Halloween Sewing

Yesterday I had fun sewing.
I made a Halloween apron. I think this is the end of the Holiday Aprons. Hooray. I am very excited about this apron, I used my birthday money to buy the material. (Life as a MBA student's wife makes the budget tight.)

I think I'm done with my Holiday Aprons.
I have:

• Valentine's
• St. Patrick's
• Easter
• Birthdays
• Halloween
• Thanksgiving
• Christmas

My son had been asking for me to make his something. And he especially liked this Halloween material he picked it out last year after Halloween on 70% clearance. The last halloween bag I made him is still too huge for him. So I decided to make him one his size.

I'm not sure why I make my child such fancy things. He couldn't care less, he probably would have liked a simpler bag-- ie the straps. Plus its fully lined inside. He asked for his name to be sewn on the bag. (The yellow material makes it look even fancier, but I used that to make it easier to embroider his name, the white would have shown my stitches and it would have taken twice as long to try to hid them.)

I tried to mimic the bag on the print of the material. That's why it has so many handles. When I asked him what he thought of the back, I expected him to say, "Probably good", that is what he usually says. Instead I got an "I don't know" and a look away. Sad, for me and my pride.

Brain Food

I signed up to bring two dozen pieces of desert for our church Halloween Party. I found brain cupcakes at Family Fun, and decided those would be quick and easy.

Mine don't look quite as Brain like as Family Fun, I don't know why? Maybe its because my frosting had too much liquid.

They were easy all things considering.

Punkin

My son was asking to make a pumpkin cake from the front of Family Circle Magazine. I didn't have round pyrex, so we just made a flat cake. I should have looked at the cover before decorating, it would have been easier to figure out the mouth. As you can tell my mouth had issues. After doing the black M&Ms, I realized the cake had plenty of sugar and didn't need the orange M&Ms. If you click to enlarge the photo you will notice my son added orange sprinkles for cheeks, and hair-- his idea. The "punkin" also has an orange M&M stem.

We made one round cake, and 12 cupcakes.

My son decorated all the cupcakes but one, this is my favorite one that he did. He then wanted to have a Halloween Party with his friends, which I was totally willing to oblige. He made the invitations, and I started planning, a Halloween Party for 6 Preschoolers, until I found out they all have swine flu. Does that mean we are next, it is harboring in our immune systems waiting to reek havoc? Only time will tell.

Here is our finished Pumpkin Army.

Dry Erase Cozy

My brother was around when I was making the crayon rolls, and got jealous of said crayon cozies and asked for a dry erase cozy for his business presentations.

He wanted a flap. He was a little picky but my mother was willing to oblige, she did most of the work.

This was WAY more work than four crayon rolls. Warning amateur sewers should not attempt this at home. Only with mothers on hand. Thank goodness I did it at my mom's house, with most of her work. I did make the M.

Crayon Cozies

My mom helped me make quite a few crayon rolls. Four to be exact, one for me, one for her, and two for presents. Did I ever post the colored pencil roll I made for the church bag? I didn't read the directions, it was way easier to do it with directions than otherwise. Even if it takes me longer to read the directions and finally understand the directions than to actually sew and cut something. (I'm bad with reading directions.)

I found them on my sister in law's friend blog, who got them for this blog.

If I would have thought about what I was doing, I would have made them longer and hold 24 crayons, all the boxes these days are 24. I got a box of 24 for $.25, how does that work?!?

Family Reunion Girl Prizes

For some crazy reason my mom and I made necklaces for all the girls in my family over three. Here they all are. I am pretty proud of them, because I came up with the design myself. My mom wanted pendents that said Integrity or family. But instead they just random virtues.

Here is the one I made for myself, it does actually say family.

My two nieces got birds on theirs. Because birds are trendy right now.

Here they are all packaged up ready to go.

Grammy Clock

The count down to grammy time
or the 40th anniversary present

Nine Years

I have been an aunt for nine years now. Which is totally crazy to me, how did they get so big so fast. But this birthday cake was for a nephew that turned 7. Still a long time! We had a partial family reunion with some of my siblings and their families, which meant we had a mini birthday party for a birthday boy. I decided he needed a theme cake, so I checked out Family Fun. And created this.

My frosting wouldn't stick to the take so it took longer than I expected. Anyway if you had a deprived childhood its a lego brick.

Lentils

(I meant to hit publish on this post about two months ago.)

This is my husband's favorite no oven dish this summer.

Lentil salad

I found the recipe on another site and can't find it again, so I have no idea what the real recipe is, but what we do is. Cook the lentils, cut up two handful of cherry tomatoes from our tomato plants. Dice a half of pepper, and half of onion, mix it all up, and squirt a ton of lemon juice on it, and refrigerate it for a few hours.

We are cheese and tortilla/corn chips family so, we usually cook tortillas and cheese, and cut them up into little 1 X 1 squares and pour the salad on top of the squares.

We can't get our son to eat tortillas usually so he has his on top of nachos, my three year old actually eats this. He actually asks for lentils some days.
I think it looks so pretty with the cherry maybe grape tomatoes.

Popular in the Neighborhood

These were the most popular thing at bring your own lunch to the picnic table in front of the apartment building, among the children other than strawberries.

They are bracelets that my son and I had made earlier in the morning. Since both of his parents bead, he thinks it's pretty cool. (Even though his dad doesn't bead to be cool, he does it to be frugal.) Not to mention I've had a few nursery leaders tell me he is very skilled at stringing beads. He was very excited to make bracelets with me, since I don't let him touch my beads. (These are clearly child friendly.)
They are very easy to make I give him pipe cleaners because then I don't have to tape up the end of his string, and then we just bent the ends of the pipe cleaners around and fed them back through the beads. It was great!

Sleeping Ballarinas

My daughter's tutu dust ruffle for her crib looks much better with the crib on the lowest setting. Now I wish I had antique dresser the same wood color, raised about a foot off the ground, so I could add a matching tutu dresser for the crib. Right now she doesn't have a dresser, her clothes are keep in a sweater organizer that hangs in the closet. Although if I had a dresser, where would we set up the play rug with the trains?

Finished, sort of

After almost three years, I have finished the applique of my christmas craft #???-- my christmas wall quilt.

I used fusible web adhesive (wonder-under) to glue all the letters and shapes on, and then blanket stitched them on the material. It was trickier than it sounds, because the green background is glossy and sparkly so the fusible adhesive didn't really stick, so as I was sewing one letter on, the next one would start to peal up.

But luckily the quilt is almost done, my fingers have now built up nice callouses for hand stitching.

Lemon Birthday

The other day I backed my brother a lemon cake with lemon butter cream frosting, for his birthday. It was said to taste really good. What I was proud about is, the fact that the top of the cake was flat, instead of shaped like a rounded mountain. Here are some pictures to commemorate the cake.

Crappy Picture

This is a crappy picture, but I wanted to post another picture of the necklace I made. I used two different types of turquoise beads, lapis beads, and silver rods.

But as a bonus here is my cute daughter, even if her face is out of focus, its shows her fuzzy hair.

Happy Fourth of July

Yes, I know my cake decorating skills leave something to be desired.