Katia Triana

Back in June I went to Ottawa to visit my family and ended up in a yarn store (surprise, surprise).  I think the name of the store was Yarn Forward in Kanata.  It was a nice store and had plenty of things that I would have loved to buy.  When my mom came in she saw a sample scarf that she loved and asked me to make it for her.  It looked really intimidating, but it was actually super easy to make.  I think in total it took about 2 to 3 hours.  Not bad at all!  The yarn is Triana by Katia and I used the colorway Fire Red and I used only one skein.

Of course Phoebe wanted to model it!

Wedding Cupcakes!

My sister-in-law got married on July 23 and asked if I would make the wedding cake for her.  I wasn't sure if I could do it as I have never done one before.  But I decided I would be up for the challenge.  I asked her what she had in mind and she told me a giant cupcake.  She showed me this picture as what she wanted.  She also said that they weren't fans of fondant so I wouldn't be able to use that on the cake.  Therefore I would need to have the bottom of the cake just showing cake so I wouldn't be able to carve it out of cake and cover it with fondant.  Therefore I would need to find a good pan.  I ended up buying the Wilton giant cupcake pan as it was the largest I found.  The Williams Sonoma cupcake pan seemed to me to be a bit smaller. To go along with the giant cupcake for them, I would need to make around 100 other cupcakes for the rest of the guests.  I ended up making about 150 (to make sure that there were enough for everyone) and half were vanilla and the other half chocolate.  I decorated them with white vanilla butter-cream icing and silver balls.  I used a silver cupcake liners to tie in with the balls.
The caterer that they had said that they had a cupcake stand that we would be able to use.  However at the rehearsal I saw the stand and was not impressed by it.  So my husband and I made a quick stop at Winners and picked up some plates.  When we got home he took all the cans out of our pantry and wrapped them in yellow card-stock.  The next day he made a display out of the cans and plates that turned out looking great!

It was very stressful making all these cupcakes and my kitchen looked like a cupcake factory exploded in it when I was done.  I did have a couple mishaps like the first giant cupcake I made fell apart when I took it out of the oven and realizing transporting all these cupcakes are not that easy.  I also ended up icing the giant cupcake at around 1:30 in the morning before the wedding!

 

Owl and Book Baby Shower

OK, so I know that it has been months since I have posted last, but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy, just lazy in posting.  So back in June I put on a baby shower for my sister-in-law.  She was really liking owls for decorating the nursery so I thought an owl theme would be fun.  Also her and her husband are big book readers so I thought I would throw that theme in the mix, and the two go together greatly!

I have also in May purchased a Silhouette SD which has to be the greatest machine ever.  It hooks up to your computer and cuts paper with a little blade.  (I just looked at their website and they have a new one coming out that cuts paper 12inches wide, must have!!!)  I love the fact that you can use the program to cut what you want exactly how you want it.  Also the online store has a lot of great shapes that you can cut out, plus a free shape every week.  The only reason I mention this is I used the machine like nuts for this whole shower!!!!

 So I made the banners using a book I got for 50 cents at a thrift store.  I cut out all the letters using Times New Roman font and my silhouette (of course!).  In between the words I had cut outs of owls that I downloaded from the silhouette store.  They were a bit of work to glue together, but looked great.  We strung them up using some ribbon.  I absolutely love how they turned out.  We also re-used the pom-poms from the last shower. 

As it was a book themed shower I bought a bunch of used children books from garage sales and used them to decorate the room as well.  My sister-in-law got to take them home when it was done to start a library for her baby.  I also asked the guests instead of buying a card to buy a book and sign that so they would have even more books for the baby!  The best part was there were only a few repeats.

As I am such a huge fan of cake pops, I wanted to make some for this shower as well.  But of course I didn't thing easy.  I had seen some pictures on-line of owl cake pops and thought, well I can do that too.  They were a lot of work, but they looked great.  I used chocolate chips for the ears, candy necklace pieces for the eyes, chocolate covered sunflower seeds for the beak and flower shaped sprinkles for the feet.  The night before I realized I had no way to display them properly so I frantically made a stand for them.  I got a few sheets of Styrofoam that I had in the basement and glued them together with a hot glue gun. I wrapped it up with some brown wrapping paper then wrapped a purple ribbon around to make it look a little more fancy.  I cut little x's were I wanted the sticks to go in, then poked each hole with a pin so they would go in easy.  It turned out great and was stable enough to hold them, and is usable again.

I found some Beatrix potter plates and napkins that I just had to get for the shower for the food table.  I also had found a bunch of these books, so I decorated the table with the books to match the pates!  I just love the little touches like these.

Again, the water bottles just add a nice finishing touch to the shower.  They aren't all that hard to do and make quite the impact.

For a little activity I had a piggy bank that everyone could sign. 

I like having games at showers.  This time I decided to go a little over the top.  I made a Jeopardy game, which took a lot of time to put together, but was a lot of fun.  I can up with the categories and all of the questions.  I cut out all the numbers again with the silhouette and glued them to blue card stock.  I got a foam board and some clear picture corners and attached the questions that way.  It made it super easy to pop of the questions as we went through.  If someone knew the answer they were to put their hand up, and the first would get to answer first.  If they got the question right, I would give them the card with the dollar amount on it.  At the end whoever got the most "money"won.  (I had a prize of a bag full of chocolate loonies and toonies.)

Another game I had was the Price is Right.  I bought a bunch of baby things (after everything went home with the mom) and everyone had to guess how much they thought it was.  I had two prizes for this game.  Whoever had the most right answers (or closest to right without going over) won a prize.  The other was to the person who had a total of everything closest to the actual retail price without going over.  For the prize I got a "new car"sent for their car, and a travel mug. 
I also made another diaper cake, which turned out looking pretty classy!