Monkey Diaper Cake

My husband requested a diaper cake for a shower at work for one of his co-workers. I've done so many of these but realized that I'd never posted about them. I found the instructions several years ago here. After the first few I stopped using the exact numbers in the instructions and started eyeballing the amount of diapers needed to get the size I needed.

Don't you love the monkey ribbon! Total score from Michael's!

These cakes are great for showers because they can serve double duty as a centerpiece and as a gift. And the diapers are easily taken apart vs. unrolling them in the rolled diaper version.  I find that the key to making it look good are finding toys that work well as toppers. I'll try and go through my pictures and put together a post of all the ones I've made.

Just a quick post! Have a great day!

Aaaaand... I'm Back (I think)

Well... I've decided to pick up this blogging thing again. I went to the CHA Super Show last weekend and after meeting fellow bloggers, PTI forum members and of course PTI superstars and Nichole (!) (see picture below), I felt the need to contribute to the blogging world again. :) It also helped being crafty, just to be crafty. I went with 2 of my co-workers/scrappy/crafty friends and we had a blast slowly meandering from booth to booth doing some make-&-takes and checking things out.

From L-R: Debbie Olson, Heather Nichols, Nichole Heady, me, Dawn McVey, Jennifer Ellefson, Michelle Wooderson
Why do I look so nervous and short? Cuz I am.

So you may be asking, "where the heck have you been?" And I would answer, "right here, reading and absorbing everything, just not posting!" Then naturally you would ask, "Why not?" And instead of a smarty-pants answer, I would launch into a long summary of where I've been. But since you are not physically in front of me to hear that long summary, I will give you the bulleted list version. And hopefully I'll start elaborating as I get back to blogging.

August of 2008: Pregnant & VERY nauseous
January 2009: Discovered heart anomaly on ultrasound
April 21, 2009: Baby Tyler is born
April 24, 2009: Tyler's first surgery (crazy, I know)
July 2009: Back to work
January 2010: Tyler's second surgery
February 2010: Tyler's first birthday preparation underway
April 2010: Tyler's first birthday party

Now, of course, you're probably thinking, "oh no! She's gonna post an abnoxious amout of gratuitously cute baby pictures." And because you thought it - I will! Just kidding... I'll just put up a small smattering here & there for fun. There's plenty of time for that, plus- that's what Facebook is for.

A somewhat recent picture from this summer. He looks sheepish to convey my feelings for the lack of posting

On the crafty side of things, I did craft up until the baby was born, we will call that period: A.T. (ante tyler) - my Latin is very limited and mostly only to medical terminology. But just did not have the energy to post. Then with the disconcerting news we received in January, I started blogging about that experience separately. Ask if ya wanna read about it. I'm sure pieces of it will start to flow into this blog. Then all you mommies know, it is hard to carve out time to sit and do anything. I've been able to do some stuff here & there but only in sort of an "as needed" basis - in a "oh wedding today?" whip something up kind of way.

So I am calling this time in my crafty life: P.T. (post tyler) and hopefully it will provide some reading fun for you all!

I have a lot of catching up to do so come along on the ride with me!

Who's turning 30???

Hahaha... my husband finally turned thirty in August, he's 9 months younger than me. I know, I know, "gasp! younger man?!" What can I say? heh heh heh just kidding. He hates large groups and noise (already acts older than he really is) so we just had a handful of friends over for Korean BBQ. But I wanted to make it a little special.

Sooo... I made this pennant banner to liven things up.

Here's detail of one of the pennants. The letters are also from Archiver's die cut letters, also from the "Chunky" font but I used the capital letters with the shadows. Also if you notice, I use a lot of sheer navy blue ribbon - um... I have a lot, I mean A LOT of it leftover from my wedding (from 2 years ago!!) so whenever I can I try and use it and I mean WHENEVER.

So now you may now wonder where I got the color scheme? Well I got the idea from Amy Rysavy. She had posted a gift she made for her husband using the Father Knows Best paper and set and I filed it away for later. When I was thinking of a theme for the party, this came to mind. I thought the color scheme was nice, boyish but not typically so. Therefore I take ZERO credit for the idea, I only changed the main image and the sentiment. Then I made the pennants to match.

Oh and I used SU! Soft Sky instead of Aqua Mist just cuz I had bought a bunch of it along with the ribbon. But I used it with PTI Summer Sun.

I filled nugget tins with matching Jelly Belly's. Don't they match the color scheme exactly?? I got Berry Blue, Pink Grapefruit, and Peach flavors

The flower from Flower Garden and the sentiment from SU! Simply Said are embossed with White EP.

Also to make it even more special, I ordered a cake from Cake Girls, in Chicago. If you can't tell, my husband likes golf. He has moments when he is obsessed but I have moments when I'm obsessed with crafting so we always consider ourselves even :).

His reaction was so funny cuz he kept asking "what are you supposed to do with it? Do we eat it? Do we eat it? What is that? What is that?" And I had to keep responding with, "yes, yes, we can eat it, it's a cake!" It took some convincing for him to cut the cake but don't worry, we cut that sucker and ate it! It was really good!


So even though we don't have any kids, that doesn't mean you can't have themed parties for adults, right? And without the cheesy kinds you get at a party favor store. After I had spent so much time on my friends' 1st birthday party & baby shower, I felt I had to step it up for that special person in my life - just didn't seem fair to not spend my time on him :). Overall it went well, my friends sorta made fun of me for it but I don't care! :P

Thanks for looking and be sure to send any questions my way!

Sew Pretty!

If you didn't know... I'm famous :). Hahahaha... just kidding... but check this and this out!! Ain't that SO cool?? It's cool too cuz I got like 100 hits in ONE day. I know that's chump change for some of you but for someone where 1/2 the hits are from yourself... that's a BIG deal :).

Anyways, if you check out that first link, it's to Lisa Johnson's blog and you can see that she was at the Marvy booth at CHA the whole time. She was showcasing their new Fabric Paint Pens and we got to decorate canvas bags with them using her Flower Garden set. That inspired me to do something similar.

TADA!

I used the stamp as a template to embroider a few things. I've NEVER done this before, cross sticth, yes, but embroider, no. Lisa's design TOTALLY lends itself to it though.
I first embroidered my digital camera case. I liked the case but didn't like the lettering on it so I thought I'd cover it up. I stamped the flower with white craft ink and the threads eventually covered it all up. What do you think? Not bad for my first time, no? It was kinda hard b/c the fabric was stretchy and if you pulled to hard, you squished the design. You can tell I'm not that consistent but I got the hang of it for the next project.

This was for a canvas bag for my MIL for her to take to doctor's visits. See, I improved!! :) I was going to do a lot more but my hand started hurting so I figured simple was better :P.

Thanks for looking!

CHA Day 2

Oh Man! Sorry everyone for leaving you hanging for so long! :) Here are some more pictures from CHA - that are SUPER DUPER late.

These are from the McGill Punch Booth. They had LOTS of ideas but I really liked this one of a placecard. I would probably never have a party nice enough to make these for but aren't they SUPER cute?

This was from the EK Success Booth, near all the Jolee's Boutique stickers. I really liked the layout, so I took a picture. You may be seeing a similar page by me soon! :)

This one and the next one are from the Doodlebug booth. Such cute cards!

These 2 are from the Just Rite Stamper Booth. And I swear, I think the Kraft paper is from Papertrey. Who knows, maybe the designer is a PTI designer too.

Ok, now that that's all done... on to crafting!

CHA!

Hi People! I am still sorta in a daze. I had an AWESOME opportunity to attend CHA (a.k.a., Craft & Hobby Association Convention & Trade Show). My PTI forum friend Lynn generously offered passes to anyone who was able to go. I jumped at the chance to go but had NO idea what I what to expect. I had always heard about this convention, especially since I live close to Rosemont, where's it's been held for several years.

This is a picture of Me, Lynn & Debbie at the Mrs. Grossman booth, posing with the Ace of Cakes cake.

I'm totally behind in the posting seeing that everyone else has already posted...but here it goes! And just to warn you, this is a very long post but it has lots of pictures!

My first day I got there and met up with Lynn and her friend Debbie (side note: there are a lot of crafters out there named Debbie!). They were SUPER nice to have let me tag along with them. I had so much fun hanging out with them and seeing all the things that had to be seen. Thanks Lynn & Debbie!!!!!!!!

One of our stops included the Marvy booth and guess who's there demo-ing their new fabric markers? None other than Lisa Johnson of Poppy Paperie & PTI Stamp Designer extraordinaire! I kinda geeked out but she was so nice to me - even took a picture of me in action! Check out her site. We used her stamp set, Flower Garden from PTI, to create designs and color them onto canvas bags. Incidentally, I was due to get an order from PTI that day and Flower Garden was in the box when I got home!

Here we are at the Provo Craft Booth - it was HUGE! They were doing a raffle when we happened to walk by and guess who made an appearance! The Cricut and purple thing (?)!! I had to have a picture... too bad my eyes were closed!

The one cool thing was that not only did all the companies have out all their wares, they also had tons of completed projects on display. Here is a wall of scrapbook pages (sorry, don't know where from). I was again, overwhelmed and didn't know what to take pictures of or who or even what to stop & see. Kinda just followed Lynn & Debbie around. :)

We stopped at the Ranger booth, another HUGE one and they had like a ton of well-known crafters doing demos. This is Claudine Hellmuth doing a demo on sticky backed canvas. I didn't even KNOW she was famous until I saw the sign over her head. This is what I'm talking about... how clueless I was :).

Here of course is Tim Holtz, the rockstar of the crafting world. It was so funny because when he came up to start his demo, ladies came out of nowhere and surrounded the table. If you look really closely at the blond lady behind Tim, that's Ali Edwards!!

After spending close to 8 hours on the floor, we still hadn't seen everything! But there was still dinner! "What!" you say, there's more?!? Oh yes, there's more! Kimberly Crawford, also from the PTI forum, organized a dinner. At first it was going to only be Lynn, Debbie, Kim & myself. Then we kept hearing that Nichole Heady and some others were coming. Little did we know that 4 would soon become 12! But what a 12 it was!

Here we are post dinner... there was Jennifer Buck, Lisa Johnson, Dawn McVey, Nichole Heady, Heather Nichols, Michelle Wooderson, Kimberly, me and two of Heather's friends. Lynn & Debbie missed the group pic!! I wish there was more time to sit and talk to each of these ladies. The surprising thing was not only were they NICE, they were so REAL :). That's a compliment, I swear! I felt like I knew these ladies but only through the blogging world, it was beyond AWESOME to not only meet them but HANG out with them.

Here's a picture from Dawn McVey's camera, thanks for sending it my way - I may need to frame it :P, dorky, I know! You can tell by my smile just how dorky I am :).

I have just a few more pictures to post from the Day 2 so stay tuned... and I will start posting some crafty things too, I promise.
Thanks for reading!

First Attempt at Iron on's

I really wanted to try what everyone seems to be doing - playing with iron-on transfers. I found out that you can stamp and color on the kind you would use for ink jet printers. So I decided to make a few gifts. I followed instructions that Ali Miles and Niki Estes posted on their blogs.

This first attempt was for the same birthday boy who loves monkeys. I thought I'd make him a T-shirt that matched the theme. Sorry about the picture but I thought of taking a picture only AFTER I had wrapped it. I created my own box too using a transparency sheet and following directions from Niki (again) :)

Coloring is trickier than I thought it would be because the marker can start to pull away the transfer material and leave spots - as you can see. The key is going slow and blotting the color in more than brushing the color on.

Thanks for looking!

Finally Caved...

I've finally caved and got a bunch of Copic Sketch markers. I had gotten 3 of them awhile back but I had already decided to get 3 of the 4 sets from SU! thinking that the Copics weren't worth the investment. I still think you can get a decent amount of shading and blending with water-based markers. BUT...then there is all this talk of them on the PTI forum and I saw the potential and the advantages of alcohol markers vs. water-based markers. I'm helping a friend do some of the decorating for her son's birthday party, so I thought I'd start with ones that go with the project, see how I like them and go from there.

Here's my humble collection. Notice I've re-purposed a box from PTI? I've done my part for being green!
Here's one of my coloring attempts... this is only a sample so it's not perfect, especially the stamping part, but I do like how the colors go on the paper. So we'll see. I'll probably just add as I go along, buying as I need. I did also make a color chart so I may already be past the point of debate.
I really wanted to go to the Copic Certification Class in Chicago but couldn't justify taking a day off for it. I AM glad though that Marianne from Copic started a blog, so hopefully I can glean enough information from that.
I used the Copics for my first ATC swap, so I'll be posting that soon too.


**Edited to add: In case People want to know how I made my Color Chart, here's my word document: Copic Color Chart

Thanks for reading!

Simple Alter

Being in the field I am, sometimes you get stuff for free. Usually it has company logos, drug names, etc., emblazoned all over said stuff. A few years back I got this clock that was BEGGING to be altered. It wasn't until after I got married, after I set up a craft room and after I cleaned up some stuff from my mom's house (which incidentally still has a lot of stuff still there- my bro can attest to this), that I found this again. I thought it would be perfect in our office/craft room 'cuz I tend to lose track of time. It was pretty simple - I popped the plastic cover off and used the existing paper insert to trace a circle onto patterned paper. Don't you just love the paper? It's from 'My Mind's Eye.' The hard part was lining up the hour marks. Actually the hardest part was feeding the clock hands back through the hole - I bent the second hand a little but no one can tell :).


I wanted to keep it elegant, so instead of searching for numbers to use, I decided to use brads. I used silver square brads, angled onto their points like a diamond, and green rhinestone brads to mark each quarter hour.
So not much to altering this but I am SO happy with the result - especially since it's pretty AND practical.

Thanks for looking!!