Tuesday 20 November 2012

Christmas cards

 So I did my best to make as many Christmas cards as I could this year. It's totally not cost effective or efficient but it's fun.  We send out over 50 Christmas cards to family and friends, so the first set of cards ( around 30 or so)  were almost the same, with only a variation in the type of ribbon I used.



The next lot is for immediate family, so they're unique. I used a combination of stamps, punches and ribbon.  Anyway, this is it for now. I'll keep experimenting and see what I come up with.





Thursday 15 November 2012

Paper roses

I absolutely love these. My new favourite project!  More on how to make them later. For now. Just ooh and ahhhh with me over them.  They're made from coffee filters if you can believe it.  LOVE IT!






Halloween party

My son was born on Halloween much to my chagrin.  He was late and set to be induced on November 1st which apparently was enough to encourage him to make his appearance in a big hurry on the morning of Halloween.

Ordinarily, I try to avoid doing a Halloween themed party but every once in a while my son asks for a costume party which is kind of fun. We invite our family and make them dress up. It's pretty funny stuff!

I did a lot of paper craft for this party so it cost almost nothing for the decorations. (I already had most of the paper at home and lots of black cardstock) and so I just purchased a few items from the dollarstore like the plastic spiders and eyeballs and cobwebs.


It was difficult to get a good angle of the birthday banner. I didn't want it to be too dark so I chose, black, white, orange and green for the colour palette.


 I hand cut the screeching cat on the window and all the bats on the branches from black cardstock.
Relatively easy, although the fine detail cutting on the cat was a bit time consuming. And it made for a really fun food table.







Other simple decorations were a wooden coffin that I found at the dollarstore and painted black, pickled eyeballs (plastic eyeballs which I put in the display jars and tinted the water with food colouring), and plastic spiders and centipedes in a jar with tinted water.


The bat branch was hanging in the living room from the light fixture and looked better in person. It's obscured by the rope we had to tie across the living room for our doughnut eating contest, which was a big hit!


 These frankenstein cupcakes were fun and super easy to make. It was just large marshmallows, stick pretzels and black decorating gel.   I bought a spray icing in aeresol form for the green skin. Wilton makes one, but the one I bought was by Duff Goldman from Charm City cakes. It sprayed on a bit more of a blue green colour at first but darkened and changed slightly once it dried.
The only thing I would recommend is putting the pretzels in first before spraying because once they were sprayed it was hard to handle them without pulling some of the colour off.


  I didn't get a picture of this before it melted, but in our punch I put a green frozen hand ice cube.
 I just tinted some water with green food colouring and poured it into a latex glove (inside out and washed). I sealed it with an elastic band  and placed it into the freezer until we were ready for it.  You just have to be careful that the fingers don't freeze in such a way that pinches any of the fingers together otherwise it makes it really difficult to cut the glove off once it's frozen.


Also, I didn't anticipate how quickly it would melt, so I would recommend waiting until the very LAST minute before putting it in the punch.






 We started the party by giving everyone a small pumpkin which they had to decorate and make into a pumpkin "baby". They then had to care for their pumpkin baby for the rest of the party. If they left their baby unattended someone could steal it, and the person with the most pumpkins at the end of the party won!  Grandma turned out to be the supreme pumpkin-napper!









 Another game we played was wrap the mummy.  Each group was given 2 rolls of toilet paper and 5 minutes to wrap their mummy. At the end the birthday boy got to pick which group made the best mummy! Everyone got into it and it was a great laugh!



  The plague of mice were a simple but fantastic idea from Martha's Stewart's website.  I have reams of black cardstock that my husband brought home from work and this was perfect for it. I wouldn't use anything thinner because they wouldn't stand up as well. I went a little further but adding a small strip of paper I bent in half  to the backs of some of the mice to give them a stand so they didn't all have to be flat against the stair.  You can't really tell from the photos but it gave it more of a 3D effect and looked way better.


 So this wasn't a great angle to see them but I had black crow sillhouettes on the mirror and had a branch hanging from our light fixture with more card stock bats.
The orange balloons were for a darts game.  Everyone had to stand a certain distance from the board with a nerf gun dart that had a thumb tack glued to the end.  You had 3 tries to hit one of the balloons with a prize sticker inside. It was a lot of fun, but next time I probably won't fill them with as much confetti.. that made a huge mess. Maybe just a few black squares so you can't tell just by looking at the balloons which ones are the winners.  I filled the balloons by blowing them up, placing a funnel I made out of paper into the top and quickly shoving the winner papers and confetti inside and then tying them up. Fun but a lot of work! We attached to a large sheet of pegboard.




The picture just doesn't do this justice but the egg sack with hatching spiders was pretty creepy.  It was just a white balloon that I covered in white tissue paper and glue to give the egg sack texture. Then I hot glued plastic spiders to the outside and then tied a bunch of spiders to string and glued those to the bottom of the egg sack. The only thing I might have changed was using larger plastic spiders.
It was a great party and I think everyone had a lot of fun! I look forward to our next one!






  Me as the evil Queen of Hearts, and my hubby as Ceasar Flickerman from the Hunger Games.

 And my lovely sister as a geisha and her partner as a freaky zombie pirate!

Jamie's 12th birthday

We didn't do a lot at the house for this party because we opted instead to go to the Markham Fair with a group of my daughter's friends, which frankly was a relief because we were only a few days back from England.

The decorations were pretty simple, just an aqua colour theme, a couple of big tissue paper poms and the banner.








Star Wars

      Following closely on the heels of my oldest daughter's birthday in early October is always my son's birthday, which means I'm always working with a pretty tight budget.

    On his 6th birthday my son chose a Star Wars theme for this party (what boy doesn't love Star Wars?) and because of how long the movies have been around there are a plethora of fun items that you can find both online and in stores to accessorize your party with.  However, these items quickly add up which was not helpful to my tight budget so I tried not to go too crazy with themed decorations. I made a few items like the cupcake picks and invitations myself using Star Wars graphics I found online and printed out.
    Little bit of cardstock and glue and voila!  A Star Wars party on a budget!








These were lots of fun to make and a big hit with the kids.  They're made up a jumbo marshmallow stuffed in a mini ice cream cone, then covered in melting chocolate and sprinkles.  Pretty easy to do (once I got the hang of melting the chocolate). I packaged them in individual cello bags and the kids loved them!






 I kept the invitations fairly simple, just downloading a graphic of Yoda from the internet but they were fun!