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?