Make It: Little Guy Tie

More preparation for Fosters upcoming first birthday!  In my efforts to create the opportunity for some fun pictures at his first birthday celebration, I've been thinking 'what will he wear?'.  I've decided to go with a little guy tie..  I've seen some adooorrrable baby and toddler ties available to buy online and such, but not willing to pay the price, I'm making my own :)

So here's what I did, step by step to make my very own, 'Little Guy Tie'.

The Other Side of the World

Image courtesy of MapQuest

When you were a little kid, playing in dirt, perhaps wrecking the lawn or garden by digging a hole.... you may have heard your parents say, 'If you dig that hole any deeper, you'll end up in China!'.  I heard it.

I've stated before, my participation in Postcrossing and recently I received a card from Austrailia.  From the senders home to mine, it travelled a whopping 18,268 km's.  Wow.  That flight would suck!  Pardon me!  But then it got me thinking... what would be the absolute farthest I could send a postcard?  What is the absolute farthest point from where I am?  Naturally, that would be the antipodal point on the earth.  I know.  I'm impressed with my use of 'antipodal' too!  (Gheesh I hope I've used it correctly...)

Next came some searching (thanks Google) which brought me to Antipodes Map.  It's a site just for that purpose!  To see the other side of the world!  Apparently, I would be floating out in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia!  It gives you co-ordinates as well.  You could even plug those into Google Earth for a more realistic view.

Thanks for indulging my nerdy-ness...but that brings the question... if you were to dig a hole straight through the earth, where would YOU end up?

Gumdrops & Spicedrops - Oh My...

Lets make some gumdrops!  I had no idea it was so easy to make them.  I'm usually intimidated by candy recipes... but gumdrops require no special equipment, thermometers or unusual ingredients.  So come follow along and make some candy with me!

Baby's 1st Birthday Prep: DIY Cake & Cupcake Stands

As you may have seen, I recently posted about the teired tray I made for Fosters upcoming first birthday.  We have until October, but I'm taking my time getting it all done and put together!

In addition to the tiered tray, I decided to make a small cake stand to put his little personal cake on (for the cake smash photos) and some little cupcake stands as well.

As before, I raided the thrift stores for items to build the stands.  Dollar stores work too!

Crusty huh?  They were dirt cheap.  Stove burner element covers.  I washed them up and ended up using the two smaller covers.  I also found a terracotta pot hanging around my house that I decided to use as the base for this cake stand.

Using E6000 again as the adhesive, I glued the two small burner covers together so it would be stronger.  It needed a little more height, so I added a mason jar lid in between the burner covers and the pot.  Glued... set.

Puffy paint to the rescue!!  I felt the cake stand was going to be a bit 'flat', so I decided to use some puffy paint to give some dimension by adding 'dots' around the top and bottom.  I'm sorry, I neglected to get a photo at this stage!  (bad blogger)

Using Krylon's Banner Red spray paint in gloss finish, this is what we get!  This cost me all of about $3.00 to make.  I loooove the red!  It's the perfect shade.  I used the same method for the cupcake stands....

Except these little lovelys got a coat of Krylon's Sun Yellow in gloss finish.  The top of the cupcake stands are old coasters and the bases are a little tiny sauce dish and a little candle stick.  I think they turned out sweet!

Have I mentioned how much I love spray paint!!?

Make It: Chalkboard Paint

Yes you can.  Chalkboard paint is ridiculously easy to make.  The great thing about making it yourself is the array of colours you can make it in!  Do a small project like a message board or go big and turn your kids play room into one big chalkboard!  Ohhhhh... all the kids from the neighbourhood would surely be over if that were the case!  Follow along for the recipe and some tips!

Baby's 1st Birthday Prep: DIY Pinwheel toppers

 

Foster will have a cake for his cake smash, a cake for us (hopefully) and cupcakes as well.  I've seen these adorable cupcake pinwheel toppers around, but being the crafty type, I decided to make my own. 

Pinwheels are super easy.  I have done them before with felt, but never with paper!  Want to know how?  Read the full post for all the details.

Gone Camping....

 See you next week!

Baby's 1st Birthday Party Prep: DIY Teired Trays

Our son Foster's first birthday is approaching in a couple months... I can hardly believe it!  Since life is hectic and there are always a bunch of things to do, I've decided to plan early and get things put together slowly over this next while.  It also means, I get to share with you bits and pieces along the way!  Of course, when the day comes, I'll share the whole shebang, all put together!  Pinterest has absolutely been a great space to pin up all the idea's and such that are floating around the wild, wild, web, helping me get organized.

I wanted to make a lovely cupcake / cake stand for the big day.  Foster's party is going to be somewhat of a non theme.  Just bright and colourful, with pattern.  We'll save the themed birthday parties for when he is older and has specific interests.  A tiered tray was first on the list and it all began with a trip to the thrift store.

Some serving trays and brass candle sticks.  I liked them because they had a nice weight, so once assembled into my tiered tray, it would be fairly stable.  All five pieces were under $5.00 total.  A lot of thrift stores have a half price day.  That is your ideal time to get your supplies!  Washed and dried :)  They were nothing spectacular on their own, but together, they will be perfect.

I used E-6000 as the adhesive to assembled the trays.  I glued the bottom tray with the candle stick on it and the middle teir with the candle stick on it first, then let them totally set and dry before adhering everything else together.  So far, so good!  Really, if you like the look you could just stop right here.  But I kept going. 

Picked up some Krylon, Blue Ocean Breeze in Gloss finish.  Since this product works on metal, there was no need for spraying on a primer first.

Ta-Da!  Lovely, blue tiered cupcake and cake stand!  Of course I'll absolutely be able to use this again in the future for other social gatherings.  The cool thing?  The brass candle sticks I used actually unscrew into to pieces!  So I am able to partially dismantle this thing to make storage a little easier. 

It would look super pretty on a summer party table, filled with lemons, waiting to be turned into refreshing lemonaid.... or at a bridal or baby shower filled with delicious treats!

The whole thing cost around $7.50 to make.  $5.00 for the trays and the candle sticks, I had the E-6000 adhesive on hand and I'm using the rest of the Krylon Blue Ocean spray paint for other projects... so I figure around $2.50 worth of that.  Not bad!  And it looks just like I wanted it too.

There are soooo many ways you can build your own tiered tray.  If I had the room, I would have a ton of them in all different styles and themes.  Gah!  It's probably good I don't have the room.... lol.

P.S.  If you are concerned about placing food directly on the spray painted surface, consider putting treats on them that have either their own wrapper (like a cupcake) or put a paper liner on the tray first.  Wax paper or even a pretty decorative paper would work great and would help with cleanup.

DIY: Tank Top Tote in 5 Minutes

Here is a quick little tutorial on how to make a tank top tote bag in less then 5 minutes.  Seriously.  It's that simple!  For books, beach stuff or as a market bag, what a great way to upcycle some old tanks.

Read the full post for all the details!

Apothecary-esk DIY

Love those apothecary jars you see all over design magazines and shows?  Don't love the price tag enough to buy your own?  Think the one in the picture above is beautiful?  I do too.  I made it.  It cost me a whopping $2.50.

Read the post for all the details and instructions!

The Sushi Experiment

My friend Eryn has a severe allergy to shell fish.  Naturally she is very careful when she goes out to eat at restaurants, avoids buffets and places that serve a lot of shell fish.  Because of this, she has never had sushi.  The tragedy!  So naturally, we decided to try our hands at making our own, shell fish free sushi and got started on the grocery list. 

Simple was the theme seeing as though it was our first time making it.  I found the sheets of nori (seaweed), the sticky rice, bought a jar of pickled ginger and a tube of prepared wasabi.  To add to the experience, I found some miso soup too.  Yum!  I was able to find everything in the international food aisle of my local grocery store.  Next stop, Eryn's place.

We cup up our toppings into thin strips, or we shredded it.  We had carrot, avocado, cucumber prosciutto, and some goat cheese.  Make sure you follow the instructions for your rice.  Sticky rice (or glutenous rice) will turn into a pot of glue if you don't rinse it well before cooking.  Let's just say I learned that lesson years ago and pretty much destroyed a saucepan.  We added some rice vinegar to season the rice and then let it cool.  So far, everything was on track!

A bamboo rolling mat is a must have.  Eryn got this one at her local grocery store.  Wrap it in plastic wrap or everything will stick to it.  I lay down the sheet of nori next and spread the rice onto it.  Tip;  keep a glass of cold water handy and dip your fingers in it before you handle the rice otherwise you'll end up with rice fingers!  Next we put in the filling.

It was time... it was now or never.  Grab the mat, roll it over and squeeze, roll and squeeze so the mixture is nice and packed, roll all the way to the end, let go... look in disbelieve at the ease of it all... then celebrate!!!  Yay!  Who knew it was so simple!

Tip; when you cut the roll into pieces, make sure your knife is clean and sharp.  It may get sticky between cuts, so keep a damp cloth handy to wipe it off periodically.

It was so much easier then either of us thought it would be!  I will absolutely be making sushi again and again.  And of course, I was happy that Eryn enjoyed it too!  My favourite combination was prosciutto with avocado and goat cheese. 

One thing about sushi, it's surprisingly filling.  Time to take Eryn's boys for a walk and work off some dinner!

Once we worked off some dinner, we promptly filled that space back up with some chocolate frozen yogurt and a peanut butter haystack.  Okay, so dessert wasn't very Japanese, but it was delicious!

If you like sushi but have never made it yourself, give it a try.  You'll be surprised at how easy it is!

Shopping List

• Sticky / sweet glutenous rice
• Rice vinegar
• Nori (seaweed wraps)
• Bamboo mat
• Filling (whatever you wish!)
• Pickled ginger, wasabi, light soy sauce for garnish and dipping (optional)

Pinterest. I'm In.

We'll finish off this week of websites by checking out Pinterest.  I'd heard about it before, but never really explored it to it's full potential until recently. I'm not even sure I have fully explored it or that I ever could!  The sheer amount of images pinned makes it a gold mine of inspiration.  You could spend hours looking through amazing images without even noticing the time ticking away. 

For those of you that don't know what it's about, Pinterest is like a virtual bulletin board.  It's a great space to collect images you love online, organize them into groups and share them, while maintaining the original source of the image.  Yes, source credit is maintained.  I love that!  Especially for blogging.  I can't even tell you how many images I have saved on my hard drive for inspiration but I have no idea where I got them from.  And because of that, they will probably never get used on my blog.  From now on, I wont have that problem!

Follow other pinners and be followed by others who like your pins.  Put together images for a specific project like decorating a room in your home, or for an event such as a wedding or baby's first birthday.  It's a great way to keep all that inspiration in one place without having to tear pages from magazines, or save random images to your hard drive.  It's all right there.  Brilliant!

Go on, head over to Pinterest and request an invite to join.  You'll quickly receive an invite via email, do the sign up thing and then you can start pinning. You can also link it to Facebook and Twitter.

For those of you with an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, get the Pinterest App free from iTunes, so you can pin on the go.


Get pinning!

Scrapbooking Supplies from Two Peas in a Bucket

I thought I would post about Two Peas in a Bucket in case some of you have never heard of it before.  Like scrapbooking and the likes?  Two Peas has an abundant supply of paper, images, stamps and anything else scrapbook related that you can think of. 

The cool part is, they always have backgrounds and fonts you can download for free!  However, do look further then just the freebies!  There is a TON of stuff to chose from and so much of it is priced very well.

Click on Digital -> Digital Shopping, to get the free fonts and free downloadable digi kits.  Have fun!

Pick Your Plum

Pick Your Plum is a cool website you crafters out there will appreciate!  Shipping to Canada and the United States, Pick Your Plum posts one awesome craft product a day at a steal of a deal.  It's there until either the end of the day or until it's sold out.  Whatever comes first! 

So head on over to Pick Your Plum and do as they say, 'get it before your neighbour does'.