Luau Cake

Last week my second oldest niece turned 16. Holy cow! That means I'm.....getting old. For her birthday, she requested that she not be a part of the party planning, so her parents decided to throw her a surprise luau party and I offered to make the cake (and to be the distraction! Pretending to be lost and/or crazy for 40 minutes was not easy lol)
Remember two years ago when I said that I would never make another two tiered cake? I lied. I wanted this to be really big and really special. I was slightly less stressed about this one than I was about the last because it was for family and it wasn't my first two tiered cake. That's not saying I wasn't stressed, because boy howdy I was. I become a freak when I'm baking for other people. No one can be in my kitchen. Not even my husband who lives here too. Poor guy.
Anyways, it took approximately 12 hours, but I really loved how the cake turned out. I'd hoped for better things with the palm tree topper, but oh well, it was still cute! Everything, including the shell candies on the bottom I made from scratch.The leaves of the small palms were made from Royal icing, and the "sand" is just brown sugar.
The bottom layer was dark chocolate cake with chocolate ganache and chocolate buttercream, and the top was pineapple with pineapple filling and pineapple buttercream. Both cakes were super rich and turned out pretty darn tasty if I do say so myself! I only wish I'd taken better pictures!

Homemade Bath Bombs

Whaaaat a craft post, from me? I bet you didn't see that coming! :)

I've recently become Obsessed (<-see that capitol O? That's for extra emphasis!) with Lush products. If you don't know what Lush is, it's a sort of hippieish cosmetic/bath products store. All of their products are handmade with no preservatives or any junk, and almost everything is amazing.

Herein lies my dilemma. I do not live anywhere near a Lush, and not only are their products pricey (though well worth it!) so is shipping. I loathe paying for shipping.

So I decided that I would make my own! I spent a few weeks gathering supplies, some I had to order online, then spent last night making my lushlike creations. They were so easy, and so worth the effort! The fresher these bad boys are the more they fizz, so mine are super fizzy and fabulous. The fragrance I chose is called Monkey Farts, and while a little crass it's a lovely blend of banana, strawberry, kiwi tropicalness. Yum!

Here is the simple recipe, though making these is more of a process than a recipe:

1/2 cup citric acid
1/2 cup Epson Salt
1 cup baking soda
tap water in a spray bottle
mold of some sort (I used round Christmas ornament halves!)
Gel food coloring

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, make sure there are no clumps! add in your fragrance and color to your liking. Mix well. Spritz on two to three sprays of water and mix in well. The grab some in your fist and drop into the bowl. If it lands in the bowl with out breaking, you're ready to mold. If it breaks, repeat the spritzing.
Once you get it to drop without breaking, fill both of your mold haves tightly, then add extra mixture between and press together as hard as you can. Don't twist! The hardened ball should easily pop out of the mold.

Allow to dry for at least 24 hours (though you can use these right away!) before packaging.

I suggest watching some video on bath bomb making on YouTube before you dive in. You'll get a feel of the mixing technique and how the mixture should look before you mold. Have fun!

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!