Butterfly Baby Shower

Butterfly Baby Shower

 

 

The entire theme of my baby shower was inspired by these little nylon butterflies I made! They are too cute for words!

 

 

I even made some miniature ones for the letters on my baby girls nursery wall!

 

The main decoration was this Butterfly Diaper Cake I made! I used over 100 size 1 diapers, tulle, baby socks, flowers and ribbon as well as some of the hand painted nylon butterflies. This picture has been getting repined like crazy on Pinterest. At the time this post was written (March 2015) it was at 127 repins and it is being pinned about 3 times a day!  I also used a smaller version of the butterflies in my daughters nursery.. I am working on a tutorial for how to make them that I will hopefully post in the near future so check back for it!

 

 

Here is a close up of the diaper cake topper :

 

I made a few diaper cupcakes for table centerpieces

 

 

They were each topped with a coordinating baby sock bouquet:

 

I get all of my cakes at my local Shop N Save - the large one with the big bakery inside! I let them know the theme and let them be creative with the design.

 

 

This sign was posted in the girls bathroom and I found it really hilarious! My baby shower took place in a meeting area of a Senior Care Center.

 

 

I have been wanting to try my hand at making fun balloon decorations and this was the first time I had a chance to make some! I made balloon columns! They are so fun!

 

 

A close-up of one of the balloon columns:

 

The thank you favor was my homemade sugar cookies! Before I discovered my perfect icing recipe! To see all of my sugar cookies check out this post.

 

 

One of the finished tables:

 

 

Me and baby Amber with my hubby at the shower :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

My 2 year olds Frozen Birthday Party!

If you are like me and have one or more daughters at home, then you are probably going to be planning a Frozen themed birthday party at some point. My girls love the movie so much, my youngest requested a Frozen birthday, so I gave her one! Doesn't she look so happy?

Now I am not one to buy licensed birthday party sets- instead, I craft anything I can to make a party special and bring the theme to life! I found a bunch of ideas online as well and recreated them!

The first thing I did to prepare for this party was to make the pin the nose on Olaf picture. Every Frozen party needs a "Pin the nose on Olaf" game, right? You can find tons of downloadable versions of this game, but I wanted mine to look a particular way, so I drew it!

I used my silhouette to cut the nose shapes out of orange cardstock and I wrote the names of all the kids on them!  It was a really cute touch!

I also made a birthday banner with my silhouette cutting tool! I made the same sign for our last birthday party, the Tangled party. I just used different colors of cardstock! I found the snowflakes in the Christmas decoration isle of my local craft store for $1.

 

And what party is complete without balloons and streamers?

 

I made some snow garland simply by stringing cotton balls onto a needle and thread. I recommend hanging them right away to avoid tangling them up! I hung mine the day before the party as I made them.

I even left them hanging for a few days after the party so I could use them as a backdrop for my little girls 2 year old photos! I always take my own portraits of my girls - they have never seen the inside of a portrait studio! The flag in this photo was the inspiration for the color theme! I found it at Walmart for under $2.

A collage of my two-year-old Emma Jo's Frozen Birthday photos!

 

For the cake, I just made a boxed cake and iced it with a very light blue icing. As a rule, I always use pastel colors for icing- no matter what colors are in my party theme! I hate icing that dyes everyone's teeth and stains clothes and skin! I topped the cake with white chocolate snowflakes! To make them, I piped snowflakes onto wax paper and added edible pearls before they hardened. The girls and I had blast eating all of the broken ones!

I googled for Frozen party ideas and found many different forms of a snowman building game. I liked the idea and it was fitting because Emma loves- LOVES- marshmallows! However, I didn't like a lot of the things people used for snowman parts.

 

In each of these bags there are :

3 marshmallows

3 pretzel sticks

3 chocolate chips

1 orange tic-tac

 

I made the label on the bags using Microsoft word and I printed, cut them out and stapled them to the top of snack sized ziplock bags. Each one featured Olaf, snowflakes, the phrase "Do you wanna build a snowman?" and they even had the kids names on them!

 



Instead of giving them as the goody bags, we built them together. The third pretzel stick was for stacking the marshmallows onto. I have a handy tip for anyone who makes these: Instead of providing icing or melted chocolate as a glue, just use the insides of the marshmallow that becomes exposed by putting the pretzels through them!

Here are pictures of the few snowmen who hadn't been eaten before I could snap photos of them :)

 

 

Homemade costumes! Operation man, baby spider costume, baby octopus costume, maternity costume, twilight sparkle equestria girl costume, google maps costume

Costumes I have made!!

Well, I have a trend going with my blog. I have been crafting all of my life and I only recently started this blog, so I want to post about the Halloween costumes I made this month and I may as well just post about all of the best costumes I have ever made right along with it!

The first homemade costume I did was for my new husband in 2008, a year after we were married. He was the "Operation Man"! It was a big hit. I made the "game" part of his costume using two pieces of cardboard, styrofoam, some cardstock paper, foil and velcro stickers. The cardstock shapes were attached to the costume using velcro stickers so they could be pulled off with the tongs and people literally played the costume at parties we went to that year!

 

When I was pregnant with my first child, I didn't fit in any store bought costumes so I made my first maternity costume. I was a pumpkin, but I used some sparkling orange fabrics to add a pretty touch to it. I made the face by sewing on pieces of felt. The whole thing is made like a pillowcase dress with a ribbon around to add shape and highlight my big round belly. I attached a trunk that I made with a bit of spare brown fabric and fiberfill to a headband and tied some glittery curly green ribbon to act as some vines. My husband went as my farmer. People said he was a farmer and I was his pumpkin and my baby was a pumpkin seed :)

When my little girls first Halloween came, she was 6 months old and could barely crawl, so I made her something cute for a crawler. A spider! I made it using a store bought hoodie and matching sweatpants set and some black nylon pantyhose stuffed with fiberfill. The pantyhose was an infant size so her spider legs were the same size as her actual legs ! She looked ADORABLE!! Watch your step!!

 

My husband and I were her spiderwebs that year. I actually got the idea of a spider and mommy being her web from a Martha Stewart magazine several years before this. They had a pattern for sewing an elaborate dress that looked like a web. I simplified this a lot by just using black yarn as the webs and we wore white. I made the webs by laying down pieces of yarn in a criss cross pattern and then tying pieces of yarn to each strand in a circle beginning in the center and working my way out. I used a little fabri-tac glue to hold the knots and I even glued a few plastic spiders on!

 

The following Halloween I was pregnant again with my second daughter. I searched Google for a maternity costume and I found a picture of a skeleton shirt with a skeleton baby on it. I decided to make my own and I came across a great tutorial by make it - love it. I followed her directions and I made my own!

 

My 1 1/2 year old daughter was a sparkling tulle ghost that year. I had a ton of tulle laying around and wanted to use some of it up! I also fashioned her a little hood with some see through fabric so she would look more like a ghost and less like a bride. I made the skirt by tying pieces of tulle to a crochet stretch material you often see baby headbands made out of.

 

She loved twirling around in her sparkling dress!

 

In 2013, My youngest daughter was not walking yet, so I played off the spider costume I made in 2011 and came up with an octopus! I found this adorable pair of pantyhose at Babies R Us that had polka dots on one leg and stripes on the other, and I thought it would be adorable for this costume!! They only had 3 pairs in stock, but she needed 8 legs, so I stopped at Target and I saw glitter pantyhose in similar colors and I bought a pair of purple and a pair of blue. I had to get both- they matched so perfectly! I attached the legs to a piece of elastic and she just wore them like a skirt! I painted polka dots onto a white t shirt and a hat with fabric paints. I even made the hat with the leftover section of the pantyhose that was left after removing the legs on one of the pairs of panty hose. I simply tied the leg holes together and put it over her head!

 

She hated the hat but 8 legs didn't bother her in the slightest. Tho she did look down every once in a while as if she was thinking "I don't remember having this many legs before" !!

 

That year I put a few quick costumes together for me and my husband when we went to a Halloween party. I was 50 shades of grey. I just grabbed a bunch of grey colored paint cards at Lowes and sewed them to an old grey t shirt. My hubby went as a The Price Is Right contestant. I just cut out numbers and rectangles out of paper and glued them to a piece of cardboard. I also glued a string to it so he didn't have to carry it around all night. The nametag is just magic marker on paper I glued to a pin used for making brooches.

 

This year my 3 year old daughter was finally old enough to tell me what she wanted to be for Halloween! She is nuts about My Little Pony, so she picked Twilight Sparkle as an Equestria Girl. I found a purple pleated skirt at my local gently used childrens clothing store Once Upon A Child, and a boys blue dress shirt - less than $5 total! I painted Twilight Sparkles cutie mark on the skirt with fabric paint and I made the neck tie out of pink cotton fabric. I just made the socks out of some flannel fabric that was as close to the color of the skirt as I could find. I sewed it to a piece of elastic to keep it from falling off her legs and I painted the diamonds and stripes with fabric paint.

 

We found a Twilight Sparkle barrette with hair attached to it at Claires and I removed the obnoxious barrette and sewed the hair to a clip used for hair extensions. She loved having some pink and purple hair!

 

And our last minute costumes this year were characters from Cast Away. It was fitting, since my husband works at Fed Ex and we love the movie. He is the stranded Chuck Noland, and I was his friend / volleyball, Wilson. You can find hundreds of homemade costumes for these characters, but we made ours simple. No big balls or beards. I made his box exactly like the package from the movie that is treasured by the main character and no one could mistake who he was next to me! I just used a little brown and red fabric paint to paint a handprint and hotglued some straw to a bit of spare t shirt material. Everywhere I went I was greeted with shouts of "WIIIIIILSOOOOOON!" and "WILSON!! COME BACK!!"

 

After attending so many of my friends Halloween parties, this year a good friend of mine asked me to make a couples costume for her and her husband. They wanted to be "Google Maps"! My friend provided a picture and there was no tutorial. So I went from the picture and made it as close as I could to the picture she showed me. I made it by sticking yellow duck tape to the shirts for the roads and I printed the busses and road names onto some printable stickers for shipping labels.

 

The pin drops were tricky. I hand drew them onto cardboard and cut them out with a razor blade. I used the cardboard pieces as a template for cutting the red paper. I cut the letters out of the top red paper and glued a sheet of black paper between the red pieces and glued it all together. I couldn't figure out how to make the face holes until my family and I were browsing at a Halloween store trying on masks when it hit me. I laid a facemask down and traced it for the holes!

 

I love Halloween and I love making home made costumes ! They are so much fun! Wonder what the girls will want to be next year :)

Tutorial : How To Edit Microsoft Word Clip Art

 One of the biggest ways I save money while scrapbooking is by making my own stickers and embellishments! These can get very expensive at the craft store. Especially if you want to add texture and dimension with them. I like to use Microsoft Word clip art instead of buying expensive stickers! The library is pretty extensive and I find almost any image I ever look for! Here is a tutorial describing how I edit the clip art to match my scrapbook colors.

 

First of all, if you plan to use Microsoft Word to design your layouts, you will need to change the page size to the size of the paper you will use in your scrapbook. (Typically 12"x12") If you are only using this tutorial to edit clip art and not to design your layouts, it is not necessary to change the paper size. Click the tab that says "Page Layout", click "Size" and a drop box will appear. Choose your paper size. On my version of word, 12x12 is not listed so I select "More Paper Sizes..." at the bottom.

 

 

Enter the dimensions you want. I entered 12" by 12". Select OK.

 

 

To open the clip art library, Click the "Insert" Tab, click "Clip Art". A Library toolbox will appear on the right side of your document. Search for the picture you want.

 

 

I typed "Baby Toy". make sure "illustrations" is selected in the "Results Should Be:" drop box. You can also select "Pictures" or "All", but I prefer the illustrations for stickers I make. Click on an image you like and it should open on your page. Right click in the image and select "Edit Picture". Some clip art files are not editable and the option to edit will be greyed out. If this happens to you, try another picture. I believe most of the illustrations are editable though! 

 

 

On my version of word, a pop up box usually appears asking if you want to convert the image to a drawing object. Click "Yes".

 

 

A box will appear around your image and each of the little shapes that make up your image are now selectable. You can click on any of these shapes to move, delete, or change the size. Right click on them to change the fill color and outline color. On some images, the shapes are so small that it's hard to tell which one you have selected. If you make a mistake, use the "Undo" option. Zoom in as close as you need to.

 

 

I deleted the purple background shape and the sparkle shapes, and I changed the colors to match the page in my scrapbook I plan to use it on. Play with it a little- you can select anywhere in the rainbow box and drag the arrow up and down the lightness bar- have fun! You can also click the "Standard" tab and click from a section of other colors.

 

When you are happy with your newly designed image, click and drag to select every shape that makes up your picture.

 

 

Right click on any shape and move your cursor down to "Group", Then click "Group". Be sure to click on one of the shapes , if you miss- it will deselect everything. Then you can just click and drag again.

 

 

Now all of the shapes have become one complete image! Right click this new image

 and click "Copy".

 

 

You can now paste your newly edited image anywhere within word!  Click on the grey box around your drawing object to delete it. Print them on cardstock to make embellishments for your scrapbook!

 

 

I haven't tried this yet, but maybe you can add glitter!! I am sure you can paint on a little Elmer's glue and sprinkle glitter on, but in the near future I plan to try clear glitter fingernail polish and maybe a glitter spray paint or mod podge.

Happy editing!! :)

 

Coming soon - Tutorial describing how I turn the printed clip art into stickers.