a little drama

11/7/10

jar o' pumpkin cream pies...

I got this cute idea from Brooke at The Crafting Chicks who got the idea from the blog Inchmark. Brooke adapted the idea from mini pumpkin pies to mini pumpkin cream pies. When I saw these cute little individualized jars of yumminess I knew I had to figure out a reason to make them.

Luckily this past weekend we had a dinner group and we were asked to bring dessert! Wahoo, I already knew what I would bring!

I went with the pumpkin cream pies that Brooke made and ended up using 8 oz regular mouth crystal quilted jelly jars instead of the wide-mouth jars that Brooke used.

Baseball Cupcakes...

This crazy kid pictured above had his end of the season party for baseball and I volunteered to bring cupcakes... I was just going to do plan ole cupcakes, but got to thinking about how easy it would be to make them into baseballs, so that's what I did...

I debated about doing just red lines and no laces, but wanted them to have the laces on the ball. I also thought about jut piping the laces on, but I thought the licorice would be more fun. So, I ended up pulling out my trusty X-acto knife. I made little slices down the outer edges of a strip of 3 pull-n-peel licorice pieces (see above) and then pulled out every other little sliced piece with tweezers. I liked the result and they were a hit with the kids!

bloody fingers, ewwwwwwww

Bloody Finger Dough

1/2 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup butter

1 tablespoon vanilla

1/2 bag powdered sugar

Also need..

red jelly for the blood

almond slices for the nails and

medium sized pretzel sticks for the bone inside the finger...

makes a nice surprise crunch:)

Easy and fun!

recent birthday cakes...

My kids are getting old enough that they want to help out and when I was trying to figure out my husband's birthday cake they suggested an "under the sea" cake with swedish gummi fish and gummi sharks. This is an easy and fun cake to make with your kids. All we needed was our cake (my kids picked the pan shape, I probably would have just gone with a cirlce or rectangle:), blue and green icing, big and little M & Ms, gummi fish and gummi sharks...

Cupcake cake for my daughter's birthday...

personalized vase

I personalized 2 vases (both bought at Michaels with 40% off coupons for about $20) with the help of my friends vinyl letter machine and some swarovski crystals. Such an easy thing to do and it added a nice personalized touch to a special day.

6/7/10

UNO Party...

I got the idea for an UNO party for the boys from an adorable UNO shirt found on the blog Made... you can check it out here. I suggested the idea to my husband and he thought it was a little odd I was mentioning an idea for the babies 1 year party when they were only about 6 months old. Anywho, the idea stayed with me and this is how we celebrated...

THE INVITES

Anyone who knows me knows I LOVE a good invite... it's the first impression of what your party is going to be and I like them to be special. To save time and money sometimes I do an electronic version, but I really do love and prefer a hands on, open an envelope and read, stick it on your fridge as a reminder, type invitation.

I found some UNO cards with the original look from my childhood on Ebay. I scanned them in on the computer and then made an invitation the same size as the card to put on the back. I had fun figuring out how to incorporate the different UNO card names in the invitation. After gluing the card and the invite together I had them laminated to give them the look and feel of a real UNO card.

Conveniently I already had these wonderfully cute little envelopes that I bought a while back at Envelope Mall.com. The cards fit perfectly in them. I started out using the vellum, green dot and red, but ended up using vellum for the majority of them. I thought they looked so fun with the number one showing through. My 7 and 4 year old helped me hand deliver a bunch and then I slipped the rest into a bigger envelopes to mail those we didn't catch and out of towners.

THE PARTY FAVORS

I searched online for Uno Cards and found some party favor sized. When I bought them I thought that the cards were the size of the box, but they were actually 1/2 the size of the box. I was a bit disappointed because I thought that they were actually big enough for someone to actually play. I guess technically you could play with them, but I think keeping track of them would be pretty hard!

The mini cards were the perfect size for necklaces so my daughter and I broke open a pack and made necklaces for people to wear while at the party.

We also did party favor bags for each family that included the Mini Uno Cards, Dum Dum Suckers, meltaway mints and (my favorite) Cinnamon Bears.

FREEZER PAPER STENCILED UNO SHIRTS

I've been meaning to try out freezer paper stenciling for a long time. A friend of mine has done some really cute shirts and I finally got around to giving it a try with the Uno shirts I made for the boys' birthday. You can find the tutorial here. It's the same great blog, Made, where I got the Uno idea to begin with! Freezer paper stenciling is super easy, cheap and really quite addicting... I'm already trying to figure out what I'll create next!

THE CAKE

I made Uno Card cakes for the party and then little Uno Card cakes for the babies, which ended up being smashed and tossed to the ground (see pic below, great shot Emily!)

I wanted the cakes to be relatively easy to make the night before the party so earlier in the week I made the cakes and froze them.

Also, earlier that week my friend Deanna showed me her fondant skills. She showed me how to make all of the "1"s out of fondant so they'd be ready to go when I iced the cake... this made icing the cake super easy. White icing layer, then marked the area I wanted to keep white with a pattern I had made, star tipped the rest of the top of the cake with the color of the card, piped a border, added the "1"s and there you have 'em... Uno Card cakes!