Cakes

I am surprised that I haven’t shared any cakes.  I don’t make them very often and I still need A LOT of practice but I do enjoy making them here are a few cakes and cupcakes that I made over the past year.

This cake I made for my dad’s birthday, him in his Mustang.  I had to finish it at my parents house and I forgot my thermometer so I had to improvise on the window my original intention was to make candied glass

I made this cake for my birthday these are chocolate butterfly’s they are really easy and fun to make.

This by far was my favorite one to make it is cupcakes and it was so easy and fun to make, mess ups are completely allowed with this cake.  I made this for a former coworker who was quitting.

I made these for my daughter’s birthday for her to pass out at school.  Amazingly there is not policy in our school district against bringing homemade food and I hope that it stays that way until my girls are done with elementary school.

I made these dogs for a bake sale that my former employer was having they were fun, but my frosting kept melting.  My favorite that I made for the sale were pigs unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of them.

I made this cake for Princess’s birthday party.  She really wanted a purse cake, all of the accessories were made using modeling chocolate.

This cake was a last minute order.  I was recovering from surgery and was asked if I could make a cake commemorating the anniversary of when her husband broke his leg at scout camp. I had only hours to make it, that included baking the cake, and no supplies as I was at my parents house.  It was nice being paid for the cake and it is the only one I have ever been paid for.

These I made for another former co-worker he and I share the same birthday and I really wanted and excuse to try these sharks out, they were really fun.

That is just a glimpse into what I have made.  I very rarely take pictures of my cakes, as you can see most of these were taken at location and generally with a cell phone or by someone else.  I wish I knew more people because I do like making them but we can only eat so much can in our house until we throw it away.

Car Show

On Saturday I drove down to my parents and we went to a car show.  My dad entered his 1982 Ford Mustang, not with any intentions of winning as it needs A LOT of work but with the hopes of selling it. I am completely against this decision and if I knew anything about cars and had the money I would buy it but sadly I don’t.

 

It almost won though up until the very last hours his car was the only one entered in the 1980’s category amusingly enough, only one other car was entered in the same category. 

There were over 140 cars entered and some were fantastic I am by no means a car nut but I really do like the vintage cars like pre 1950’s, when I was in elementary school I read the autobiography about Henry Ford at least 10 times, I had an obsession with him, the Model T, and the invention of the assembly line.  After several hours the girls were getting bored I enjoyed just laying in the car getting a suntan/sunburn so I sent them out to take pictures.  We got a whole ONE, I forgot to charge the camera, AGAIN!

However, the whole entire point of this post is to mention this cute little shop/vendor that was there.  It was called Hipsy Gypsy Boutique and they even have a website found HERE. I loved everything about it, there displays were fantastic it was almost like walking into vintage heaven.  Items were displayed in vintage suitcases and she even had the cutest little trailer that you could walk into that had items you could buy.

I got these pictures off there blog more images can be seen HERE.  I loved it so much that I even bought this AMAZING purse and I had to share.

Oh, yes that is totally cowhide.  I am by no means a cowgirl but I LOVE this and I think the clasp makes it totally not country.  When I was in high school I had cowhide clogs I wore those things to death and this bag totally reminds me of them, when I went to the website I noticed that they sale it online and you can totally buy one HERE.  I love my new bag and I am so excited to start using it, it was a great Saturday purchase.

5 Dinners In One Hour

I have mentioned this program in the past but I wanted to show you how we use this in our house.

Just a note this is not a sponsor I just love this program SO MUCH that I feel I have to share it and I seem to talk about it all the time to my friends.

 

If for some reason you have been stuck underneath a rock and have not heard of this let me explain what it is.  Upon subscribing, which you can do HERE, you are emailed a month worth of recipes, Each week is on one page and a shopping list is on another page, for only $15 you get 3 months of recipes.  Now I’m not going to lie I thought I’ll do 3 months and cancel my subscription and rotate, but then I got emailed the menu for May and it included many recipes for the grill, one of my favorite things to do!  So I have decided to continue.  I like the the menus rotate around the seasons. 

Since I plan on reusing the meal plan I wanted to make them easy to reuse and this is what has worked in our family, after wasting several printed pieces. 

I took a binder and bought some plastic sheet protectors and placed a week menu on one side and the shopping list on the other side.

When it comes time to do my shopping list I choose my menu for the week take a dry erase marker and mark what I already have on hand.

After I do my shopping I then flip over the page and the week full of menus are placed on the fridge.  If we don’t like a meal, which occasionally happens we write a few notes on the actual paper and write what we didn’t like.

I make the meals and they wait in the fridge and as we make the meals, we never make them in order we cross them out with a  dry erase marker at the end of the week we wipe of our marks place it in the binder and start it all over again.  I know that there are only 5 meals but we rotate our meals on a 5 day basis,  it is nice because we now have 3 months worth of menus and can get away with doing that.

Something else amazing with this program is that there are several meals that can be frozen.  I recently went through and and separated the frozen only meals.  I did this because a friend of mine had lost a family member and I wanted to help but in a different way. Having lost a sibling myself I know that it is when everyone leaves after that first week of the death that reality really sets in and the casserole seem to no longer exist.  I set a week of freezable meals aside sent instructions to each meal so that when they felt like it they could pull the nearly-premade meals out.

I really love this program and I urge everyone to try it out because it is completely AWESOME and there are so many amazing things you can do with it.  It is designated for a family of 5 I believe and being only a family of 3 it has been easy to adapt it to our family size.

Adoption Auction

 

For whatever reason my hear has opened up for the family over at Team Chase: 4 and Counting, who are waiting to adopt children from Africa.  They had an auction earlier this year and I donated my Chips ACount Cookies.  They are having another auction beginning at the end of the month.

She may kill me but I haven’t mailed anything yet, I don’t even know what to donate.  Suggestions?  I need to get the ball moving and I suppose I had better do it rather quickly as she wants the donations by the 20th, YIKES!  I may just donate some more cookies but I want to do more for them, I can’t really say why I haven’t met them before but I feel drawn to this family. 

I will be mentioning more next week but just wanted to give you a head up as last time the auction was great and they had a lot of neat stuff, I even bought some items.

Teacher Appreciation Week

Last week the girls and I got really creative for Teacher Appreciation Week, there were so many great ideas online that we couldn’t choose one so we gave gifts out all week.  Now ideally it would be great if I took pictures for everyday but I didn’t so bare with me.  Princess’s teacher is a male so we wanted to keep the gifts fairly gender neutral as well.
On Monday we woke up and realized that we didn’t prepare anything with only minutes to spare I remembered seeing this on less cake {more frosting} you can find the tutorial HERE.  I always have an abundant of pencils we printed off the poem and for the container I used a take out box.  They were really easy to put together.

On Tuesday I once again used things that I had laying around the house.  I had some hand soap from Bath and Body Works they had a sale awhile ago and I must have ended up with 10 extra bottles and bonus we had one that was Apple scented we thought that was great for the male teacher.  I sadly cannot remember where I found this at I even went back to look for it because they had tags for everyone (we gave them away for Mother’s Day) and I could not find the website the poem went like though:

Grateful Hands, loyal hands, clean hands, loving hands, strong hands, giving hands, praying hands, helping hands, kind hands, willing hands, caring hands, friendly hands

Each Card had the words A+ Teacher (mother, grandmother for Mother’s Day).

On Wednesday we took advantage of the free clock download that Attempting Aloha gave found HERE. 
I didn’t have any clocks on hand but she was right and they had clocks for $4 at Walmart.  This did take a little more prep work then I thought it would and the pattern was still smaller than the clock so I had to paint the numbers over but they turned out lovely and the teachers have since hung them.

On Thursday I found a rubber band ball at Office Max and thought it would be fun to make something up with it.

I also found this fun printable for sticky notes at Craft whatever found HERE and included those with the gift.

On Friday I took a cue from eighteen25 with this teacher tackle box found HERE.  I created neat labels but they would not stay stuck to the boxes so they got trashed and to make it a little more special we included a gift subscription to netflix. 

Our teachers have really been taken for granted losing days of pay, having supplies taken away, and having more children added to their classrooms, among other things. It was nice to be able to tell them that we still care.  It was also nice when the girls returned to school on Monday and were given thank you notes, it made the girls feel special as well.

Violin Necklace

I recently found the blog My Girlish Whims and was drawn to her blog when I saw this beautiful Sheet Music necklace found HERE.

Princess was finishing up her year of violin and her friend will not be continuing the next year so to commemorate their time together I wanted to make something and this seemed fitting of course I used a different design, a violin.

I had never made any jewelry before except for maybe some made out of cereal so my knowledge was lacking and I admit I had always been a bit intimidated, but the tutorial and a list of tools needed was so great and easy to follow. The best part?  I was able to make four necklaces under $20 and that included the price for the tools!  I found a nice cheap toolset that had 5 different tools and they worked out great.  I still have lots of beads left over too.

When I made these I had promised not to blog or do any crafts because I was focusing on my studies but I totally cheated and they were so simple. Unlike the tutorial I did not dye my paper, I just didn’t have the time to wait for it to dry.  As you can imagine there are not any hole punches for a violin so I used my silhouette to cut it out.  Princess criticized that there were not any “f holes” but my blade was going dull and it wasn’t cutting them through all the way. 
Because I was using the silhouette I couldn’t use cardboard and instead used cardstock and stacked it twice using the mod podge. They turned out beautifully, Princess was actually able to help make them, and everyone who received a necklace thought that we had bought them.  They were such a huge hit that we even made on for my Sister-In-Law for Mother’s Day she plays piano so I cut a piano instead and despite me not taking a picture it was just as neat.  I love the idea of using the sheet music and so many different instruments can be used based on the instrument that you play.

I will be linking this to:

Lemon Squeezy Pillow Case

I was downloading some pictures for today’s post and was surprised to see that I had not shown/shared these pillow cases that I made.  I found the pattern and tutorial over at A Lemon Squeezy Home, you can find it HERE.  Like everything of hers I LOVE it and cannot express how easy it was to make.

The first one I made I used left over fabric that I had on hand.  It was meant for a Cheeta Girls quilt so it was difficult to cut to size and I had to make a few alterations but it turned out great!

Princess loved it so much that she requested I make one for her friends birthday present.

I still had to make one for Kitty Kat and she is a purple girl through and through.  I was going to make one like the Cheeta Girl one but I found some Jelly Fish fabric and for whatever reason I LOVED it.  She did say that it was a bit boyish but I assured her that the button that was a real seashell made it girly.  She loves it.

The best things about these pillow cases is that they can hold so much.  They are great for long car rides because they can but their books in them and have pillows when they want to rest.  They have worked great for overnight bags as well there is plenty of room to hold all the items they would need PJ’s, hairbrush, clothes for the next day, and even an animal or two.  I seriously recommend these pillow cases and they only take a couple of hours to make cut to finish. A great project for all those sleep overs that are sure to happen. Amazing!

On another note I wanted to say thank you to all who follow and read this blog, I truly appreciate it.  I have had some struggles and rather rude comments that have made me re-evaluate a lot of things and my new attitude is that I will take it as it is!  I can handle criticism but rudeness is not necessary and not welcome in my world.  Only love and kisses here!  Thanks for sticking with me and I hope to have an amazing summer creating new things and enjoying the outdoors.