Brown and Blue Granny Square Afghan for Mothers Day

I have a family member who has been asking me for as long as I have been crocheting to make her an afghan. I learned to crochet at age 9 so lets just say it has been a long time!! I never got around to it, but then her daughter asked me to make her one for Mothers Day and I got to work! She wanted brown and blue but I don't like to make 2 color blankets- especially with squares because they always just look like checkerboards to me! So we decided on blue, brown and tan, but I am using 2 shades of blue to add more variety of color to it.

 

I used Caron Simply Soft in Bone, Country Blue, Dark Country Blue, and Chocolate and a size H hook.

 

I decided to use the granny square for this blanket. I wanted the blanket I make for this person to be traditional, so what better choice than the granny square? I don't know what it is about the granny square... its a classic. So easy to work up and so clean and neat.

 

 

It starts out just a tiny little square and before you know it- its finished!

 

 

I decided to work a border around each square in tan, so tan will be the main color of the blanket with pops of color from the blue and brown squares.

 

 

I think the colors look great together!

 

 

Each square is 5.5" wide and I am shooting for a 40" x 60" size blanket. I have made many baby blankets but I have yet to make an adult size blanket! According to my math, (or my calculator I should say) I would need 8 squares across and 11 squares down to reach my desired width and height. 

 

 

19 squares down!!

 

 

at least 69 more to go...... :)

 

Check out my post about finishing this project to see how it turned out!!

 

 

Tangled Birthday party!

My daughter LOVES the movie Tangled! I showed her a picture of a tower on a birthday cake and that was it- she wanted a Tangled birthday party!!

 

 

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 was make these little Pascal party blowers. Pascal is Rapunzel’s funny little chameleon friend. My little girl just loved them and we had a good time making them together.

 

I used this tutorial to make them. When they say a permanent marker works best- they are not kidding, if you make these use a Sharpie!! Non permanent markers will rub right off the foam.

Our favorite part of the movie is when Rapunzel finally sees the floating lanterns in the sky. So, of course, I had to make some for her party!

 

I saw a few pictures on pinterest of this type of decoration. Most of them were either with the star printed on the paper or with a paper star cut out and glued to the paper lantern. I decided to paint the stars right on the paper. Before the paint dried, I even sprinkled some glitter on so they would sparkle! Little girls love glitter!!

Then I just rolled the paper and stapled it into place. I used a hole punch to make holes to feed a ribbon through. I also hung command strips on the ceiling to hang the ribbon from. I LOVE Command strips!! I use them for a lot of my temporary decorations!

I also saw an idea online of a Tangled party game called “Pin the frying pan on Flynn Rider” I thought this was clever since Rapunzel uses a frying pan as a weapon in the movie. Flynn is always making a big deal about his “wanted” poster, so that was the perfect thing to use as the picture!

 

There are downloadable files available online that you can print of this image, but I wanted mine to be really big and I didn’t want to pay for a large print, so I just drew it and went over it with a Sharpie. I used my Silhouette electronic cutting tool to cut frying pan shapes out of black cardstock and I wrote the names of each kid on the handle. This was a good way to make sure all the kids at the party got to play the game, even if they ran off somewhere! Plus it was a cute touch!

 

 

I used Elmer’s Painters opaque paint markers to write the names. I used the sherbet swirl colors, they really popped on the black paper and almost looked neon.

I drew a faint outline of a frying pan in the center of the picture as a guide for the winning pan!

 

 

I also used my silhouette to make a happy birthday sign. I have made several happy birthday signs in the past and this was the nicest and easiest one I have made ! I am really good at eyeballing when it comes to making straight rows and even spaces so it was easy for me anyways…

 

I also made a braided hair decoration for the party. It was very easy but it was a pain because the yarn kept getting knotted up as I braided it. I am very good with yarn. I crochet and I am used to getting knots out of yarn. It turned out pretty cute though so it was worth it!

 

 

For the cake I just made my own and decorated it to have some simple flowers and a tower like a picture I saw online, except I stacked bigger donuts to make the tower so it would be less likely to fall over!

 

 

I stuck a dowel rod into the cake and stacked the donuts around the rod. I cut little holes into the cupcake papers so the dowel would go through and topped it with a sugar cone covered in icing! I am nowhere near a professional cake decorator. I have a few years’ experience decorating ice cream cakes at Brusters, so I know how to pipe flowers and leaves, and scribble a “happy birthday”, but that’s about it!! One of the party guests surprised me at the last minute with a Tangled cake topper (something else I NEVER buy for parties- cake toppers!)

 

 

My daughter already had a Tangled dress up outfit that she got for Christmas, so I had her wear it for the party. I knew she would want to take it off once she started playing with all the other kids though, so I put together another outfit for her to wear (and I had this in mind for her third birthday pictures) and she wore it under her dress.

 

I bought her a yellow skirt and a purple T-shirt for $4 and I made a T-shirt stencil with my silhouette. (Ya I use my Silhouette a LOT- click here if you are wondering what it is) I put a big yellow “3” on the shirt and let it dry, then I put her name on the shirt with a Tangled font. You can download the tangled font here. It doesn’t have all the characters but it’s the only one I could find! And luckily, it had all the characters I needed! 

 

 

I like to use whatever I can for multiple purposes. For her 3 year old pictures, she wore the same outfit from her birthday party and I even left the lantern decoration up and used it as a backdrop!

And of course, to top it all off, she needed a braid in her hair!

 I came across this awesome website where they show you how to do cutehairstyles for girls. They recreate a lot of the Disney princess looks. Here is a link to their youtube channel too.

Since my little girl is only 3, I didn’t want to drive her crazy with bobby pins and flowers falling out of her hair all day. Instead of making two micro braids and wrapping them around a bigger braid,  I made ribbon braids to wrap around her big braid.

I used ribbon that matched her hair color so it actually looked like her hair! I made it by tying ribbons around an elastic and braiding it, then I hot glued flowers right to it. When you are supposed to wrap micro braids around the larger braid I just wrapped the ribbon braids around it. For the flowers in the rest of the hair, I hot glued flowers to the tips of bobby pins and placed them in her hair. I was careful not to use too many flowers and hide the braid too much. 

At the end of the party, every one got a goodie bag filled with yellow and purple candies! It helped that my daughters birthday is right before Easter so I bought the candy with pastel wrappers and used the yellow and purple. I saved the blue and pinks for the Easter baskets :)