Any Excuse for Snowflakes in May!!!

Like every other little girl on the planet lately, Kate is really into the movie Frozen. So when her preschool teacher said she could choose a day near the end of school to celebrate her summer birthday with her class, she of course, OF COURSE wanted to bring Frozen cupcakes.

Well, she lucks out that her mother is semi-obsessed with snowflakes, because I was eager to oblige.

She really wanted chocolate AND vanilla for the cake part, so we did half and half.

I sprinkled white sparkling sugar over blue frosting then added the snow flakes made of white chocolate. (Normally I consider white chocolate an abomination, but for snowflakes I'll make an exception!)

To make the snowflakes I melted white chocolate and put it in a little plastic sandwich bag with a corner snipped off. Then I piped it onto wax paper over a snowflake pattern. (I used a pattern for DIY window clings I found here, then printed it at about half size.)

This movie is a great chance to use snowflakes in some month other than December or maybe January. YAY!

Pumpkins 2013

It was a bit of a tight squeeze to fit pumpkin carving into the schedule this year.  Like I said in my last post, my sister-in-law's wedding made my October a little crowded. Not that I'm complaining. I wouldn't have traded being a part of her beautiful wedding for the world. But it did mean our pumpkin carving was a little less elaborate this year.

In the past we've been able to get our pumpkins carved for the church party and still have them not entirely gross when Halloween night rolled around. But this year our party at church was almost a full week before the actual day of Halloween. Not gonna have carved pumpkins for both. Normally we would have chosen to have the pumpkins carved for our church party, but given our busy month, we ended up carving them for Halloween night.

We let each of the kids pick out a pumpkin and what they wanted carved on it.

Claire chose Angry Birds and did a lot of the carving herself:

Scott designed his own silly face and we helped him execute it.  The googly eyes were an extremely important design element for him:

And Kate really, really wanted a princess pumpkin. A Sleeping Beauty to be exact.  And because she has me wrapped around her little finger:

And then the next day I let her decorate a gold crown to put on Aurora:

M and I wanted so badly to do a design of our own choosing too, but we were running out of time.  In the end, we stayed up way too late rushing to carve one and I don't think really turned out.  Can you tell what we tried to carve?

Halloween 2013

Halloween didn't get the attention this year that it usually does around our house. M's sister got married (WOO HOO!) two weeks before Halloween, so we were pretty busy getting ready for that. Helping with wedding plans, planning and buying outfits for the family, making flower girls dresses and accessories, and planning a 9 day road trip to Washington D.C. meant that I didn't have the time I usually do to make my kids' costume dreams come true. (I'll be subjecting you to photos from the wedding soon too, trust me.)

Kate wanted to be Merida from Brave in the blue and gold dress. I looked into buying the costume, but everything was either too expensive, too lame, or both. Some of the costumes didn't even look like anything Merida wore in the movie. Pshaw!

So I was going to try to make Kate's costume, but it soon became clear I had bitten off more than I could chew. My wonderful mother came to the rescue. She took the pattern and fabric from me and made Kate's dress mostly while we were gone at the wedding. I think she did a pretty awesome job:

M made her a little bow to complete the look.  She LOVED it.

And before you ask, yes. That is Kate's real hair, not a wig:

I got the idea for Kate's hair from this site. But I wanted a wilder look than that, so I used smaller sections, tied them in tighter knots, left them in longer, and separated the finished curls more.

I curled Kate's hair the night before using drinking straws and some mousse. I used the straws like you would do rag curls - roll the hair around the straw and then tie the straw in a knot to hold it.  I went with a full square knot so they would hold up to a four year old level of abuse for almost 24 hours. And they did hold up really well. None fell out with her sleeping in them and then wearing them all day long (even at dance class!) until the party in the evening.

This is a photo from the first time we did it for a church party. We went with rainbow straws. For actual Halloween we went with all red and orange straws to slightly give the illusion of red hair when she wore her costume at preschool earlier in the day. The second time I did it, I think I sectioned her hair even smaller than pictured here and it was almost too much. But I did cut the ends of the straws shorter the second time, and they were less cumbersome for her to wear, so I recommend that.

We're not going to talk about how long this took me. Suffice it to say that Kate and I enjoyed a nice movie together while we did this.

Then I untied all the straws and was left with a Shirley Temple look. Adorable, but unfortunately not Merida-like. I combed through all the curls pretty thoroughly with my fingers until we had a nice wild mane of curls. Then I hairsprayed it all. Finally, we covered her body and face in an old towel and sprayed her hair with a combo of half red temporary spray color and half orange temporary spray color.

The look sagged a little by the end of the evening, but still looked pretty great! It was so sad to put her in the shower at the end of the night to wash it all out, but I wasn't letting that hair color get anywhere near her bedsheets!

Fortunately, Claire and Scott picked some pretty easy costumes this year. I bought some robes, threw together some of Scott's, Claire's, and my church clothes, and sanded down and painted some sticks. A little eyeliner scar and some old costume glasses we already had from M being Waldo for Scott.  A french braid that Claire slept in overnight (Yes, my fingers were cramping by the end of doing both Kate AND Claire's hair in one night, in case you were wondering) and... Voila! Harry Potter and Hermione Granger!

It doesn't really show in the bloggable photos, but they REALLY looked like Harry and Hermione, if I do say so myself. It struck me with Claire especially. That girl basically IS Hermione, brainy sassy attitude and all.

And at the last second, I threw together a costume for myself out of a few things around the house:

Can you tell what I was?  I'll give you a close-up detail for help:

It was a very polarizing costume at the party we went to.  It was immediately obvious who was familiar with the Fruit Ninja game, and who was not.

(Do most people have Japanese toe shoes, a toy samurai sword, kick-boxing pants, and a balaclava hanging around their house?)

Semi-Aquatic Egg-Laying Valentine Box of Action

Both Claire and Scott were supposed to bring Valentine's Day boxes to school this year, so I was really happy that I got a two-fer.  Both kids wanted a Perry the Platypus box, so we just made two of these:

This isn't really Perry in his cool secret agent "semi-aquatic egg-laying mammal of action" persona,

but his "sedate pet" persona made a much better box.

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

Fanged Mazda

Last Halloween post for the year, I promise.

I have never been able to look at the front of our Mazda 3 without seeing a smiling face.  I love it.  But for Halloween, M and I decided it needed a little vampire flair:

A Duck, A Gecko, and Belle

Claire's costume request this year was a duck.  Largely motivated by her skill at making a duck call noise.  (Hey, whatever floats her boat.):

I bought a little duck face/bill visor and some wings:

I made a feather edged tutu, bought orange tights, and made duck feet to go over her shoes:

Scott's request was to be a gecko.  That's their school mascot, so it's a little less random than it seems:

We modified a dragon costume pattern to not have spines and to have more bulbous fingers.  I doubt anyone knew to guess "gecko" just by looking at him, but I think we did okay.  If he keeps picking obscure animal costumes, he's going to have to accept the price of no one knowing what he is!


Kate got to wear Claire's old Belle from Beauty and the Beast costume.  She LOVED twirling in it:

But we forgot her fake glove things the night I took these pictures before the church party, so I promised her I would take more on actual Halloween night WITH her gloves.  Pardon the poor lighting:

Pinterest Costumes

I love Pinterest.

That being said, you know how people tease a lot about how people pin things without ever actually doing them?  Well, we decided to turn that concept in to a Halloween costume.

For Halloween this year, M and I were Pinterest pins:

So instead of actually making cool costumes, we only got as far as "pinning" the awesome things we wanted to be for Halloween. And that was our costume.

A Katniss pin for me.

A Sherlock pin for M.

 

 ***I do have to brag though and say that >>I<< for one have actually done A LOT of things I've seen on Pinterest. 

That is all.***

Making Earrings to Match

 I picked up this necklace on clearance awhile ago at Target:

I love it!  But I every time I wore it I had the darnedest time figuring out what earrings to wear.  The metal was so dark that bright silvers looked wrong.  And the style of the necklace seemed to clash with a lot of my black earrings.  I looked and looked every time I was in a store for something that might work, and I just couldn't find anything that seemed right.  So I decided I had no other choice than to make my own earrings.

I took a trip to the craft store to buy some black earring hooks.  Then I took my needle-nose pliers to the necklace and removed two same-sized balls, one from each side of the necklace.  Luckily, there are so many balls, that you don't really notice 2 are missing.  The balls were just attached to a chain grid, so it was super easy to find symmetrically placed ones to remove. I just bent open the looped wire attaching them to the necklace and bent it closed onto the earring hook:

I love the result!  Although this necklace was especially conducive to scavenging earrings off of, I bet this could be done with more necklaces.  I totally need to go see what other necklaces in my jewelry box have earrings on them waiting to happen!

Old Dishtowels are Scary!

When we got married, I registered for several sets of flour sack towels.  I LOVE them, especially for drying dishes.  But it turns out that after 10 years, towels wear out.  Especially when you bleach them along with all your other rags.  My towels had reached the point that I had to accept them as "dead."

But I looked at those ragged pieces of cloth and said to myself, "G, you should save those!  You can't fake that kind of wear and tear.":

What do you think?  I think they make great Halloween decorations!  I have them inside over 2 windows in the living room, in the big front window, and hanging in the sidelight by the front door.  I just bought a package of black plastic spider rings, cut the ring part off, and stapled them in a few spots on the old towels.

Pumpkins 2012

Things have been SO busy lately.  I am totally exhausted. Beyond exhausted.

And yet despite it all, we still couldn't resist our traditional pumpkin carving endeavors.

This year we let the kids pick one design and then M and I picked another design.

The kids opted for Po from Kung Fu Panda:

We chose to do a the Mockingjay design from the Hunger Games:




But a little advice from me. After you print off your pumpkin design and cut it out, make sure you don't accidentally turn it sideways when you start taping it to your pumpkin:

As I started poking holes to transfer the design, I thought something looked a little odd, but I couldn't put my finger on it.  And then when it was already too late, I realized.  The bird is supposed to be flying with its wings up and head down, and not with its wings back and head up.  Luckily, once it's dark you can't see that we have the pumpkin turned on it's side!

A Trio of T-Shirts

For one last project before summer ended and the kids went back to school, we made freezer paper stenciled t-shirts:

Claire's favorite pink t-shirt had a run-in with some glitter paint during craft time at a birthday party not too long ago:

Claire was pretty sad, so we determined to try to save the shirt by making the splatters look somewhat deliberate.  Claire liked the idea of stars, so we added several sizes in several colors:

In the end, we made an otherwise ruined shirt into something wearable again.  "No, no.  That's not paint splatter.  It's stardust!":

Scott liked this triceratops skull design.  Straight forward, but nice in it's simplicity:

It's hard to tell, but the paint is actually a metallic silver, which is pretty cool.  Might have to make something for M or me with that paint:

And Kate, of course, OF COURSE, got a Hello Kitty shirt:

I wanted something obviously Hello Kitty, but not overly cartoon-ish.  So I started with a plain but fairly girly t-shirt - lace edge and puffed sleeves and what-not.  (Actually, I didn't immediately find something plain enough for painting and cheap enough when I was at Target, so I bought an inexpensive little shirt with a little pocket on the front and carefully picked out the seam attaching the pocket.  One trip through the wash and you'd never know there used to be a pocket on the front of this shirt! And light pink was the only color they had in her size, so I'm lucky it worked for Hello Kitty.)

I cut out the outline of Hello Kitty's head and then the bow with freezer paper.  For the outline of her head, I wanted something a little different and more abstract, so instead of painting inside a stencil shape, I ironed down the shape and painted outside of it:

I used a relatively dry foam brush and streaked/dabbed it radiating outward, so the end result looked like this:

Then I carefully lined up the bow in it's spot and painted it red:

Now I actually liked the finished result at that point better, but I fussed with it.  I pulled the stencil off while it was still wet so I could see the result.  There was a tiny spot where the red bow paint and black outline paint didn't meet up, so I went to fill the little light pink gap with a toothpick and some red paint.  Which was great, until I accidentally smudged the bow lower down with my hand.  It was barely visible and probably would have been okay had I stopped then.  But NO!  I tried to clean the paint smudge off.  Which resulted in a GIANT mess of smudginess around the bottom edge of the bow.  In the end, my only fix was to cut yet another stencil in order to put a nice fat black outline around the bow:

Moral of the story?  Don't be dumb like me.  Leave well enough alone.
Also?  Nice save, G.