Mustaches For All

A friend of mine hosted a baby shower that was mustache-themed. HOW CUTE IS THAT? There are quite a few mustache cookie cutters out there, but I went with this one from Amazon.com due mostly to its primeness (2 day free shipping FTW). The cookies aren't too big, one batch of dough made about 55.

I set myself to decorating them whilst I watched the twitter-sensation Sharknado. (Only made it half way through before I finished the cookies. They were pretty quick and easy to ice.)

Outlined and ready to go!

Of course I doused them all with a heavy helping of disco dust. I'm a big fan of this cookie cutter. I will have to find another time to use it - maybe in Movember?

More Baby Shower Treats!

Not that these are much different from the boy baby shower cookies I posted 2 weeks ago, but here are the girl baby shower cookies/mini cupcakes I made for my friend Kim's shower. It was for her second child so it was pretty chill and also the first co-ed one I've planned. Our theme was everything mini so we had sliders, individual servings of mac n' cheese, pigs in a blanket, chicken nuggets, jello shots, and mini forks and spoons to eat everything with! The best part was baby colors = Easter colors so DOUBLE USE!

March Showers

I made these cookies for a baby shower I attended a few weeks ago. I really loved the green/blue/yellow scheme. Though some of the dots fell off the onesies. FAIL.

With all their dots!

I'm co-hosting a baby shower this weekend for a baby girl which I'm pretty pumped about! Time for Purple/Pink/Orange? Still trying to figure out the color scheme for that one. And maybe this time I wont dot the onesies. We shall see. The shower this weekend is technically co-ed "sprinkle" since it's for their second child. We're doing mini food for everything (sliders, pigs in a blanket, cupcakes, etc.) and including alcohol. (Still need to look up how to make fancy jello shots!) I'm pretty pumped. I have a full weekend of baking ahead of me!

Time to Get Creative

There are so many fun things coming up! This weekend I'm hosting our annual Lord of the Rings Marathon. You may remember the Hobbit cake I made for it last year. The Legolas die-cutout is ready and waiting at my house and I just have to finalize the menu for a full day of eats. I think I'm going to try to make the Eye of Sauron cupcakes. I also found a recipe for Lembas bread that I'm pretty excited about!

The palace has announced that Kate is due in July! That means I can start planning a royal baby shower! I'm going to do some sort of tea party. Luckily I have a while to figure out the menu for that!

The Princes Half is approaching way faster than I am prepared for. Since I don't like to dwell on how out of shape I am, I'm just going to focus on what really matters: my costume! I have a purple skirt procured from Team Sparkle. Now I just need to figure out a top and my hair! SO MUCH TO PLAN.

Snoopy!!

My Aunt Robin gave me the pattern for this easy to make baby sweater. I've made it twice - one for a boy and one for a girl. The first time I just bought normal black buttons. Then I found adorable dog bone buttons and knew I had to make it again!

This was the first sweater I made using different colors of yarn. I used Caron Simply Soft (LOVE THAT STUFF). I even took pictures of the back every 2-4 rows I knitted so was able to make this awesome gif:

If only knitting could really be done that quickly!

Fun with Fruit!

We had a baby shower for a coworker last month. I'd been waiting for a chance to make a baby carriage fruit salad that my friend told me about. However there were a few things I was not prepared for...

1.) How do I choose a good melon? I've never bought cantaloupe before so I had to call my mom while I was at Harris Teeter to ask how to pick a melon. She told me to smell them and if it smells like a melon then it's good to go. Awesome. If you know anything about the Teeter where I live, its always full of attractive bachelors - so of course I wanted to be seen standing there smelling melons. I'm pretty sure I just went with the first one I picked up.

2.) Watermelon is really... well, watery. I've cut watermelon before, but I'd never scooped it out. I was splashing watermelon juice all over my kitchen. By the time I had a carriage assembled, I was covered in it.

3.) Fruit is heavy. I cut everything up separately and brought it in big bowls to work to assemble it there. I could just see me carrying the finished product to work and dropping it in the parking garage. 

I cut out a small hole for the pacifier and used toothpicks in the grapes for the eyes. I found the easiest way is to toothpick they grapes first and then put it in the melon, otherwise the toothpick falls into the melon and there is zero chance for retrieval once all that fruit is in the basket.

I was really happy with the final product - so cute you could eat it up! 

Baby Shower Cookies!

With the last post about baby knits, I thought I'd continue the baby streak with the sugar cookies I made for Kim's baby shower. These were the first royal icing cookies I ever decorated. I copied the suggested designs off of the Wilton cookie cutter box. As you can see the teddy bear didn't get a lot of decoration. Now that I have more experience working with royal icing, I think I can get it to the consistency where it'd be much easier to decorate.

The carriage and the onesie were probably the easiest to decorate. The rocking horse and teddy bear had a lot more detail. But they all are so cute!!

Wednesday Review: The Little Box of Knits for Baby

This book (using that term lightly) by Sandy Scoville is really fun. It has some great projects for babies 6-18 months.

What I like:

·         It's a box! That's right - the title ain't lyin'. Inside are 20 "portable project cards" that have step by step instructions on how to knit sweaters, booties, blankets, hats, & Scarves.

·         The cards are colorful, with good pictures and a glossy finish. It's nice to be able to take the card out for the specific project you're working on and not worry about it getting all crumpled up.

·         There are some really cute designs! There is an adorable cardigan for a little boy and this cute pixie dress for a little girl that I definitely want to make someday.

·         There is an extra card that has a list of abbreviations, types of yarn to use, and a yarn conversion chart (for all those metric people?)

What I don't like:

·         A few of the designs are outdated (Hello 80s!) but I think if you just change the color yarn you could easily fix that.

·         There's no difficulty scale on the cards so you'll really have to read through the instructions first to make sure you'll be able to do the project. (Not that you shouldn't do that anyways)

No Monkeying Around Here

Happy Spring!! This is another item from Kim's baby shower - a jungle themed diaper cake! I used bottles for the core and used a rubber band to hold rolled newborn diapers to the bottle. It's like a bonus present inside a ton of diapers!

I went a little crazy in the ribbon section of Michael's. Back then they didn't have any jungle themed stuff so I printed out baby jungle animals and taped them to the ribbon. (Now they have EVERYTHING jungle themed).

Then I topped it with a big stuffed animal monkey! Who doesn't love monkeys?

*Top Secret* Project REVEALED!!

The top secret project can finally be revealed as I gifted it this weekend. It was a birth sampler cross stitch for my friend Kim's son.

It's a little wrinkly before I ironed and framed it.

I have a love/hate relationship with cross stitch. It takes such a long time (especially when you're a procrastinator like me - that’s why he got it for his second birthday) but it is so fun to see the progress you've made.

Frog-in-progress

Happily Hopping Frog!

My Aunt who cross-stitches all the time told me to back it on sticky board - which I bought and cut out, but it was too thick and didn't fit in the frame. Must find thinner sticky board for next time. Instead I just stretched it the best I could and taped it to the cardboard that came with the frame. Even that was almost too thick to fit.

If I start now, maybe I can have one ready by the time she has another child.

The Best Sweater I've Ever Made

The design for this sweater comes from Knitting on Top of the World. (Yes, this is the ONE thing I've made from that book) As I said in yesterday's post, I'm a big anglophile. And who doesn't love argyle?? When I heard that my friend Kim was having a boy, I knew I had to make this sweater. She was definitely going to have a preppy kid, and what's more preppy than little argyle designs on the elbows??

I had knitted with 2 colors of yarn before, but this was my first time knitting with 3. It is pretty time consuming. When you're knitting with multiple colors, the strings intertwine so after each row you have to go back and untangle them. I used Caron Simply Soft yarn and picked colors that matched what was in the book.

It took me a few months to make, but I LOVE the design. The braid on the collar is just TOO cute. The book also had fun ideas on how to use a baby sweater when it no longer fits the baby - put it on a stuffed animal, or wear it as a hat (you just tie the arms together at the top). 

Baby Shower Cakes!

This past Saturday was my friend Kim's son's 2^nd birthday. This week we'll look back at his baby shower! (I can't believe that was TWO YEARS ago!!)  I was expecting 20-30 people for the shower so I made 2 cakes. I bought the Wilton stork and the baby carriage cake pans. (LOVE THEM)

I thought it'd be a pain to decorate, but it was fun - almost like a color by number. I wasn't too creative with the colors - just copied the picture that came with the pans.

Unfortunately we had a blizzard the day of the shower so only 7 people ended up coming. Luckily I love cake so had no problem eating all the left over! 

BABIES!

This has been a full week of baking! Last night we had a surprise baby shower for one of the girls in my bible study. It was a blast and fun to see the mom-to-be so surprised! My sister posted the idea of cupcakes that look like babies on my fb wall a few weeks ago and I thought this would be a perfect time to try them out. They were so easy to make!

I dyed butter cream frosting with Wilton's Creamy Peach. After frosting the cupcakes, I stuck pacifiers on top.

Next I drew on faces with black icing.

This week Michael's has a 50% off one item coupon so I used it to buy a 3-in-1 cake caddy that has a cupcake tray. SCORE! Whenever I look at the picture it makes me think of this commercial:

My Very First Sweater

The summer of 2006 I decided it was time to learn how to knit for real. I was going to teach myself how to do all the fancy stuff and how to read patterns. If you're a non-knitter, then you you'll know how I felt when I looked at patterns:

Lace Panel A
Row 1 (RS): K1, yo, k to end - 24 sts at the end of this row.
Row 2: K1, yo, k1, p to last st, k1 - 25 sts at the end of this row.
Row 3: K1, yo, k1, *k2, yo, k2tog; rep from * across to last 3 sts, k3 - 26 sts at the end of this row.
Row 4: Rep Row 2 - 27 sts at the end of this row.
Rows 5-12: Rep Rows 1-4 - 35 sts at the end of Row 12.
Row 13: Rep Row 1 - 36 sts at the end of Row 13.

(taken from a Diagonal Eyelet Baby Blanket pattern)

Mumbo-jumbo right?

I taught myself what the abbreviations meant and practiced a few of the techniques (yarn-overs, decreasing, cables, etc.) and decided I was finally ready to make a sweater! I thought a baby sweater would be best because obviously a smaller sweater would be less work! (wrong) I found a free pattern online and it was easy enough at first. It has you knit the entire thing continuously. (Instead of in pieces and sewing together at the end which is how every other sweater I've made is done). I even had to use double ended knitting needles to knit in the round for the sleeves. I had some holes here and there where I had lost a stitch - but my aunt showed me how to sew them up so they're unnoticeable.

Caron's Simply Soft yarn is the BEST. They have wonderful colors and it is really soft. I still need to add buttons - I was thinking purple flowers or something along those lines. Someday I'll get around to adding those.  

Next Up

I made some good progress on the "top-secret" project this weekend. I can't wait to finish it so I can start on something NEW! Next in line on the "to-craft" list will most likely be this:

I found this pattern a few years back but haven't been able to make use of it as the first round of my friend's babies were all boys. Where this may have made a good present for a boy a few centuries back, I just don't think it'd fly today. But now I'm getting this pattern back out of the craft-vault as my friend E is 6 months pregnant with a baby GIRL! I wont have it ready right when the baby is born (unless I have some crazy crafting miracle?) but I'm still excited to try this pattern - I mean, it has PUFFED SLEEVES. Anne would be so proud.

Blanket for Baby P

This was one of the first blankets I ever made - not my best work, but I do love block pattern. It was for my roommate at the time to give to her newborn niece.

The block pattern is alternating stockinette and garter stitches. I embroidered the 'P' into the blanket because at the time I didn't know how to knit with 2 different yarns. Speaking of yarn, I used Bernat Baby Coordinates yarn which is very soft and kind of crimped - great for newborn projects! And who doesn't love a good pink/green combo?