An Elmo Cake

Here is an Elmo cake I recently did for a little girl turning 2 who absolutely loved Elmo.

I made a 12" bottom and 8" top.  The head is made from 2 half circle cakes using my Betty Crocker Bake N Fill dome pan.  Arms, hands, feet and present are made w/rice crispy treats.  The cake is covered in a mixture of candy clay and fondant.  My house is very dry, so it did dry out and crack. The only all-fondant is the white eyeballs and the rest is made with candy clay.  I used the Wilton sugar sheets in black for the black in the eyes and the mouth.  I will say that was much easier than tinting fondant and cutting it out.  The stuff doesn't taste worth a darn, but makes it easy to do little things like this.

Thankfully the cake traveled well and made the 1 hour drive to the party.  With my husband's driving and bumps in the road, I was worried!  The only piece I didn't put on until we got there was the present and the #2.

Some more cakes!

Here are some more cakes I have worked on recently.

The Strawberry Shortcake is for my neice's 3rd birthday.  It was a group effort with my mom and sister in law.  I wish I had a better photo of it, but this is as good as I have right now.

This cake I finished yesterday evening.  It was for my husband's customer appreciation dinner.  He came up with the idea to use a trophy similar to those DeKalb handed out last week and mom came up with the idea to have it coming out of a bag of seed corn.

Next weekend will be an Elmo cake for a little girl who loves Elmo.  Will post pics once it's done!

DIY Ruffle Curtains

I have had curtains in my bedroom for quite some time that I just did not like, no matter how hard I tried.  They were nice curtains, just didn't look right.  So, since I've made this discovery of ruffle fabric, I decided why not use it for curtains!  If you haven't seen ruffle fabric, it's really pretty.  It can be a little tricky to sew as the ruffles like to move around and try to get in your way of cutting and sewing (and I never want to take the time to pin them back).  I purchased ivory 2" ruffle fabric from www.rufflefabric.com.  This stuff is so pretty and would make an gorgeous wedding dress!  I told my daughter I was making a dress for my windows. :)  Anyway, I sewed a pocket at the top (lined it so it wouldn't sag) and that was it!  The fabric needs no hemming and the sides didn't even need finishing.  Here's the finished project that took just about 1 hour tops to complete.

From looking at the pics above, I either have quite a bit of dust floating around (very possible!) or have quite a few ghostly orbs in the house!

Now I need to either cut the curtain rod a bit so it's not so long or move the holders to be wider.  I hate making more holes in the wall, but that would look the best.

There's still much to do in the bedroom to get it looking the way I want, but I feel like I'm making progress.  Next step will be to get rid of the big TV in the corner, but I'm so cheap, I hate to throw it out and buy new since this sucker still works.  Darn thing won't die!

Wedding Invitations!

I offered to do wedding invitations for my mother-in-law.  What I thought was going to be an easy process turned to something not so easy.  I had started out wanting to make something with a pretty design cut into the outside of the invitation (I got a Cricut and wanted to use it!).  I couldn't make anything I really liked, so I turned to the sleeve option and made a couple different ones (sorry, don't have pictures!).  Well, in the end, my m-i-l ended up seeing one of my "test" invites and really liked it.  I thought "no problem, I can do this easy".....Yes, well, after much frustration and headache, I got them done and here's what the finished product looked like.

It ended up being a sleeve invitation in the end.  It was going to be a fold over, but it just wasn't working out.

 I also did a RSVP card, map, and golf outing info cards as well.  I bought all the paper from Paperandmore.com - really great place to order paper from.  Everything was a pearlized metallic so it had a nice shimmer to it.  I even bought the envelopes from there.  Much cheaper than Hobby Lobby.  Actually, HL doesn't carry the pearlized ones!

So now the invitations are out of my hands and are in my m-i-l's to be mailed.  Can't say that I will ever do that again unless I have a week off with no kids to get them done!

Finished ruffled bed skirt

Ok, so here are the pics of the bed skirt.  I cut the strips of organza/crepon and what I finally did later was singe the edges with a candle to keep from fraying.  I had fray stop, but it became to messy and had to wait for it to dry.  I then sewed a straight stitch to use for the gathering, then sewed the ribbon on the other side.

Next, I pinned the first ruffle to the bed skirt I got from Walmart and started sewing.  I used white, but I think I would use a color next time.  The white kind of "glows" through the sheer fabric.

 

 I spaced the ruffles about 2 1/2 - 3 inches apart.  I would suggest lightly drawing lines where each ruffle needs to go to make sure you have them spaced correctly and straight.  I did this for the remaining ruffles.

Here it is finished.

My daughter's bedroom is still a work in progress.  Next task is the curtains and covering the cedar chest top.  The only bad thing was I started the dust ruffle before we moved the cedar chest up to her room.  Now that it is in front of her bed, I really didn't need a dust ruffle.  Oh well, still looks pretty!

 

You can see the white "glowing" through like I mentioned above.  This is why I would use a colored bed skirt if I did it again.  You don't notice as much in normal light, however.

Ruffled Girly Bed Skirt

I've been working for quite some time on a ruffled bed skirt for my 2 year old daughter's bed.  I combined ideas from Pottery Barn Kid's tulle bed skirt and seeing pretty ruffled bed skirts.  I wanted to pull in colors from her room that I had already used on the wall, so I knew I needed multi-colors in the skirt.  I ended up buying 5 different colors of organza and I believe crepon sheer (didn't have all the colors of organza) and ribbon to match to make the edges finished looking.  Once I get it complete, I will have to post some pictures of it. 

After this, I'll have to start on the curtains, but I've got a better idea on these to make them go quicker!

Has it been that long?

So, someone at work brought up that she has started a blog and that made me realize I started a blog sometime ago.  I thought it was maybe a month ago, but I see getting on here, it was back in October.  October?? Really, has it been that long since I started this? All I can say is good thing I only have 1 follower and I think she forgot about it, too. :)  Hopefully I'll get better at posting and updating this thing with all my projects I've been working on or would like to work on.