Everyone likes cake!

Last night was our last cake decorating class and we had to come in with an iced cake, preferably smooth and a plan to decorate it.  My first choice of cake (from scratch) was taste tested by Aria when I unwisely turned my back on her while I was icing left over cupcakes.  She apparently is tall enough to reach things on the counter :0! I was too busy laughing to be mad. Her look when I caught her was priceless and she did go straight to wipe her hands on the towel after I stopped her little snack attack on my cake!!  I then had to make do with a box cake but such is life!

   We both managed to bring in slightly smoothed iced cakes but no concrete plans and late as usual!!  We were always the last to arrive and we never had all our stuff ready but we had a lot of fun and we learned some new decorating skills! :) It was a fun class to take.

   Here are our final cakes.  I decided on this slightly odd fish. It was fun and I think it turned out pretty cute. I have to say I am glad that the class is done as I don't want to make or eat frosting for awhile!!

Sarah's octopus!!  I love it, it's so her. She free handed it and it turned out awesome!!

 A close up of my fish. Sarah said I need to work on my star work....she may be right. I may have gotten a tad lazy after the first couple of rows!!

Nathania

two little squirrels

Right around Christmas I bought two little prints from Etsy (AmyVaknin). The prints sat on the shelf for about a month...cause I don't do things in a timely manner! So I went to Target and picked up two frames.

I had to trim the prints just a little bit, to have them fit. They were then hung up in our bathroom.

These pictures aren't the best...from the phone...but I think they are sooo cute! They help finish off the bathroom perfectly. As for why I bought squirrels, they are a favorite of Andy's:)

Although it took me a month to go and hang them up...but in reality it took me about 10 minutes. Why it takes me so long I'll never know!

I'm trying to get my projects done, and I can check this one off my list!

Sarah

Headboard, that I made myself:)

Andy has been complaining for about 6 months that we needed a headboard, because his pillows kept falling down between the bed and the wall. He looked on craigslist and showed me about 10 different ones...and I didn't like any of them. Nathania and I had been wanting to make upholstered headboards, but Andy wasn't too sure about it, so we made a simple wood one. I got the idea out of the book by the fantastic duo over at YoungHouseLove.

We bought 10 foot boards from Home Depot, and had them cut them in half. Queen size beds are 5 ft across, so it worked out perfectly. Instead of getting regular boards, we used the boards that linked together like a tongue and groove.

While at Home Depot, we picked up some stain (Minwax Red Mahogany), and we set things up in the garage to stain. We were going through a nice little warm up (40s)that melted ALL the snow --boo!--so I was able to do the staining with the garage door open. As I sit here writing this, it's -10 outside which is much more normal for January in Anchorage.  We had to let the stain dry extra long because of the temperature...you're not really supposed to stain at temperatures below 50. We also bought a 2x4 and cut that in half--I think it was a 12 footer.

We screwed the boards into the 2x4s and then drilled holes into the base and bolted them to the metal bed frame. We used the 7 of the 8 boards we had from the store.

The boards, hardware and stain was about $40 total.

Cheaper than anything we found on craigslist!

We really like the result. We have to move the pictures either up or possible up to the middle and put them together.  Thats what my friend Krista suggested...and then maybe getting new bedside lights, that are taller. 

What do you think?

Happy DIYing!

Sarah

Linked to:

Too hot to touch

My sister may have a fabric problem but it comes in handy when I need fabric and the stores are closed!!!  Way cheaper too :-)!  Over Christmas our mom helped her clean up her craft room and challenged her to not buy fabric for a year and sent her this link here with ideas to use up her fabric. It has some really cute ideas like the fingertip pot holders.

I had given one of the casserole cosy's we made to my friend Lisa for Christmas and thought it would be cute to make matching potholders.  I had just the right amount of leftover fabric and insul bright to make 2 of the fingertip pot holders.  I was too lazy to actually print out her template so my corners didn't end up as rounded as hers so I had some issues with my corners when putting the binding on but overall they turned out pretty good.  Just don't look too closely to the back! I definately need to work on my binding skills!! But I just found out that I can buy a binding foot for my sewing machine!!  I have to get one!!!!

Happy Sewing!

Nathania

Cake

For Christmas, Nathania wanted to take a cake decorating class....so I signed her up and asked my mom to get her the kit that was required to take the class. Come Christmas, I opened up my own kit, with my mom saying "Happy Birthday--I'll pay for the class"

 So the past two Tuesdays we have been taking a cake decorating class at Michael's. This week we frosted and decorated our cakes, whereas last week we just watched. Part of decorating the cake was to bring in a image you wanted on the cake. Nathania picked a howling wolf, and I picked a crazy squirrel!!

I picked the squirrel, because Andy's birthday was last week and he loves squirrels--I looked for one on skis but couldn't find the image:) So I picked a squirrel I liked. Isn't it happy?

Andy had a rough day at work and got a huge grin on his face when he saw it....winner!

Here is Nathania's cake...which...well...

Do you think it looks like a wolf?

I think we came to the consensus that is looked more like a ill cow or a caribou without antlers...but not a wolf. The coloring of the frosting could have been better. But we were lazy and didn't want to mix too many colors.

Now, I'm pretty sure that our instructor thinks we're both a little crazy...we were the only ones who did things a little out of the ordinary. Two people in our class did snowflakes, some flowers...etc which are fine, but not our style.

Nathania did much better than I did on the side of the cake...so maybe next time we just need to combine the two:)

Also, in the end, the cakes were tasty...which really is more important!

Have you decorated anything lately? Anybody else taken the cake decorating class at Michael's?

Happy Frosting!

Sarah

New year, new look

Why is it that "simple" projects always turn into such complicated ones??? Case in point my sister-in-law Vanessa and I decided to re-cover some dining room chairs that my mother-in-law got free from a friend. Simple enough right?  Wrong!!!  We had fabric, batting, padding and a staple gun and figured we could hammer it out in 2 days tops but we didn't account for disintegrating webbing and an extremely hard press board that was impervious to our handheld staplers, yes staplers.  It even bent the tacks we tried to use to attach the webbing!! It was impressive and more than a little frustrating!!  After my first stapler failed I purchased a new one along with new webbing and almost cried when the staples folded in on themselves like origami. :( I did not want to make another trip to the store so I broke down and asked my husband to buy me a pneumatic staple gun only to find out we already had one....argh!!!  Really!!?? Who knew a nail gun can also shoot staples!!!???   Not me!! He swears he told me we had one but I swear he told me I could get one if needed!! Anyways he redeemed himself by buying me the right sized staples and setting up the compressor and staple gun for me! So sweet! 
  I have to tell you I am now in love with my staple gun!!  It's so much fun and so quick!!  Albeit a tad loud! I may need to come up with more projects just so I can use it!! We only finished 2 of the 5 chairs but only because we ran out of webbing.  Never having replaced webbing I started with 4yards and actually needed 8.  Oh well, at least I have a 50% of coupon for the next 4 yards as it is pricey!!! Now that we have perfected our technique the next three will be done in no time!

So here is the nemesis press board and the nasty padding that was under the nastier fabric which I threw away before taking a picture.  I really wish I had taken a picture of it as it was pretty nasty!

My new friend...the staple gun!  It's awesome and everyone should have one!

One of our finished chairs, isn't the fabric gorgeous?...I hope Fran likes it!! It looks kinda green but it's actually light blue, much better than the original dirty off white fabric.

Nathania

Casserole cozies

About three weeks before Christmas, I received an email from a coworker asking me to make her some casserole cozies for Christmas (I had made one previously for another coworkers wedding shower). She wanted three of them.

I agreed.

2 days later I received an email from a friend of Nathania's asking me to make a casserole cozy for her as well. 

How crazy is that? I randomly make one last spring and get request for 4 in less than a week.

Well of course I agreed to that too.

My coworker wanted three, one for her, her mom and sister in law.

We changed the pattern up and created a pattern that when it is open it looks like a "X".

Did I get a picture of the insides? No, cause I'm terrible at taking pictures....Nathania may have one on her camera, and if so I will update. The above is the one we made for my coworkers sister in law.

Now, when I say "we" I mean, Nathania and I coerced our mom into helping! It didn't take much:)

(thanks mom!)

The blue and grey was for my coworker and the one with blue straps for her mom. We made the straps for the grey one, because we couldn't find any strapping we liked.

We made the third one for Nathania's friend.

Overall everyone liked them! So it was a success!

We're thinking of putting some in our Etsy shop....what do you think?

Happy Crafting!

Sarah

New Years Resolutions

I'm gonna join the band wagon and post some New Years Resolutions, at least those in accordance with crafting!

1. I will not buy fabric until June. My lovely Mom helped me clean up the disaster that was called my craft room, while she was here over Christmas. She may have suggested that I NEVER get more fabric, but I think I can resist Joann's until June. My bank account will thank me I'm sure:)

2. Mom may have also suggested to do a project a week with the materials I currently have. I'm gonna try this one, and Friday will be the first installment.

3. Work ahead on stuff for the craft fairs next year...cause although we did better this year, our living room was still an explosion of wool from October until December....something both of our husbands would love NOT to repeat.

4. Set up and maintain an Etsy shop. Well...we've made some good progress towards this goal! I'm going to be posting more things over the next week.

5. Post at least twice a week on the blog. I've been really bad about this...but I think we can work it out for at least two posts a week. Let us know if there is anything you want us to post more on!

6. Finish some of those already begun projects...I'm really terrible at finishing things.

Do you have any resolutions? We'd love to hear about them!

Sarah

We're Open for Business!!!

After saying we were going to start an Etsy shop...we finally did! We haven't posted everything yet, but we do have our baby slippers and headbands posted!

These are just some examples....you can check out our shop via the page at the top or the mini-Etsy feed on our sidebar!

Thanks for looking!

Sarah and Nathania

Seward Craft Fair

Happy New Year! It's been a busy last month and unfortunately the blog has been ignored horribly!

Our third craft fair this year, was in Seward, AK which is about 2 1/2 hours south of Anchorage.

So we packed up Nathania's car and headed out.

It was such a pretty drive. We had had negative temperatures four about 3 weeks and the stuff on the trees isn't snow, but hoar frost. Very thick hoar frost. Makes for a beautiful drive!

We were working on the slippers on the way down:)

This was our booth set up. We had a large space, and brought an extra table...it worked well.

This was our new way of hanging put our buntings, I found two CD holders for free on Craigslist. It worked well for our display.

Overall, it was a great show. But it wasn't as busy as we would have liked...not sure if we'll do it again next year.

Sarah