Promotion, Part Two: The Reception!

I know this post is a bit delayed, but I definitely want to talk about this!  Along with the great promotion ceremony I had, I also planned (with lots of help) a great party afterwards!

Thanks to my friend, Gabi, an amazing chef and party planner herself, I decided to make quiches for the event.  It was my first try, and after a week-before dry run that had rave reviews, I bit the bullet and made 7 different quiches for the big day, using this amazing recipe.  Easy, delicious, do it.

The spread

 I went with a fall theme since my promotion was at the end of September and did brown tablecloths, gold plates, lovely metal touches here and there, and orange serving platters.

My friend Kathleen volunteered to help and made this AMAZING cake.  Seriously, what a feat, and delicious.  Other pals chipped in with baked goods, and I even got to use my little major's leaf cookie cutter to make some imprints in some sugar cookies!

Seriously, wow.  A cake shaped like an oak leave on another cake!  Mind blown.

As you might have noticed, I used Scrabble tiles to label all the food

But the best part was seeing people from my past and present in a great celebration!!

Easy Peasy Art

I was so excited to do this art project and had limited time during Cassidy's nap that I didn't take pictures of the progress, but you guys are smart, and it wasn't hard, so use your imaginations!

Step One: Buy a canvas and spray paint it lightly silver

Step Two: Draw a hot air balloon on a piece of paper and cut it out

Step Three: Draw stripes on the hot air balloon and cut out the stripes

Step Four: Get some cute scrapbook paper (mine was left over from this project)

Step Five: Trace the stripes on various pieces of scrapbook paper and cut out

Step Six: Glue onto the canvas with spray adhesive

And it's done!

Hangin' in the nursery

Treasure Hunting Turns Heartache

We recently took a trip to Community Forklift in Maryland, which is this sweet warehouse filled to the brim with old doors, windows, tiles, you name it!  We were in search of an old door that we can re-finish to make a growth chart for our kids.  When my mom was growing up (and when I was, too) we measure ourselves on our grandmother's doorframe, but we didn't pull the doorframe out of the house when my grandparents died and we sold the house.  Since we Beaches are nomads, we wanted to create something we can take with us.

The outside of the Community Forklift

Cool stuff on the outside, from granite to bathtubs

I almost bought this, even though I have nowhere to put it

How to find the perfect door out of 1500?

Jon on the hunt

Hmmm..swap out the hardware?

Avery helps dad put the door on the car

The one we chose!

We love the old 5-panel door that we chose, which needs to be slightly sanded and refinished, but hopefully will keep that vintage vibe.  After looking through all the hardware, we decided to keep what it came with and just refinish that as well.  The goal is to make a great vintage-y growth chart to measure our kids every six months and one that we can take all over the country as we bounce about.

And how did this turn into heartache?  Here's our take on the door just a few hours later when we actually tested it for lead paint:

 Yup, turns out this sucker was covered in lead paint/dust.  It looked like it had just been a cool old wooden door that was stained, but even after a good cleaning, our lead test home kit was still showing there was lead there, and we just can't have a giant piece of lead paint in our house.  Especially one that we smash the kids up against every 6 months or so.  Not cool.  So, we have to change tactics and go with something else.  So glad we wasted a whole day and $20 on that, BUT, it was worth it to see the cool stuff the Community Forklift has!

Lesson:  Always bring a lead test kit to the warehouse before you buy.

Project - Frames

This is just a small taste to the bathroom remodel, but here is a cute and easy art project I did.

My bathroom has a big blank green wall, and with a shower curtain providing the main art of the room in the form of a leaf and nature-like patter, I wanted some kind of branch art to put on the wall.  Why buy something when you can make it yourself?  My mom and I headed to Michael's and purchase a big bunch of grapevine-like craft sticks. My original idea was to bunch sticks together and hang these bunches up, but this didn't work.  Then, I remembered I had picked up some $1 frames at the Dollar Store for use in a future art project.  So, I took these and painted them brown.

I then used our garden cutters and trimmed pieces of the sticks off and haphazardly attached them to the frame with a glue gun.

The finished frame looks like this.

I wanted to go to The Paper Store and get a neat postcard or card or something to put in the middle of the frame, but I couldn't find ANYTHING that I liked, so I just decided to hang them up solo.  I love how they break up the green wall and carry on the motif.

Weekly Project - Stationery

I like to do stuff around the house, crafty stuff, etc.  So, in an effort to stay busy (like a newborn and choreography/costume duties for Clue: The Musical aren't enough!) I'm trying to do at least one fun project a week, and hopefully write about them.

This week, I found a DIY stationary idea on ShelterPop via Fresh Home that looked really fun and easy.  I love sending and receiving mail, and I've been meaning to send out some cards to some folks, so why not make them myself?

I took some scrapbooking paper as the base of the card and measured it off to make sure it would fit in one of the many random envelopes that I had lying around.

Then, I made a paper template of what I wanted the front of the card to say, in this case "congratulations"

I taped the template down to a bulletin board and slid the card under it so it was snug enough to hold steady.  You have to make sure you have the template and the card turned correctly so you are punching through the card so the front of the card has the raised bumps.

Then, I took a thumbtack and punched away along the lines of my template, causing the card to have little bumps on the front.

There you have it!  A cute, fun card that's truly homemade!

The best thing I like about it is that it's still in your own handwriting, just elevated to a new level! Who knows - maybe this one was for YOU!

House Design - part 3

Well it's more NURSERY design than keeping with our Beachy house theme, but I'm excited to finally show off what I've been working on!  Avery's room has a jungle theme, and I wanted to create something that was personal from me to him.  Scouring the internet for ideas for his room, I found these posters on allposters.com by Yuko Lau.  They are super cute.  I love the peekaboo animals, but the price was kinda much.  Here is the actual giraffe poster, and you can find the other animals here: Other Animal Posters

The posters are gorgeous, but a fairly simple concept, and I used to be great in high school art, so I thought I would give painting the same picture myself a whirl and see how they turned out.  For $20 I got 5 canvasses, picked out 5 of the animals, and used some of Jon's old acrylic paint from when he was doing some art projects in Germany and got to work.

It started with a pencil sketch:

And then I added in all the color, one color at a time:

Until all the colors were filled in:

Next, each painting got some outlining to make everything pop, and voila, I was done!

 
They aren't perfect, but they are cute and created by me.  I've got the giraffe and the tiger done (OOPS I just noticed I forgot to put the whiskers on the tiger!!), but have to finish outlining the rest.  And the best thing is that they were very inexpensive, gave me something fun to do, and they are super portable so Avery can use them until he decides he's too grownup for a jungle animal room!

Crafty Ali

When I get a good idea in my head, I can't forget about it, even if it's completely silly and difficult. That's how I ended up with the idea for making white whale cookies for my Law and Literature class to munch on while listening to my partner and I drone on about Herman Melville. Even though the story we were discussing wasn't Moby Dick, who wouldn't like to eat a white whale cookie?

But, I couldn't find a whale cookie cutter, so I'm thinking "how hard can making one be?" Turns out, it's very hard and time consuming, but here's how it went down. First, I went to Michael's to look for a cookie cutter, and I bought a fish one, but that's all they had. Whale are not fish, they're mammals (thank you, Star Trek 4) so I wasn't really that satisfied. Then, I stumbled upon this woman's blog where she discussed how SHE made a camel cookie cutter. Because whales are kinda blobby compared to camels, I thought that it would be a piece of cake. Or a piece of cookie to imitate.

Here's her site: http://blog.jugglingfrogs.com/2007/10/make-your-own-cookie-cutter-from-clip.html

Here's the picture I started with:


So, it took about an hour, but here's how my cookie cutter came out:



And here's the cookie! A white whale with little red beady eyes. RAHR, MOBY DICK!