Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Easter Apothecary Jars

I was trying to decide what to put in my apothecary jars for Easter this year and was coming up blank. I got on pinterest and found this cute idea. The ones on pinterest are a little different, but not terribly. My pal Charlene gave me some of the left over burlap from the shower we through for our friend Josie. Thanks Charlene!! I had a chocolate bunny outline in my silhouette program and printed it out then traced it. You have to sew it before you cut it out because the stitching will pull. I stuffed it, and sewed up the bottom and rifled through some of my craft drawers. I found the ribbon, flower and charms in the drawer and went to town. I found these little brads that worked perfect for little bunny eyes. I love how they turned out. The chick is cute, but I'm not in love with it as much as I am the bunnies. It'll do for now though. I found some nice sparkly eggs at Joann's and through those in with some grass. I'm really liking how they turned out.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Cowboy Baby Shower

I've been on a party planning kick lately. I'm going to chalk it up to "nesting" as people call it. Really, I think it has more to do with the love I have for my silhouette. And now, since I have finally restocked the ink in my computer, I'm experimenting with the print and cut capabilities. I'm a little bit addicted. Luckily, my pal Josie is having her first baby boy, so we got to throw a shower for her. I thought a cowboy theme would be cute. I found some cute ideas on pinterest and a few of my own and off we went!! Here's my banner. You can't really see it very well, but the letters are cow print. Again, I'm loving the print and cut feature on my silhouette. And it was another chance for me to laminate something. For some reason, I find laminated items very satisfying. I think because I know they'll last longer. For food, we decided to run with the cowboy theme and had bbq chicken wings, baked beans, cornbread, honey butter, pies and other yummy foods. My awesome pals helped with all of this, Marie & Charlene. We split the work amongst the 3 of us and it was much easier to manage. I love how the pie signs, and cupcake toppers turned out. Hard to see, but really cute. I don't know if you can see the little cowboy hat by the cupcake stand. I LOVE it. I found it at Hobby Lobby and wish I had bought 10 of them just because they are so cute. I also found the wood boxes and cow print napkins at Hobby Lobby. I found the cow print balloons on amazon and love them too. The tables had a strip of burlap as table runners with blue bandana's and mason jar centerpieces with daisies in them. So cute. The present table before it started. Don't worry, it was completely full and running over when the party started. A close up of the centerpieces. Way to go Marie and Charlene!! The silverware were in cans that Charlene made. I love how they turned out. She put the cow print on then wrapped twine around the edges. Love it!! The cornbread was seriously delicious. Yum!! My favorite decoration by far is the Waterin' Hole. I found the idea on Pinterest. I LOVE it!! It turned out so cute. I put some root bear, sprite, juice and water in and it all turned out so cute!! I'm so glad I got to help throw this shower for my friend Josie. It was so fun and cute. Josie deserved it too, she is a truly good friend. Love you Josie!!

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Angry Bird Birthday Party

You'll have to excuse this post. It is a flood of pictures. This website has been a bit slow because I've been working on this party for several months and I wanted to post it all together. So, here goes. My little guy Parker wanted an Angry Bird birthday party this year. This was the first year he gets to have a friend birthday party. We start doing those at 4 then do them every other year. So his next one will be when he turns 6 & chances are we won't live here anymore, so I wanted it to be memorable. I totally threw myself into planning this party as many of you will see from my pinterest board. So 1st we made the invitations. I got all the paper from hobby lobby and found the Angry Bird font online. It's called feast of flesh and I'm sure you can find it by googleing it. I can't remember which font website I downloaded it from, but it was free. I used my silhouette to draw and cut all the shapes including the angry bird faces. There are tons of sites with free downloadable angry bird images on pinterest. After it traced and cut them, I colored in the faces with markers.
For a few party favors, I used the silhouette again with the print and cut feature. It was my first time using it and I LOVE IT!! I bought some magnet paper from silhouette's website and voila!! Angry Bird Magnets!!
We did tootsie pops also, I just printed some bird faces and wrapped cellophane around them.
I also made book marks for a favor. I just cut some vinyl out with my silhouette and then traced them with a sharpie.
I made some water bottle wrappers too. Again, cut all with my silhouette.
I made these masks for the kids too. I found a pattern on pinterest for the red one and then made the other ones myself. I made 4 of each of these. I thought about just having them tie in the back, but ended up sewing velcro on all of them instead.
I'm especially proud of my white one. I made 4 more of this one too, just in case.
So the rest of my pictures didn't load in order, so these will probably be all over the place. Here's one shot of some of the food. We had gummy worms/butterflies for bird food, orange slices for bird beaks, and chocolate covered sunflower seeds as bird seed. Love that Winco carries that.
I made this banner with my silhouette too. I used the sketch pens to draw the letters and then colored them in. I got a laminator for Christmas too, so I got to try that bad boy out. Kind of love it!!
And the King Pig Pinata. This pinata was a labor of love. It took my husband and I a few nights to complete. We used one of those punch balloons, then stuck our rope through a piece of cardboard and tapes that to the balloon to reinforce where the pinata would hang from. Then we did a first layer of paper mache all over. We let it dry overnight then taped half of a red solo cup for the snout, plastic Easter eggs for the ears and a white paper cup for the crown onto the dried paper mache. Then we went to town and paper mache'd our little hearts out. There was going to be a lot of kids, so we needed it to hold a lot of candy. Daniel wanted to make sure we really reinforced the bottom and where the rope was so we probably did 5 layers of paper mache. The next night, Daniel painted it green, and the following night I painted the face and crown. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out, even though it doesn't look exactly like the pigs on the game. For a 1st attempt at a pinata, we did pretty good.
The cake turned out amazing I think. I didn't make it, cake decorating isn't really my thing. My sister however, took a decorating class and I asked her to do some magic. So I bought the coloring and supplies and she came up with this. She did homemade fondant too. It was tasty and Parker LOVED it. Thank you Aunt Sarah!!!
You can't really tell, but I made a back drop for the pictures with the masks on, but oh well. I got one of those blue dollar store tablecloths and cut some white vinyl clouds to put on it. We even made a little slingshot to have in the picture, but quickly learned that a giant stick was not a good plan with this many kids. We're missing a few kids in this picture too.
More food. M&M bird eggs and angry bird graham crackers and cheese nips. I also used some wood looking paper and cut out these wood crates that I wrote TNT on. I tried to make it look a little like a nest inside them with the brown graham crackers on the bottom and jelly beans on top.
Our kool-aid, labeled as bird nectar and our fancy water bottles.
For some reason this is the only shot of my balloons I got. I cut vinyl out to put on the balloons and make them look like the angry birds. I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out. This is the whole table set up. The paper bags are filled with popcorn too. I got the wood crates from hobby lobby and really like how they added to the set up.
We played musical chairs. Daniel has the game on his IPod and hooked it up to some speakers. The kids marched around the chairs to the theme music and Emma won!!
We had 4 tables with center pieces that I bought from partycity.com. We also printed out some coloring pages and had them and crayons on each of the tables for the kids to color. The coloring pages are all over the internet.
We set up some cardboard boxes and drew some pig faces on green balloons for one of the games. We rounded up 7 stuffed angry birds at our house and everyone got to try and knock the pigs and boxes down. It was fun. The kids got a kick out of it.
Here are some kiddos coloring away!
We also played pin the beak on the bird. This was a seriously labor intensive project for me. I used my silhouette to trace out 20 faces and then colored them all. All my orange markers ran out and I ended up having to find more. And then, of course, I forgot the bandana for the game. We ended up just pulling their angry bird masks down a bit over their eyes and it seemed to work out ok.
The pinata lasted for the perfect amount of time. Every kid got 3 swings before it burst open. Parker got to go first.
Afterward, the kids got a kick out of wearing the broken half of the pinata. Aunt Sarah even had a turn.
At the end of it all, my back was KILLING me. My 7 month pregnant self was exhausted as was Colson who fell asleep on me and wouldn't let me put him down. I felt bad, but I pretty much sat with Colson while my Daniel, my sister Sarah and my awesome brother in law and sister in law did all the clean up. They were amazing. I could hardly walk last night and had to be rolled out of bed to get up, but it was worth it. (it is a good thing we only do friend parties every other year though) Parker had a great day with his friends and said it was the best party ever! Happy Birthday Parker boy!!!