Baby shower fun!

I love babies.  I especially love baby showers.  Even more so now that I can do fun things for them!  A lovely friend of mine just had her baby shower a few weeks ago, and I was so glad she invited me to join in on that fun.  I adore shopping for little baby things (especially when I know what people want), and I've discovered I love making little baby things even more.

One of the fun things I got to make was a beautiful football themed baby hat.  She had a similar one on her registry, and I thought I'd try my hand at it.  Worse that happened was no one ever knew about my failed attempt and that was that.  It turned out so much better than anticipated though.  I'm completely in love with the hat I made.  So much so, I decided to make another smaller one for her too (the first one ended up being much bigger than I anticipated), so the little man will have a football hat for a few months at least.

I may have forgotten to take pics of my own, so here's the one she took.  You should have seen the cute card I made her too!

Isn't it adorably cute?!  The pattern was taken from this site: Football Hat  Obviously, I didn't make the little ear portion, but otherwise, I just followed their pattern.

Now, I cannot wait to meet this new little man in a few weeks, as I think mommy-to-be would agree on!

A co-worker of mine just had their first little man also this week (earlier than anticipated), and I just finished the cute bear hat I wanted to make for him.  I'm pretty happy with this one also, seeing it's the first time I had to make separate parts and sew them together.

A fuzy beat hat.  Cute, huh?

Had to find someone to model it for me ;)  She wasn't happy about it...

 The ears are a bit different in the middle, I need to work on that, but otherwise, I think the fuzz makes it fun and different.  What do you think?

Cheers!

Chalkboard Paint, I think I love you

I have recently discovered the awesomeness that is chalk board paint.  It's so much fun to use!!  And, to think you can draw on it, erase and start over; what's not to love!?

I was recently doing a secret gift exchange with an Ottawa group, and the lovely, awesome gal I got is a teacher.  Itried to find some fun gifts and ideas for her, and came upon this idea:

Taken from http://www.tipjunkie.com/18-creative-things-to-do-for-back-to-school/

Now, my original idea was to make a Flower Pen to put in it, but for some reason, the floral tape I found just didn't stick.  At all!  So, I just painted the pot for her, in a similar fashion to this one, and put some fun pens in it to use (she's moving soon, so figured a plant may not be the best idea for now).

Here's the version I made!

The Moi version!  Not as fancy, but pretty good.

I used some Chalk Pens to write and draw on the bottom part, and the back of this is all free to draw with real chalk.  Obviously, not as great as the original, but I think it turned out great!  I used the one from Martha Stewart, from Michael's, but for those who've seen the 'make your own' post on Pinterest, it apparently works great (as per same friend, who made it and used it).  Definitely a cheaper alternative, as the MS one is not cheap, and you can make whatever color you want, which can be hard to find sometimes.

I'm currently working on another pot, painted mainly with chalk paint.  Hopefully I can post the other one soon, along with my current project (currently drying on my desk).  There are also 2 other projects involving this paint that are on the go.  Hence the not posting much lately.

Cheers!

Santa Cookies

When you're growing up, certain things are lots of fun.  Christmas being one of them.  There are certain aspects, though, you really don't think you'll give a darn about until you're older.  Santa cookies being one of them.  I think, growing up, Santa got ChipsAhoy's in our house.  Being a new mommy, in a world where everyone can get great ideas online, ChipsAhoy's weren't going to cut it for my little man's first Christmas.  No Siree Bob!

I tried to decide what would make a good cookie for the Big Fellah.  There's lots of options really, and no one seems to agree on his favorite kind of cookies (you'd think he could just Tweet the answer and make us mom's lives easier), so I remembered a great gift idea I had saved up and how cute those looked.  Plus, they have oatmeal, so they're kinda healthy, right?  How can Santa not love Yummy and kinda healthy.

So, off the the Interwebz I went, and found my recipe.  It's a slightly modified version of these great Bakerella cookies in a jar.  Only difference is the M&M color, really.  Oh, and the fact that for some reason, I couldn't fit any nuts in my jars.  They seemed big enough!  So, I made 2 jars of them.  One I gave to a lovely friend of mine as part of a Secret Gift Exchange we were doing, and the other I ended up keeping for myself.

The mix, and my pretty new mixing bowl for the holidays.

The only thing they don't mention on either blog, and I wonder if I did it wrong, is the fact that the darn Brown Sugar got so hard, it took more effort than anticipated to get it out.  It hadn't dried out, but packing it in really tight made it nearly impossible to get out with breaking the whole jar.  After that was fixed (thank you hubby), we had absolutely no issues, and soon enough, we were ready to cook them up!

Love my Stoneware!!  Makes baking cookies SO easy and foolproof.

Little side note here.  I used my new Pampered Chef bar pan and it gave me GREAT results!!  All my cookie sheets are done for, to the point that I can barely use them even with my fake silpat, or even Parchment paper.  I'd never baked on it before, just made veggies, fries and random pieces of meats and appies, but it worked great with the cookies.  Might need to get a second one in the future :)

OK, so we cooked them all up, got a bit over 2 dozen of them, did a taste test, and yup, these are the cookies Santa will be getting at our house from here on out.  Probably won't bother doing the jar part next year, but it made for a pretty picture, at the very least.

Ready for Santa

One thing we still can't understand though, is where the next picture came from...  I did leave the camera in the living room, cause we were scrambling to get in bed (it was passed midnight, after all)...  Wonder if Wayne and Lanny were around to help Santa out.

Not sure who took this one, as we were all snug in our beds.  Curious...

Cheers, and a slightly late Merry Christmas to everyone!

(And yes, I'm aware this isn't really a 'craft', but the jar sort of is.  I did get the lids all pretty with Christmas paper and Modge Podge)