Yea! Spring is Here! (Officially)

I love Spring!  Well, I love all the seasons, but I really love spring.  It means the weather is warming up, flowers and trees are blooming, the sun is shining more and it rains.  Living in the desert, I love rainy days.  They don't happen very often here and when they do they don't usually last very long.  Hmmm, maybe that's I like them.  A few days ago I took my girls up to the L.D.S. Temple to take some spring pictures.  I'm not a professional photographer or anything, I just like to take pictures of my kids.  They are so fun to take pictures of because they like to think of fun poses and pictures.

They love the fountain and it makes a great back drop

               

                      

I love to go up to the temple and feel the peace and see the beautiful flowers and trees in bloom.  Now I have spring pictures of my girls to put up and bring spring into our home.  Now to get spring pictures of their brothers taken.
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I have a fun project to share with you that I've done recently and then I want to share some things that I've pinned that I'm going to do.  Notice I said, "...going to do, and not want to do".  There's a difference, you know.  When I say I'm going to do something I will do it, but if I say I want to do something, then it most likely does not happen.  Anyone feel the same way?

O.k. so for today, I found these adorable flowers on pinterest a long time ago and finally decided I was going to try them.  They were very easy to do and you can use them for anything.  I am going put them on some hair clips for my girls.  They would also be cute on little pins for lapels, they would be super cute as accessories for clothes, or jewelry.  What else can you think of?  So many possibilities!

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Step 1:  Fold your Rick Rack in half, and start to wind the rick rack around
itself.  (Does that make sense?)  Hope so!
Step 2:  When you have wound it all up,  then roll it
up starting with the folded edge, like the green flower below and put two straight pins through to hold in
place, then hand stitch it all together, going through all layers, criss-crossing. Tie off.
Step3:  Remove pins and turn or fold out one side of the outer layer, then the next layer and then maybe the
next one too.  So it looks like a flower, like the blue flower below.  

 I hope that wasn't too confusing, and I hope you try it.  It is really simple once you get started.  If you have any questions, concerns or comments you can email me or just leave a comment.

Have a happy day!

Oh yeah!  Here are some projects I plan to do for spring......

I've had my heart set on this for a long time for our entry way.
LOVE it!  Sorry I couldn't find the source of this one.  When I clicked
on the link from pinterest it went to some other site.

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LOVE this idea!  Especially since I have a couple of old shelves  that need some love.

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Love this for a subway art sign, for my home.

This would just be a funny prank to pull on my kids.
Of course I'd have to make some real brownies to curb their
disappointment. :)

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I love this center piece for Easter.  Maybe because I love Peeps and
jelly beans.....o.k. and I love Gerber Daisies.  

What are some projects you have in mind to do this spring?  I'd love to hear about them!  

Have a great rest of your day and Thanks for stopping by!!!!!!

Elsa's 10th Birthday

Like many of us, we are on a tight budget, so in order to fulfill her request to have a "friends party", I had to really be creative.  So, with the help of Pinterest, I went to work.
Let me tell ya, it was quite a lot of fun to plan a party on a budget.  I mean, I got to be creative and it was so fulfilling and a little refreshing to look at all my work when it was all finished and think "I made that!".  So here is what I did....

Elsa wanted a doll craft party.    For the invitations I made little purses and for the "goody bags" I made 3d purses to take their crafts home in.  Here is where I found the tutorial....  I am so mad at myself for not taking any pictures of those.  They turned out so cute and I think you could even make them out of fabric or leather for real doll purses/bags.  Maybe I will work on that.
Of course she wanted a lot of crafts, but the party was only an hour and a half and crafting can get rather expensive.  So, I told her we would do two crafts.  She was a little bummed but she picked two of her favorites, which were necklaces for the girls and their dolls and little pipe-cleaner dogs.  (For Barbie sized dolls).  She found this you tube channel a couple months ago and LOVES to watch it and get ideas, and I love it because she no longer looks in the American girl catalog and circles everything.  Instead she tries to make whatever she wants.
Anyway back to the party.  It was so fun.  I think they enjoyed themselves.
The only thing I regret is that I didn't get many photos.  My sister in law was there and she snapped most of these.  So thankful for family and friends who are willing to help.

 Making little pipe cleaner dogs

 I think they liked making these dogs.  

They did pretty good with them, but I needed to help them at times. 

Here they were making necklaces for their dolls and/or themselves.  We took ribbon and threaded beads on them and then tied bows on them next to the beads.  Here is this tutorial.  In the tutorial it said to wrap a piece of scotch tape around the end of the ribbon to make it easier to thread the beads, but I found that just cutting the ribbon at an angle then heat sealing that end worked better for us.

 Here is the food table.  Because every good crafter needs some snacks right?  You can see the little purses I made for them to take their crafts home in, they also had some chocolates in them and they got to pick out some colored glitter glue also.
 The cake stand in the middle is just a wire shelf that I normally keep my laminator on, but for the party I wrapped some party themed ribbon around it, put some balloons on it and voila!  A cute little cake stand.  I wish I would've thought to get a picture of the table with the cake on it.  Oh well, you can kind of see what it all looks like with the cake in the next picture.

 Isn't she the cutest 10 year old!

(Faded shirt and all)

 I got the idea to decorate these number candles here.  And I've always liked those little banners for cakes.

Here's Kit Kittredge enjoying Elsa's birthday breakfast of "doll sized pancakes" and wearing the necklace we made her while practicing our crafts before the party.  

You can always go to my pinterest boards and see what I found for birthday parties.  It's always fun to see what other people found and what they have come up with.

Have a beautiful day!  Don't forget I love comments!

Happy New Year!

Well, can you believe it's 2013?  What a great holiday season we had over here at our home.  If you would like to see our Christmas happenings you can visit our family blog here.  For New Years Eve we spent it at home with each other eating fondue, playing our new Wii games and watching the count down to the new year, then celebrating!  What did you do for New Years?

Well, I promised I would show what I made for my girls for Christmas.....after Christmas so there wouldn't be any chance of them sneaking a peak.  Well, the time has come....
They have been asking for doll furniture and doll clothes for a long time and every time the American Girl Doll catalog comes they look through it with a pen and circle everything....seriously EVERYTHING!
Well, I decided that it would be so fun to make them some doll clothes and I found some cute patterns found here.  So I set to work.  It WAS fun to work on this gift.  Also, my husband and I make a great pair when it comes to wood working, I think.  He makes the items and I sand and paint them.  That's how it works out and I like it that way.
Well, we decided that doll clothes wouldn't be enough, so we made them these awesome Farmhouse beds found here.  We also were going to make them armoire's for their clothes, but ran out of time, but we're going to make them for them later though.    Anyway so here they are....

Swim suits....so easy and fast!  

Jean jacket...my favorite item to make, though it took a little more time...along with the jean vest below

The girls loved them!

Here is Jenifer, Abby's doll, taking a nap in her new bed.
That is the first quilt that I made all myself.  One of my goals
this year is to quilt more.  I have been pinning a lot of quilting
projects/ideas on my pinterest board. 

I think she likes her dolls new clothes.

This poor dolls hair...Elsa loves her though.

Abby's dolls both fit on the bed...Hooray!
Abby got the doll on the right for Christmas. I didn't make the outfit she's wearing,
it came with her.  This is a My Salon Doll, her name is Brynn. She has real human hair.  Abby and I have had fun
curling it and doing fun hairstyles.

I also made them matching outfits...well skirts, to match their dolls

 What fun things did you do for your kids this Christmas?

'Tis the Season....

'Tis the season for working on Christmas gifts, and I've been busy with those.  I think I'll show you what I've done after the holidays just to be sure that little eyes (though they're not so little anymore) don't sneak a peak.  However, those eyes are little enough to still believe in the "big guy", but they are "sniff, sniff" growing up.
First though, I'd like to share some of our Christmas happenings so far.  This past Saturday was such a fun day to spend with my family.  On Saturday morning we went to our church's Christmas party.  It was a really fun breakfast and a nice program about the Savior's birth.  Then we came home cleaned the house, hung out for awhile then we went to the Ethel M. Chocolate factory where they had a light display, then we took a self-guided tour of the factory and got a free chocolate at the end.  (Who doesn't like chocolate...yum!)  Then, we went over to the Opportunity Village here in Vegas to see the production of the Nativity put on by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  It was so good!  The spirit was so strong even my seven year noticed a crack in my throat when I would talk to her.  She would look at me and say, "Mom, you're crying."  It was so so good.

 My girls loved petting the animals at the Nativity.

The baby that played Baby Jesus was so good, he didn't cry once.  My older boys saw this earlier in the

week with their church youth group and they said the baby cried the whole time. 

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Now,  I will show you other Christmas things I've been up to...

I love to make hair clips for my girls to wear....these are always fun to make, especially because my girls love them.  

That's all for today, check back soon for more Christmas crafts that I'm working on!

It's Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  Hope you're having a great day with family and friends!  Oh yeah and have fun and be safe on "Black Friday", whether you're shopping or just doing something else fun with family/friends!

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See ya next week!  I'll show what I am doing for some Christmas gifts!

Our Thanksgiving Door!

Hello everyone!  Today I'm going show you a fun and inexpensive way to spruce up your front door for Thanksgiving.  The past few years I've tried to think of ways to decorate my home for Thanksgiving.  I had Halloween and Christmas decorations, but not many Thanksgiving ones.  Except for a cute little turkey that I made when I was a teenager.  So I have been trying to decorate more for Thanksgiving.  Lately it has been easier for me to do since I joined Pinterest AND got my Silhouette because I cut cute images out of vinyl, stick 'em to what I want, such as doors, walls, windows, mirrors, etc.  Then after the holidays they're easy to take down.  This year was no exception.  So this is what I did to my front door.  I did a really cute Halloween one too, but I never took a picture of it.  Don't ask me why...it was weird because I usually take lots of pictures of everything.  I got the turkey image from the Silhouette online store and the font is one of my favorites called CK Woodbine Swashbuckler.  I used the same turkey on the plate that I made last year. You can go here to see what it looks like.  I love creating!  What do you love to create?

This will be the last year I put these decorations up.  They're pretty beat up.
My kids have enjoyed them!

 What kind of Thanksgiving decorations have you done?