Garage Sale find

A couple of weeks ago I decided to stop at a garage on my way home from errands. I’ve been reading a lot of DIY blogs so I have a small list of things I’d like to find.

I was so excited to find a small desk that will be perfect for our guest room. Currently we have a tall dresser that is completely empty. It is part of the bed set for the bedroom, it was given to us so I’m not really attached to the set at all.

After seeing all these decorating blogs I have been thinking I’d like a desk in the room to act as a vanity and maybe find or make a large mirror.

Here is the desk I found:

I really want to try out Annie Sloan Chalk Paint on this. I know I don’t have to sand a piece when using ASCP but it’s pretty beat up. I got the top sanded to smooth out all the ridges. The rest may actually look ok with a good washing. I am going to change the top drawer hardware, but see what I can find for the bottom drawers.

My next step is figuring out what color I want to paint it. I love white furniture, but am not sure if I want to branch out at all. I’m going to paint the walls of the guest room a brown color that is in the rest of the basement, so I want it to look good with that.

We have some other parts of our house that are a priority in fixing and decorating, so hopefully I can get this finished without having it sit in our garage forever.

Any suggestions or options for this piece?

Crafty Baby Shower

I threw a baby shower for a friend at church. I had some fun being crafty and putting together some fun theme things.

The baby’s room is going to be decorated with Red and Blue (they’re having a boy) and the family is a huge fan of Superman, so I worked those into the party decorations.

Here’s what the whole table ended up looking like.

The string of dots is one of the first things I decided to do. I punched out circles with 4 different size punches from Stampin’ Up! and then I sewed them together to make the garland. It took a while to punch out the circles, but sewing them was actually pretty quick.

I knew that I wanted to do striped paper straws and I found them at Garnish (great stuff on that website!). I also picked up a bunch of mason jars, too bad I’m not near all my family that cans food so I didn’t have to buy them. Now at least I have some for the next party.

I was so excited to find this tutorial for making pinwheels out of my stamping supplies. These don’t spin, but I didn’t need them to. I used a set of 12×12 paper and cut them into 6×6 squares.

From the pinwheels I made this centerpiece:

I used extra dots I had to tape onto the pail I had on hand from a MOPS craft. Then, I also made a wreath which I love and it’s staying on my fireplace!

I want to paint the brick, I think I’m close to doing it this summer. I love how fun and summer-y pinwheels are and it’s fun to have some sort of seasonal decorations in my house.

My next decoration was the “Welcome Baby” banner. They don’t have a name for him yet so I just went generic with it. Since they are Superman fans, I went to the comic book store and found some back issues of Superman comic books. I found out that this store has clearance books for .25 each that are great for getting comic paper- although, I did have to look through bunch to find ones that had good pictures.

I cut out the banner shapes and then found a font I liked online to print the words. I copied those onto the colored paper. This was one time where I wish I had a Cricut so I could just make my own die cut.

I hung it up with ribbon and mini-clothespins. I think that’s my new favorite way to hang up banners. This was gift to the mom since I have no reason to have a Superman baby banner.

Finally, we got the cake from my favorite bakery in town. They run the cupcake truck and mostly sell cupcakes in their store, but they also do custom cakes. They were able to make the perfect cake!

We used the mom’s last initial for the logo- it turned out super cute!

Overall it was a lot of fun trying to figure out what to do with a red and blue theme. We all had a great time and now we are ready to meet this little kiddo!

6 month comparisons

I now have a 4 year old and a 6 month old. One thing that’s been fun to pay attention to is how similar these two are in their growth. The girls were born within an ounce of each other, Isabelle at 6 lb 14 oz and Adelynn at 6 lb 13 oz, and have stayed on the same chart for the past 6 months.

We had A’s 6 month appointment today and here is how she’s doing.

enjoying some yogurt and avocados

Adelynn weighed in at a whopping 16 pounds, 11 oz (71st percentile). She’s 26 and 1/8 inches long (also 71st percentile- it’s nice to be proportional).

For comparisons, here are Isabelle’s stats at the same age.

isabelle enjoying avocados at six months

Isabelle at her six month appointment was 16 pounds 13 oz (72nd percentile) and was 27 inches long (92nd percentile). 

 

So far Isabelle is two ounces ahead of Adelynn in her growth. This is where Isabelle dropped significantly in her weight, she’s been between the 35th and 50th percentiles since her 9 month appointment.

I’m not really worried about percentiles, I’ve just been amazed that they can be so exact in size.

Sneak Peak

Just as I was getting on a roll with blogging around here I missed the whole month of February. whoops!

I have something brewing over here in my corner of the world and am trying to get some things in order.

 

In the meantime, here is a sneak peak…

Crafting gifts for boys

One of Isabelle’s friends turned 3 this week so we headed to his party this morning. In typical 3-year-old boy fashion he loves cars and all the characters from the Cars movies. Instead of buying a toy I thought I would find some fun things to make for him. Making presents for my daughter’s friends won’t be cool forever so I might as well do it while I can.

I started out with making a pillowcase. Isabelle loves her “custom” pillowcases so I found Cars fabric and made him one.

I was excited to find the racing check fabric, it worked perfectly it. I can’t find the link to the tutorial I used, I didn’t pin it on Pinterest and now it’s not showing up.

I decided to add one more thing to the gift so I searched around Pinterest and found this.

via

It looked easy enough so I got all the materials and loved how it turned out!

Here is my version of the car caddy:

Since we live in a house with little girls he got a new Lightening McQueen out of the deal so I could make sure the cars actually fit.

Here is what it looks like with a parked car.

I was having a little photo shoot with this caddy, so here is what it looks like folded in half.

 

I like how the velcro part looks like a front window. This was also the first time I’ve made something with piping all the way around- I like the way it finishes the edges.

And finally, what it looks like all folded up and ready to go. I hadn’t added the final vecro piece when I took this picture, so it’s not strapped.

When we were at the party we tested it out with all 6 cars in the pockets and it still folded nicely!

This would be great for throwing in a purse to keep your son occupied while you are out and about, and it helps store all those little cars! So fun and a fun gift to make for a little boy.

You know you’re a blogger…

Last weekend my in-laws went to visit Tim’s grandpa. Tim’s grandparents have downsized from their large home to a two-bedroom apartment in a retirement home. So Tim’s parents picked up some new furniture from Ikea to help his grandpa finally organize a pile of office equipment in his bedroom.

When my mother-in-law came back, I asked her about the new set-up since I was curious how the Ikea items worked. Then I asked if she took a picture. She paused for a minute and then basically said “why would I take a picture?”

At that moment I realized being a blogger (even a sporadic one) means you take pictures of a bedroom corner. Because someone surely would want to see a before and after…

Pirate Princess Party part 2

Back in November I posted about Isabelle’s birthday party and showed you the invitations I made. Thanks to Pinterest I was able to come up with fun decorations to make too.

We started out with a sign to welcome everyone. The balloons lasted all of 10 minutes because it was so windy out.

My first inspiration was to make tissue paper poms for the ceiling. This are super easy to make and give some fun to a room.

I saw on Pinterest an idea to make PB&J sandwiches in the shapes of crowns. You have to have sandwiches at tea parties!  (My only mistake was to have the cupcakes on the table ahead of time. None of the kids wanted to eat their food first!)

I made white chocolate strawberries with pink sprinkles, had pretzels and then I didn’t take a picture of the cheese. I found a crown cookie cutter and used that to make cheese crowns.

Finally, I made cupcake wrappers in the shape of crowns thanks to Stampin’ Up!. Since I had just spent a lot of time cutting out little princesses for the invitations, I decided to go quick with a circle punch for this one. I’m actually considering making up packs of these to sell on etsy or something.

Here is the completed table ready for the tea party. I didn’t do too much here with pirate decorations. The cost was starting to add up.

For party games we played Hide and Seek, had balloons out for the kids to throw around and did a “treasure hunt”. I hadn’t found anywhere in town to buy chocolate coins in bulk, so I had my sister-in-law in California mail me a bunch from WinCo. Then I found these cute treasure boxes at Hobby Lobby to use for collecting coins. Then we had a coin hunt. I wanted make sure that we had enough coins to not have kids miss out on collecting and we probably had too much! Here is a picture of Isabelle finding her treasure.

I didn’t end up getting pictures of the fireplace. I found some cute treasure maps for the boys party bags and had a bunch extra so I taped them up on the fireplace with some balloons. If it hadn’t been so windy, we probably would have played some more pirate games outside.

Finally, my cousin runs a custom cookie shop out of her home and made these amazing crown cookies for everyone’s gift bags. They were so fun to have!

I think that’s everything! It was a fun party, it’s always fun to create things for parties, even if it gets pretty chaotic making it all.