Felt Map- Birthday style!

I made a felt map for Kenna a couple weeks ago. She is going to LOVE it.  Meanwhile, we got invited to a birthday party for a sweet 3 year old girl, and the theme of the party??? DORA!! So of course I had to make her a map, too. I found this book- Dora's Birthday Surprise, and opened it to see what the Map had to say.

Map directed Dora and Boots to Acorn forest, the blue Troll Bridge, and then finally to Rainbow Mountain.

So, I got out my felt and some scissors, and made the three destinations to go with some others I had already made.

Troll Bridge. (I wish I had made a troll, too. I ran out of time.)

Rainbow Mountain. I made them two pieces, so she could take the rainbow and use it alone. I kinda hate the mountain, but I was copying the picture and was in a rush. Ahhh, well.

Now the Birthday Girl can read her book, and follow along with her very own Map. Yay!

Rainbow Cake!

*Disclaimer: I don't cook. I don't bake. I really am only allowed to use spoons in the kitchen.

I decided to make a Rainbow cake with Kenna. We mixed up some boxed cake mix (with some egg replacer and applesauce experiment) and split it into 6 cups. We mixed in food coloring (wish we had some gel coloring, but alas- the liquid drops were our only option). ROYGBV. (Handy Husband was irrirated that I didn't make Indigo. Confession- I don't know the difference between blue, indigo and violet.) 

Kenna (the half-naked chef) did all the mixing of food coloring. She and I discussed "what makes purple? What makes orange? It was fun to see the batter transform into bright colors.

Then we recited the colors of the rainbow in order, and puddled each color into two 8 inch pans.  The batter slowly spread out to the edge of the pan. Awesome!

With no egg in our cake mix, Kenna happily licked all the cups clean. (that's me in the background- a rare Mommy sighting! I'm usually behind the lens.)

All the rainbow batter in the pans, ready to climb into the oven.  I was waay more excited than Kenna.

Cooking... (in our new Range!)

Cooling...

Iced and served!! Amazing! (Kenna requested pink sprinkles on top, and I happily obliged.  She calls them sparkles, and that makes my heart happy.

Every tiny cake crumble was a different rainbow color. I think it looks more tie dye than rainbow, but whatever you call it, it was beautiful and delicious!  I have a lot of ideas on how to make other kinds of cake- like different shades of pink. Or matching colors to themed decor. Or zebra stripes (could I??) 

I will never make a plain yellow cake again.  :) You've been warned.

I'm the Map, I'm the Map, I'm the Map!

Finally! A break from the non-stop custom orders from the last month or so... and just in time to start working on some Christmas gifts!

I'm pretty sure you know "Map" from Dora the Explorer. If you don't, consider yourself very, very lucky.  If you do, I apologize for the stupid song now running continuously through your head.  My sweet Kenna is rather taken by Dora and friends. We watch very little television, so Dora DVD's are a real treat for her.  Recently, Kenna has taken to wadding up any paper she can find, calling it "her map" and stuffing it into her little backpack.  She sings the Dora songs, she pretends that Swiper is lurking around every corner, and calls Daddy Boots more often than not. ?

 So yeah, making her a Map is a no-brainer gift! I haven't seen anything like this around, so I just kinda winged it. I wanted the map to roll up and show his face, and when it was unrolled, I wanted the three destinations to be interchangeable. I grabbed some felt and got to work. I have to say I am in love with this project, and know Kenna will be, too!

 Here's the map. The only thing glued down is the road. You can see a small square of scratchy velcro I handstitched on so that the map will stay rolled up.

 Then I got to start making the "destinations". First, through the flower garden...

Then hike over Big Mountain!

 Go around the Red Barn!

Here are three destinations, laid out on the map- flower garden, wooden bridge, dark cave.  :)

 Forest, alligator lake, big mountain!

Park, pumpkin patch (in honor of our two recent trips there... I just knew Kenna would love this...) and red barn.

When I finished making the pieces for the inside, I quickly cut out Map's Face. Because he is a cartoon, his face is completely outlined in black. To mimic this, I simply cut two layers of felt. I think he came out pretty adorable!

Here's the whole set. I am sure that when Kenna gets ahold of it, she will ask me for some specific things to add, and I can't wait! I plan to make at least one more set for an upcoming 3 year old birthday girl who loves Dora, too!

Bath time!

The only person more excited than Kenna about Little Man's birthday was ME!! I couldn't wait to give him this present! I ordered him this awesome wooden bath toy set from Mama Made Them on Etsy.

For a great price, I got a turtle, whale, fish, boat and two removable people! It is all hand-carved, woodburned and sanded. It is really nice! All the wooden pieces float, and they are a perfect size for a one year old to push around in the tub. Kenna really likes them, too.  I am soo happy!

Our new wooden bath toys go great with our other bath stuff- small bowl and cup from Ikea, and two little pinch pots from Walmart. I banned plastic bath toys about six months ago, while on my plastic purge. I'm proud to say bathtime is totally plastic-free! :)

Dinosaur Cake

I don't cook. I definately don't bake. I rarely make edible toast. Also, we're vegetarian (i.e. no butter, eggs or milk). 
Today, I'm going to demonstrate how not to make a dino cake.   I'm sure you'll take away lots of great advice. I found the idea for my adorable dino cake here.
Here are some of the ingredients you'll need. Not all of them, because of course I don't bake and forgot a bunch of stuff.  (You'll notice I didn't forget any of the ingredients that start with "c.h.o.c.o.". ) I did completely forget to buy fake butter.  If you start with a cake mix and the required ingredients (listed in pictoral form) right on the box, you'll be doing great.

 After sending Handy Husband to the store for butter, he came home and I promptly announced we were out of egg replacer.  He then sighed deeply and whipped up some egg replacer-  a yogurt and soymilk experiment. (Here's where you can start taking notes- don't experiment with egg replacer on important birthday cakes.)  While the dubious cake mixture was baking, I gathered some chocolate pieces- I unwrapped some Kisses, picked out some brown m&ms, and opened some chocolate candy melts. I was going to open a bag of chocolate chips, too, but thought it might be overkill.

Dubious cake mixture yielded two incredibly sticky 9 inch round cakes.
 

I printed off a dino template from the Betty Crocker website, and got to work carving. 

You'll notice the cakes are still in the pans. Please note that this is a bad idea. You should get your cakes out of the pans before cutting.  (My delicious cakes wouldn't come out, so I had to hack them out, piece by piece as I went.)

Prying my cakes out of the pan required a knife, a spatula and a lot of cursing.  (My cake was, in fact so sticky, the templates stuck to it.  Awesome.)

Ahh, lovely. Just like they demonstrated on the video. Simply place the dino pieces together and glue them down with a bit of icing.  The template was supposed to yield three dinosaur body parts- my cake crumbled into about ten.  Doesn't it look great pieced together?

Here's a closeup of the Jurrassic carnage.

One of the materials I forgot to mention gathering was green food coloring. I used about 15 drops to get a really nice green (totally washed out in the picture, but it truly was nice and green in person.) Here is the crumb coating applied. It definately helped, since most of my cake was crumbs...

After an hour in the freezer, I applied another layer of frosting (with the back of a bread knife- BAD idea...) and then decorated liberally with fun candy.  I made some cute eyes with white candy melts and some black sprinkle dots.  Then I made some teeth with the candy melts. It's really hard to see in this picture.

It's really hard to see in this picture, too, but here we are-  a nice close up of Mr. Disaster the Dinosaur.  :)  The ear spikes were Kenna's idea, and by that point, I was in no place to argue.

He really did end up quite cute. Anyone with any baking or decorating skill can do this with ease. Anyone else, good luck.

Dinosaur Party!

 Our sweet foster child, Little Man, is ONE!! We are so blessed to be able to spend his special day with him! I made this easy pennant banner to hang in the dining room.

 $2.00- scrapbook paper, $.99 spool of ribbon, and boom! So cute, so personalized, and so easy! (There was a third banner with his name, not pictured for privacy)

 Candy melts and a $2 mold made some adorable dinosaur candy favors.  (these were actually our "practice" dinos... I needed to experiment with painting the details on the mold with candy. The final dinos were more masculine- white and brown!)

 Some tips- jostle your mold to get the air bubbles out. 
* I painted my details with a tiny 1ml syringe- it worked great! I was able to squirt the candy out gently and exactly where I needed it.
* the mold cavities take a lot more candy than you think!
* If you are making more than 20 pieces of candy, buy two molds.  This one only made 4 dinos at a time... then you have to wait for the dino candy to harden and start again, by which time the melties have hardened and need to be remelted.  It was a lot of work!

 Since I was playing with melties, I gave Kenna some, too! I gave her a big squeeze bottle and she had fun splurting out the candy all over a piece of wax paper.

When it hardened, she enjoyed eating a few pieces of her masterpiece!  (The rest of the blobs are in a tupperware, to be meted out as desert over the next few days.)
More Dinosaur Party fun coming soon!

Birthday Celebration for Quinn

Kenna is two, and everyone has been asking us if Kenna is ready for the baby. "I don't know" is my most honest response. She's two. Does she want a newborn in the house? Not likely. Is she gonna fake it? ha.

Some of the ways we tried to prepare kenna for the new baby was to explain things, like:
*she was going to be a big sister
*baby Quinn was going to come out of mommy's tummy
*Babies cry a lot
...and on and on.

She heard all that, but what did really Kenna care about? Presents. And cake. It is a BIRTHDAY, afterall. "Are you excited about the baby, Kenna?" "YES, we'll get cake. And pwesents." (She announced that the "pwesents" were to be shoes, but that's another subject...)

SOooo, Quinn was born on Father's Day, and Kenna had "pwesents" to open from Quinn, and "pwesents" to give to Quinn. She was pleased about that, but was FURIOUS that a cake hadn't magically appeared alongside the squalling newborn at 6pm. "Quinn needs cake. With her name. I eat it. Can we eat it now??" ( I know, I know. Why didn't I buy a cake and have it lurking in the fridge? Well, I did... but my baby was 8 days late. That cake had long-since disappeared into a preggo lady's belly by time she was actually born.)

The next morning found Bill at Walmart, instructed to fetch a cake that had Quinn's name on it, or else. After 30 minutes of searching for anyone, ANYONE who was "qualified" to write on a sheet cake with icing, Bill concluded that this person did not exist- so, in an act of desperation,he grabbed a sheet cake and a tube of pink icing and headed back home. My only indication that something had gone wrong at Wally World was the near-panicky shout I heard from the kitchen, "How many N's does Quinnlyn have??"

This, my friends, is my handy husband's masterpiece, done out of love for a cranky toddler and her new baby sister. Why yes, it does say,

"Happy Birthday 0th Quinnlyn."

Let me fill you in on this sweet conversation:

Mommy (in her most patient voice): "Look Kenna, it's Quinn's cake. Can you see her name? Isn't that special! Hooray for cake, just like you asked for. Let's help Quinn blow out her candle."

Kenna (in her whiniest voice):"I wanted purple icing. Make Quinn stop crying. I don't want to blow out the candles.I don't like this cake."

Sigh.

Happy 0th birthday, sweet Quinn. Welcome to the world. You were worth the wait.

Kenna's Fairy Party- 2 years old

I love planning parties!! I love doing as many of the details as I can on my own. I love the craftiness, the personalization and the originality that comes with DIYing. For Kenna's second birthday, I realized that she could care less about the theme- so I picked fairies.With a winter birthday, we had to do an indoor party, and at 4 months pregnant, I was NOT hosting at my hosue. TheHickory Museum of Art offers party packages, and one of them is fairy themed. Sold.

At first my thought was to do a woodland themed party- garden fairies, and earthy things like mushrooms, river rocks, and moss would be great decor.

But when I went shopping for the first time, I somehow got swept away by all things neon green and pink. hmmm. My earthy party turned into a hot pink fairy party in one day!! That was fine, though. I embraced it and got to work making some simple crafts.

Cupcakes from Walmart. I made the flowers out of candy melts using this tutorial. **LINK, where are you??** Super-easy. (No, I do not bake. I do, however, covet the delicious icing that Walmart uses on their cakes, and buy from the bakery as often as my diet will allow.)

The weekend of the party was a little insane. We had just taken in a 10 week old foster child, my 18 year old sister had moved in 7 days earlier, and my parents had just driven up from Florida the day before. Oh, and I was pregnant. Needless to say, I was a little frantic getting set up- the art museum only allows 30 minutes for party set-up- so someone else had the camera. This makes me sad since everything was so pretty, and the pictures came out soo badly. :( No offense, anonymous relative.)

The Birthday Girl! (sporting her fairy costume, and matching light-up fairy high heels. Oh my!)She's wearing one of the art projects included at the art party- they made Fairy Crowns, Fairy wings, and fairy wands. It was fun, and each craft waseasily modified for all ages, which was good since we had a couple 6 and 7 year olds mixed in with our 2 year olds.

DIY treat bags- I simply used brown paper bags and printed off each child's name (in a woodland fairy font). Then I used my mega-scrapbooking skills to embellish the nameplates. The clips on the bags are wooden clothespins with fairy decals I made- another super-easy craft. (The fairy clipart was repeated on the invitaitons and some of the other decorations.)
Seriously wish we had gotten better pictures- this looked amazing in person. Weeks before the party, I visited the space, and realized that the "party" was staged in a cavernous room that doubled as storage. It was icky taupe colored and the ceilings were 25 feet high. Can I say ugly without hurting anyone's feelings?? It didn't feel particularly "artsy", and I was freaking out that a little table for 10 kids was going to get swallowed up in that space.

My solution was this: I stole some giant sticks (some might call them limbs...) from a neighbor's yard and hot-glued some pink and green silk flowers to them. Then I hung some of those round fairy disks I made (along with some that simply had a "2" or a "K" on them). I stuck the sticks in large glass vases with river rocks. It looked really natural and pretty. They were really tall, so it added height to the tables and drew the eyes upward a little. I put two on the main table and one on the gift table.

I also spruced up the table by making some pretty Napkins, fan-folded and secured with silk flowers glued to ribbon. The pink flufy pompom was so easy to make with tissue paper and floral wire!
We also tied balloons to each chair, and a cluster for the birthday girl. (can you see the hideous furniture in the corners? Not very party-like...)
Did I mention that this space was HUGE? We took advantage of the ceiling height and strung a bunch of huge, homemade pompom chains (so easy to make!!) around the entire room. It was so festive and brought color to the otherwise dreary art room walls. I think I (and by "I" , I mean my reluctant sister) made about 25 of these. I am pretty sure the art lady wanted me to leave them at the end of the party, since they made the room feel so much cozier and kid-like!

Other details about the party- I'll try to find pictures:

treat bags:

*fairy playdough

*fairy bracelets

*fairy erasers

*fairy tattoos

*fairy dust (pixie sticks)

Food at the party:

cupcakes

rice crispy star wands with pink sparkles

more details to come... my brain is fried!