Birthday Invitation

We hosted a very small get together for my daughter's birthday, but I still wanted to do a theme.  We chose garden party!  I made the invitations with the Storybook cricut cartridge, but otherwise pretty low maintenance.  Being pregnant, in the middle of a renovation, makes you kind of lazy for other things!

Maybe one of these days zulily will have another buy $20 get $20 free type deal for a card store like mixbook since I'm assuming for at least a year I'll be feeling a bit overwhelmed caring for two kids to make these kinds of things.

Striped Cat Quilt

One of my very dear friends is expecting a little girl - almost any day now!  She painted the nursery in pink and white stripes with a scene of a carnival.  I kept trying to find a pattern of something carnival-ish that I could incorporate a black cat into, but I couldn't find anything I liked.

So I just scrapped that idea and did a pink and white striped quilt with a cat and bird on it.  Why a cat fascination?  My friend has a black cat I wanted to incorporate into the quilt!

A few of the fabrics I used I found at Joann's, easy enough.  But I couldn't find a pink I like!  I found those at a store in Brighton called Creative Quilt Kits.  The backing is the same fabric as the inner stripe that is off white with brown and pink.

The lighter pink fabric has little squirrels and owls and other animals on it.  The off white fabric around the stripes has little brown birds on it.  that's why I decided to go with the little bird flying away and the shape of the cat.  I found both just by doing a google search for those items.

For the binding, I kind of messed it up.  Oops, I was trying to entertain my two year old while working on it, so it's not perfect, but as long as it stands the test of a small child, that's really all that matters, right?

I use regular cotton fabric, one day I'll try one of these really nice fuzzy fabrics like some of the blankets I see on Zulily that look so soft and comfy!

Modge Podge gift for a new Mom

I recently helped to host a friend's baby shower (more on that later) and instead of a regular guest book, I suggested two boxes - one labeled Mom where people could write a note to her for those days when it was really tough.  Like those 3am late night diaper changes and the baby just cries and cries.  Ug, not looking forward to that again!  As well as one labeled baby that people could write a note to the baby to read one day.  She liked that idea, so we went with it.

I'm not a big fan of guestbooks, here are two other things i did for friend's baby showers:
- actual scrapbook pages where people wrote notes on the scrapbook page and then it went into baby's scrapbook
- frame where people signed the matting.  That's what a friend had done for their wedding, so when the baby shower came around, I thought, what a good idea to go with that!

Her baby shower and baby room were pink and white, so I wanted to keep with that.

I took a trip to Joann's and found little brown box set that would fit index cards.  The plan was to modge podge scrapbook paper on them to make it fit the theme.  But then I found a really cute pink metal lunch box so I picked that for the baby one.  I thought it was cute and would probably stand the test of time a little better.

For the Mom one, I found pink and green scrapbook paper that said 'Mom' and variations of the word Mom all over it.  I already had the modge podge, sponge, etc at home.

I put the mod podge all over the box, then added the paper and cut it to the appropriate size.  I think I used three or four sheets to do it, mostly because I added it to the inside, and then on the sides cut out squares to cover the seams.  I should have taken better photos.  

I also found little wood letters that I painted black, spray painted with clear spray and then glued to the top.  

For the baby lunch box, I bought vinyl sticker paper in hot pink and white and used the Storybook cricut cartridge.  White was the shadow option and hot pink was the regular letters.  Can't really see the white well, but I thought it added a little something to it.

This is the note I created for my friend's shower so people knew what it was for.  Don't judge the rhyme, I made it up myself and I am definitely not a poet.  :)

It said:
Write a note for Baby as she grows
And
A Note for Mom on evenings she doesn't doze.
Something encouraging or something light
to help make her night!

This was the set up at the shower with the two boxes open, note cards for people to write something on and put in there.

 I was happy with the way it turned out, I hope my friend is too!  Too bad I couldn't find something pink and white striped on Zulily, but oh well!

Best Friends - Dog and Baby Scrapbook page

I created a page for my daughter's scrapbook of her and our dog.  She loves the dog way more than the dog loves her, I think.  Though Minnie probably appreciates all the food left all over the house!

This was one of those pages that I created at home and therefore couldn't go and buy whatever paper I wanted.  It actually worked out well, I think, I used up some paper I probably didn't think I would use and the page turned out pretty cute!  I used a bright green for the background and then the green with white leaves as an accent.  Yellow, dark green, and tan helped with adding a bit more color.  

I like the yellow around the picture in the top left, it's my favorite photo, so I feel like it highlights that photo.

Along the sides is where I journaled on tan pieces of paper, another way to use up all those scraps I can't bring myself to throw away!  

'Minnie & Me' is from the street signs cartridge and the 'Best Friends' is from the Jasmine cricut cartridge.  I love the stripes behind 'Minnie & Me' this page turned out really well, if I say so myself.  :)  

Ignore the ugly couches in the background, it's before we could afford to buy new furniture.  Babies are expensive!  Hopefully one of these days we'll be able to find something awesome at Art Van Furniture or One Kings Lane and save a little bit of money!

Frog Baby Shower

I hosted a baby shower for a friend of mine who didn't know if she was having a boy or a girl.  I decided on green with frogs because they painted their nursery green.  It was the shower that I had made the frog quilt for!

Sadly, I didn't take any photos until afterwards, so it doesn't look quite as nice as it had been.

My mother in law picked up the little frog inflatable i had on the drink table, but what I really liked were the green and white straws that I found. So cute!

We played the poopie diaper game where you put a melted chocolate bar in the diaper and then everyone has to guess what kind it is.  We had two giveaways in the brown bags, one tea themed and one spa themed.

This was the first diaper cake I ever made!  There has to be an easier way to do it, but I was happy with the way it turned out.  Obviously I have a little frog and also have daffodils out the top.  Our daffodils had FINALLY come up even though it was almost May.  The weather finally cheered up here in Michigan just in time for this shower for my friend's family to fly in.

Cake was so cute, green polk a dots in a light green around the sides and a green frog on top.  

I made the banner with my new cricut - street signs cartridge for the triangles and the same for the lettering.  The frog is from create a critter.  I hung it up with green ribbon and mini wooden clothes pins.

I just realized that none of these photos show the nice new paint job I did!  I'll have to do another post on that.  It was grayish - blueish - white and now it's some nice shades of brown.  It will just be nice to have a large rug to cover up the terrible grayish blue carpet and then eventually get a hanging light since it's so dark in there at night.  A few months ago One Kings Lane had a really gorgeous rug on sale I thought would look good, so now I'm just hoping to find another one like it!

Frog Quilt

This Saturday I'm hosting a friend's baby shower.  She doesn't know if it's a boy or girl and didn't want a theme that was overly froo-froo.  So I picked frogs because they painted their nursery a very bright green.  Or as her husband said - Kermit the Frog green.  And that answered what I should do for her quilt!  I knew I wanted to try something a little different than the Noah's Ark one and preferably easy because I need to start work on another friend's baby quilt as well.  Why I keep signing myself up for so many projects, I don't know.

I thought these little squares that were about 8x8 inches would be easy to sew.  Well, not really, they were hard to get exact (I'm not so good at the measuring exact part yet) and then sewing it together so that all the seams matched up.  Thankfully my Mother in Law was there to help so it didn't turn out too bad.

The goal was to put frogs on all the squares, but I got a bit lazy.  My favorite part: the one with the tongue catching the bug!  I feel so creative for coming up with that.

I wasn't going to do a border, but I thought it looked a bit unfinished, so I added the red border.  All the fabric is from JoAnn's.

My other favorite part, the super cute turtle, bug, and frog fabric for the backing.  The other bad idea on this quilt - putting a border on the back.  Ug.  Trying to get the borders on the front and back to match was impossible.  They're not quite matching, but they're close!  Hopefully my friend won't mind.  It doesn't look bad, but I want everything to be perfect.  I have to remind myself it's only my second quilt.

Now my next project is to finally finish the stupid guest bathroom that mocks me every day.  I want to find a nice painting or something for that room to finish it off from One Kings Lane.

Bachelorette Party Page

I made a scrapbook for my friend's wedding process - the bridal shower, bachelorette party, rehearsal dinner, and the wedding itself!  It was a lot of work, but fun and I'm glad I was able to do it.

My favorite page out of that entire scrapbook was for the bachelorette party.  The paper was silver glitter since we all wore sequins out.  It was kind of a pain in the rear to get everything to stick to that paper, but I bought some sticky dots called Zots for Bling and those little suckers keep everything on.  wish I had discovered those sooner in my scrapbooking life.  oh well.

I used two different cricuts to get the 'South Haven' and 'bachelorette party' words, sadly I can't remember which ones.  I think bachelorette party was from Tie the Knot.

What I love most about it though is the pictures of everyone's heads (or shoulders and up) on the left hand side.  I think that turned out the best!