Baby Boy Shower

A friend of ours was having a second baby, a boy this time!  A small group of us got together to throw her a little shower, a sprinkle.  What I love most about everything here, is the cake.  I asked Sorella's Baked Goods in Livonia to make a cake with light blue and dark blue dots (that's all the direction I gave them), and this is what they came up with.  This is why I like working with professionals.  I go to  this bakery all the time because they can take my basic instructions and turn it into something amazing.

Felt Food Craziness

I went a little overboard with making felt food this year.  My daughter is at the age where she likes pretend play and has a little kitchen set downstairs.  She doesn't have a lot of food, and I didn't feel like spending a lot of money on nice food - not the cheap plastic kind.  Weirds me out.

I had pinned a ton of felt foods on Pinterest, so I decided to start making some!  At first the plan was to make them for her friends, which I did.  And it was kind of therapeutic.  Much nicer than watching tv or messing around online all the time like I normally do.  And when we did watch movies, I could create a few of these at the same time.  Pretty nice.

I'll post photos as well as the websites where I got the information from.

The cookies are the easiest by far!  And so cute!  Felt is so cheap at craft stores and I had most of the thread and needles, had to buy a couple colors, but you can get spools of thread for just a few dollars.  The first few cupcakes and cookies I made weren't that good.  I followed the blog Sew Hip Mama for the cupcakes.  I found though that it worked out better for me when I didn't cut the bottom out until after I had sewed the round part of the cupcake first.  I would sew it, then draw a circle around it and cut that out of the felt.  Notice the cupcake on the right?  I found that felt at Joann's and it's so cute with some texture to it.  It costs a little more, but still less than a dollar.  Not as fancy as the cupcakes at Pottery Barn kids, but shoot, a whole lot cheaper than $24.

The cookies I followed PamelaSusan.com.  The one issue I had with both the cookies and the cupcakes when I did circles was that it looked like nipples so I would suggest not doing that.  I used a cookie cutter to trace the heart shape on felt.  I thought it was cuter than the circle cookie.

I can't remember which blog I looked at first for the felt eggs, which are also really really easy.  But you can get an idea of step by step instructions at WhileWearingHeels.

The tea bags I stole from a shop on etsy.  Sorry.  Not personal, but I already had all the materials and not paying for something I can make.  Not nearly as good as the ones sold on etsy, but eh, I'm working on it.

Hopefully my daughter will like mine and not think they're crazy.  So far the cupcakes are her favorite.  Pretty much hasn't touched the others.  Plus, I'll still hold out for when some nice wooden food is featured on Zulily.

Felt Merry Christmas

I was inspired by a felt Merry Christmas pendant I saw on pinterest similar to this one.

We were doing our Christmas card photos and of course I found it just a few days before and spent a few long night sewing some felt letters, stuffing them, and getting them on string and ribbon so we could use them in our Christmas pictures.

Sadly, it was really rainy and cold that day, so none of the photos of our banner turned out really well, but I will share this one!  This photo of courtesy of Lovella Photography, I've worked with her multiple times and she does a great job.  If you live in the Detroit area, I highly recommend them.

Even better about this photo, I wasn't fat.  :)  Thankfully this was right before I started eating everything in site.  Need to get back to eating a plant based diet and no white flour and white sugar again.  But easier said than done.

Off that tangent, I think the banner is cute, too bad it was just so windy.

I spent so much time on that banner, I couldn't bring myself to toss it or just store it.  I thought it would make a great addition to my mantel!

I like it so much that I'd really like to make some for each holiday, but then I remembered how much work it took to do in the first place.  I'll just tuck that idea away for the time I'm not already working on two quilts, three scrapbooks, and house improvements.

How did I make it?  I can't find the item I pinned on pinterest, but I printed out a font ( can't remember which) on paper in a really big size, it only fit two letters per page on a landscape layout.  then I cut out the paper, pinned to the felt and cut out the felt.  Took a needle and thread, sewed it, stuffed it, put it on a ribbon.  Pretty awesome if I say so myself!  Hopefully you think so too!

Now just to hit up the Christmas sale at One Kings Lane so I can get more goodies for the house next year!

Sweet Potato Cornbread - why not?

Every once in awhile I get motivated to bake something.  I'm weirded out by all the strange ingredients I find in food at the grocery stores and sometimes I wonder why there is so much sugar or salt in some of them.  So I like to try and make it at home. Especially if it calls for flour, so that way I can use organic whole wheat flour.

I order from Door to Door Organics and I had purchased a lot of sweet potatoes because it was the food of the moment for my daughter.  Then the moment passed and I was left with a lot of sweet potatoes.  Thankfully the next shipment I received contained an order for sweet potato cornbread.  I love corn bread.  I absolutely do.  And I love sweet potatoes.  I was intrigued.  But I also like to cook vegan at home 80% of the time.  What did that mean?  Time to go to the magic of the internets!  I searched for vegan sweet potato corn bread and magically it appeared!  And it was very delicious.

I used this recipe:
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-3161/Vegan-Sweet-Potato-Cornbread.html

The real test is if my non vegan, non healthy eater husband eats his piece.  he did and went back for more. And other times I've made it, right after I take it from the oven, I'll find a big hunk missing.  He always said he had to make sure it was edible.  Apparently it is.

 The dry ingredients look kind of pretty in the bowl.

Look at the big chunks of sweet potato in there!  Yum!!!!

Finally mulching the garden

My husband always says he hates mulch.  He doesn't like the way it looks. Personally, I think it's just because it takes a lot of work to do and sometimes he's not into work.  Well, he's not.  I love him, but his hobbies are watching tv and playing on the internet.

Anyways, our garden was looking better and better, but I was losing the battle of the weeds.  When I ripped up the big ones, teeny tiny ones grew back in their place and I don't care if you weed for two hours straight, you can't get them all. And every time you yank one out, you see all the seeds scatter.  So I kept bugging him about getting mulch.  So he finally did.  Thank goodness.

And it is a lot of work.  Back breaking work.

First we laid out newspaper to keep the weeds from coming back through (ran out of newspaper though...), then piles and piles of mulch.  When the truck dropped off our mulch I just assumed we'd have more than we knew what to do with.  Apparently not.  We used it all up.  It still looks good a month later!  We'll see how it holds up in the spring.

Painting the old bench

Ever see things on pinterest and get motivated to do something?  Then have a huge fail in making it look like you saw on pinterest?  That's what this post is about.

We have an old nasty bench in our backyard.  I don't know when it was built, I imagine from the first owners (we're the third), but nothing much has been done with it.  While I would like to spend $600 on a really cool one I saw on One Kings Lane, I don't really think that's in our budget anytime soon.  Man I want everything on that site.

Yep, nothing pretty.  don't mind my ghetto hay as I weed the back area.  It's a jungle out there, I'm in the process of getting it weeded and mulched.

I hate this bench.  I really wanted to break it down and get a nice iron one, but then I saw some cool ideas on pinterest.  So I bought some paint.  and painted the whole thing.  I originally painted it all white, but thought that was a little bright.  I used the below paint from Sherwin Williams in marshmallow (or something like that).

I used my cricut to cut out the word Welcome and glued it down so I could get a stencil - like  i saw on pinterest  hahahah....FAIL.   That didn't work out so well.  

So I made a few touch ups.

And now it's not perfect, but it's much nicer.

Decorating the walls

I'm not interior decorator, as you've seen from the photos.  But that doesn't mean I can't try!

We have lots of empty wall space in our house and in an attempt to alleviate that, I've been looking for inspiration to move some of the photos on our mantel piece to our wall and then a few more to show off.

I used this site for inspiration:
http://www.picklee.com/2012/02/16/photo-walls/

I went to Jo Ann's for fabric for a baby quilt (that's a whole other post!), and all frames were 40% off.  so I bought a bunch.  I also bought matting to go around the photos.  I bought too many, I'll have to take a few back, but I didn't want to have to go back.

First, I wanted to test out the layout, so I cut and pasted a bunch of paper together in the correct sizes (pretty close) and then put those on the wall to get an idea for what kind of layout I wanted.

This is one of the layouts I tried.

I measured out the distances, stuck some nails in the walls, and voila - photos below!

Though, now I wonder if it looks okay?  My husband looked at it and said 'you didn't center the photos'?  I didn't center them because above where the plant is, we've talked about hanging lights (maybe one like the Hobbs Sconce on one kings lane) either a wall sconce or a hanging lantern / light to add more light over tehre.  Over maybe a plant a bit more compact, like a miniature ever green or something.

And yes, the middle picture is missing.  I'm waiting on it to get delivered.

I don't know, should I move them closer together or center it on the wall?

Clematis Josephine

Our backyard is mostly shaded.  I have two spots I wanted a climbing vine that flowers and everyone I asked thought a Clematis would be the best option.

When we went to the nursery by our house, I went down the line of Clematis' trying to figure out which color I wanted.  Then the last one I saw, was a variety called Josephine - my daughter's name!  It was a sign to get that one!  So now we have two Clematis Josephine's in our yard.  They've already grown quite a bit, maybe it's the fertilizer.  Hopefully they get enough sun to bloom a bit next year!

First location on the side of the house.  Gets more sun than the other spot, but not full sun for sure!  Here's hoping!

 The back.  Doesn't get a lot of direct sunlight, just a little bit.  The hydrangeas love it, so hopefully the clematis will too.

The plant was about half this size when I bought it, it's grown quite a bit in a week!

 Look at them wrapping around the trellis!

Update:

In a few short weeks, check out the growth my clematis has had, as well as the new flowers on it!  Too bad it's not 63 degrees out.  Hopefully it doesn't freeze and kill them. Should probably look up how to care for it....

Fairy Door

We have a fairy that moved in!  :)

Keeping your greens fresh

I try to avoid dairy.  When my daughter was born and I started breastfeeding, I was told she had colic.  She cried all the time.  ALL THE TIME.  So after some research I found the a lot of colic is actually a baby's inability to digest dairy.  I was desperate, I gave up dairy.  And magically, within a week, completely gone.  Unless I went crazy and ate pizza then she got sick again.  And after giving it up, I never felt better myself.  I'm not perfect, I eat some dairy occasionally, but overall, I try to avoid it.  That's my round about way of talking about greens.  They're a good source of calcium, so I try to eat more of them.  Sometimes, I leave them in the fridge too long and they get all limp and gross looking.  The night before I plan on cooking them, I put them in a vase of water and they perk back up.  I do this with kale and mustard greens mostly.  Don't leave them in there too long, because they start to lose their color, become less green.  I'm not sure if that means they will lose their nutrients, so just to be safe, I only keep them in there about overnight.

DIY Canvas Photos

We have a very dark house.  We back up to woods so not a lot of natural lights comes in.  We bought it as a foreclosure, so there's a lot of work to do on it.  One of the things we did recently was paint the front entryway a red color called Maine Lobster.  I think it was a Sherwin Williams color.  We love lots of color.  Problem is, it made it look really really dark in the entryway.  Eventually we want to paint the closet doors in there white as well as the trip to help lighten it up.  But in the meantime, I wanted to blow up some photos that were mostly white to help bring color in there.

I like artwork with meaning.  I don't like to just buy stuff from walmart and hang it up.  The upside is all our stuff has a story.  The downside is our walls are pretty bare.  :)

We used two photos that didn't have a high enough resolution to be blown up into a large canvas.  But I could get large prints, so I did that and bought some plain canvas to diy them onto.  I followed the below blog and you can see my outcome.  My one tip: don't rush it, wait for the black paint to dry before you modge podge.  Oops.

http://www.blissfullyeverafter.net/2011/12/diy-photos-on-canvas.html?m=1

 These are the two photos I picked and what they look like aftewards.  You can see the black streaking from not letting the black edging paint dry completely.

My husband says it looks like they're 'messed up', but then when I gave him a look he said that they must be messed up on purpose like you see in stores.  :/  My Dad said they looked good, but then scratched at them, not sure why, totally unnecessary.  So who knows.  Maybe they look horrible and no one has told me.  But in the meantime, we can't afford the large paintings and artwork I like (one photograph I found at hte Plymouth Art in the Park was $1300!  Out of my budget!), so these will stay.

At least until I find something on One Kings Lane or Anthropologie that fits the color scheme.  :)

Bumble Bee Birthday Party

For Josephine's first birthday we threw a bee themed party.  Yeah, I know, it's a pretty popular theme, but I thought it was a really cute theme.  Plus we have lots of yellow daffodils and I had already planted yellow petunias so it all just came together perfectly.  At least on the outside!

Check out the photos and highlights below.

 I made a custom order to Power Capes because I saw they had tutus, just not in the color I wanted.  I wanted yellow and black for the bumble bee theme so I contacted them and here it is!  She wasn't too thrilled with it, but it has a draw string for the waste, so I'm hoping to get a few more wears out of it when she's older.

 On the inside in our living room I had cut shapes out with my cricut to make a banner type thing.  But rather than put them all on a ribbon, I just taped them to the window.  I also added photos from her first year on the two adjoining windows.  Theme was more yellow than yellow and black, I think it turned out cuter that way.

 I used the Cricut Create a Critter cartridge and I think for the letters and the flower shapes they're on I used the storybook cartridge. didn't take too long and turned out really cute!

 Instead of collecting gifts, we asked people to donate to the Detroit Area Diaper Bank instead by bringing diapers.  We collected over a thousand!

 The cupcakes were simple.  White cake (I think just plain ol Kroger brand) with lemon frosting and a little sugar bee I bought off etsy.

 So cute!  And pretty cheap.  At first I wanted to do a really cute cake, but I got quoted over $200!  No.

 For the older kids, we had pin the bee on the hive.  I covered a box in plain brown paper.  Cut a hive shape out of brown paper as well and then spray painted it yellow.  I cut out of a ton of those bees in all sorts of colors for kids to pick from and then pin them on.  Whoever got closest to the give entrance would have won.  But I forgot to get it started.  Hey - it was a two hour party and I was busy as a bee!  Bwahaha, pun intended!  :)

On a side note, have you seen One Kings Lane?  I'm completely addicted.  It's a store that carries stuff similar to Anthropologie and maybe even urban Outfitters.  Love it.  Need to stick to my budget though!

Sorry the image in this post is so bad. :( Sometimes I forget blogger doesn't let me do a bunch of cool stuff. Oh well, you get the idea. This is the post of the nine months baby was growing inside me! The photo of me pregnant at the bottom was about a month before my due date. I was HUGE! This page is really simple, as you can see. I made this in a naptime when Josephine was really young (she's 8 months now). But I really needed some time to do my thing, and it's amazing what you can come up with when you put your mind to it! I'm also back to trying to be vegan 70-80% of the time. So I made myself one serving of oatmeal. But then I added a serving of banana, sweetened shredded coconut (I didn't have unsweetened), a little peanut butter, ground flax seed, cinnamon, and almond milk. Really good. Only make a half serving next time if I plan to add all that. I had to stop half way through. Guess I'm not getting my full serving of fruit yet (aiming for five a day, it's harder than it seems! You have to do a lot of preplanning!).