Felt Food Frenzy!

So it’s been a while since I showed you the cute felt food that I made a while ago. Well, it has kind of become an addiction. I LOVE making felt food! Since my last post I have purchased (too many) new patterns and gone a little crazy with my felt creations. But it is so fun. If you do decide to get into it, I’ll warn you now, you’ll be obsessed. But then I’ll have a felt food making buddy! ;)

Feel free to laugh at my silly staging, I was trying to make it more interesting than last time…

Blueberry muffins in their own muffin tin! (Pattern HERE) *Most of the patterns I link to will include more than what I have made so far :)
Milk and cereal (From Felt Toys for Little Ones)
Lots of yummy desserts! On our menu here we have brownies, cheesecake (complete with a mint garnish – I know, I’m ridiculous), cinnamon rolls, peanut butter cookies and chocolate chip cookies! (Pattern HERE)
A three tiered cake! I have yet to make the decorations, but honestly, I had to make a decorate-able cake. How fun is this?! (Pattern currently unavailable)
Also came with patterns for matching cake pans!!! I die over the cuteness…
Campfire and smores! I used the pattern from Big Little Felt Universe for the fire (I haven’t made the logs yet) and then I used a separate pattern (HERE) for the toasting marshmallows and smores. Pencils make excellent roasting sticks. ;) Aren’t the little toasted marshmallows so cute?!
Gotta have some produce! (I know, finally something healthy ;) Everything but the tomato and the radish came from Felt Toys for Little Ones. The tomato and radish came from Big Little Felt Universe. I’m kind of in love with my french bread and my carrot.

And there you have it! I actually have like 4857.5 other projects currently in the works, all of them about halfway done. Hopefully I’ll get it together and finish them soon, I can’t wait to show you! :)

Treats for Your Traveling Time Lord

My other order this week was for Dr. Who cookies! Now, I don’t watch Dr. Who (I know, can we still be friends?) but I know there’s quite a following so I hope I did the show justice with my cookie interpretation. This was a really fun order to work on, probably because even though I’m not a Dr. Who fan, I’m still a nerd (Legend of Korra Book 4 is coming in 2 weeks!!!!!!!!!!! Korra cookies to celebrate?!) and get really excited about these kinds of things. So here’s my Dr. Who set for the big Dr. Who birthday bash this weekend. :)Bowties and Sonic Screwdrivers (anyone want to tell me what it actually does??)
The Tardis and a blue Dalek. I also made red Daleks. They are a robot of some kind…?
A Union Jack (it’s a BBC show) and a DW logo. Those ones are actually my favorite, I was just so pleased with how crisp my piping turned out ;)

And there you have it! Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey Cookie Stuff ;)

Marching Band Cookies

These cookies were actually made this week! Aren’t I so on top of things?!

Riiiight…

So in addition to a Dr. Who cookie order (pics coming soon) I was also asked to make 100 marching band cookies for a friend in the ward. Her son is a senior and in the marching band and she wanted something special for their opening game. I was already making 48 Dr. Who cookies and had to have them all done by Wednesday since I was leaving to take said Dr. Who cookies to Virginia where the big birthday bash was taking place. I could totally handle another 100. Right?! Piece of cake. Or…cookie, rather.

I know. I’m a little crazy. But I did actually manage to make all 148 cookies in my 3-day time frame. It’s just that my kitchen table looked like this for a few days…

And I was up super late each night. Now that Nathan is mostly down to 1 nap, (and said nap is almost never long enough,) that’s really the only time I have to work during the day until he goes to bed at night. But I was really happy with how my band cookies turned out. We’ve got hats and music notes. :)
The school colors are white, navy and silver, so that was the color scheme. I loved my little hats, especially the detail right above the brim. I had a picture of the actual band uniforms off of which I based my design. I then painted the detail silver using luster dust and orange extract and I loved the impact it made on the overall look. (Sorry if you can’t really see it in this picture, I promise it looked really cool)
I then painted the accents of the letters silver as well.
I joked that I had my own little cookie marching band in formation on my table. Ta-da!

Cookie Catch-Up Baby Elephants

So I made these sweet elephant cookies for a baby shower right before we left for Florida. Yes, this was back in August. I kind of forgot about them once we left and I didn’t have much time to take nice pictures because I HAD to get them in the mail before we left. So sub-par pictures it is ;)

They were inspired by this post and the original design was hand cut from a template. Since I most definitely didn’t have time to hand cut 36 elephants, I bought a design-your-own cookie cutter kit and, you guessed it, made my own cookie cutter. It saved me soooooo much time. I was actually really happy with how well the cutter turned out, as I was a little skeptical at first.

I’d gotten a request to use little candy pearls for the eyes and had to experiment with two different sizes. It didn’t take long to figure out which size to use, as the bigger one made the elephants looked shocked and surprised that they were in fact, going to be eaten. This picture still cracks me up, by the way.

And that’s all I have for pictures, I packaged them up and sent them off to Arizona for the baby shower. Hurray for baby boys! :)

You Gotta Start ‘Em Young

We took Nathan on his first race yesterday – the Color Vibe 5K!

This was actually the first color run for all of us. My mom found a great deal and group discount several months ago and they were having a promo that kids ages 1-12 could run for free! So we all signed up, including my parents and sister. So we took Little Man in the jogging stroller and we had lots of fun!

The race started at 9am in Manassas which is about an hour away so we had to get up a little earlier to get down there in time. Nathan is usually up earlier anyway, so he didn’t seem to mind.

I was initially worried that Nathan would get upset when they threw color at us, but he didn’t seem to mind to much at all! He did have a look on his face that basically said “I haven’t been on this earth for very long, but this seems very strange…”. He was a trooper! And he enjoyed the (very loud) music they played during the race.

They released the runners in waves, so it took forever to get going, and we got a blast of green color right as we started. Nathan got quite a bit of it and so did the stroller. We’re still trying to figure out how to best clean the stroller… ;)

This is the only picture I took while we were running, I was too busy trying to breathe. ;) Between the green color and the purple spots, I think he looks like Baby Bop. “What is going on, Mom?”
It rained a little bit near the end (We managed the 5K in about 45mins. Not bad for not training. At all.) but it was nice and cool. Much nicer to run in cool weather than sweltering heat if you ask me. Here’s our completely colored Little Man and stroller!
We did it!! Yay!
My mom finished right after us so when my Dad and sister came over Mom and I attacked them with our color packets.
So very colorful!
So fun!

We had a celebratory lunch at Chick-fil-a, where Nathan had his first juice box and stole Jennifer’s ketchup. We finally made the drive home and got all cleaned up. I was actually hoping the color would stain the shirt I wore (I wore white on purpose) so that I would have some souvenir, but it all came out really well. The color is just colored cornstarch. Oh well. ;) Guess we’ll have to do it again!

16 Months!

Two months to nursery guys! Woo hoo! Although I kind of feel as though church will get kinda boring in comparison once Little Man leaves me for nursery…

*Loves loves LOVES having music on. Even if he’s not really paying attention to it or dancing to it (speaking of dancing, this kid has moves. It’s hilarious), he likes it for background noise. I’m completely sick of the toddler station on Pandora, so we’ve switched to Disney instead ;)

*Thinks that books with paper pages (as opposed to his board books) are the coolest thing ever. He loves to thumb through the pages and so far we haven’t had any casualties. Hoping it stays that way. I gave him an old German-English dictionary and it’s a new favorite.

*Fully down to one nap, though sometimes he tries to doze off in the car when we’re on errands in the morning. Those are usually the days he decides to get up around 6 – ARG.

*Working on mastering the art of temper tantrum throwing. We’ve had some award-winners, but I can only imagine how good they’re going to be by the time he’s 2 and beyond. Has already mastered the ‘going-limp’ maneuver and the arching-of-the-back move. So. Much. Fun.

*He finally cuddles!!!!!! You guys, I’ve been waiting since I found out I was pregnant for these moments. He snuggles up and puts his head on my shoulder and we sit there and it’s pretty much the best thing ever. And he totally prefers this when I put him down to bed now. It’s awesome.

*Building up our signing vocabulary! We’ve added ‘all done’, ‘milk’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ (thank you is still pretty new though). And he will almost always wave goodbye on request. I think we’ve confused him a little with the ‘eat’ and ‘more’ signs. He used to say ‘more’ for all things food related and now he’s replaced that with the eat sign for all food and drink. It’s kind of a guessing game as to whether he’s hungry or thirsty. Oh well. I’ve looked up the sign for ‘drink’ and that will probably be the next one we work on. ;)

*Loves when he can do things like Mom and Dad. When we hoist him up onto the couch, he’ll kick back and sit there for a few seconds like he’s there to watch some football or something. Also thinks he can go up and down the stairs like us. Still trying to make sure he does it safely.

(milkshake mustache!)

*New favorite catch all for toys and other random things: the washing machine. He actually gets really mad now when I have to do laundry because he can’t use it when it’s running. But he’s still a very good helper when it comes to switching the laundry around and taking it to the couch to fold.

(I know this picture is blurry, but I just love his face in this one)

*Still loves to go outside and explore. We have a little playground here at our complex and he can go down the slide all by himself!

*Still cracks us up with his fun personality and his wild antics! Love you Little Man!

The Book Thing

Another item off our bucket list! We went to The Book Thing yesterday! What is The Book Thing? Well, if you click on the link you’ll find out, but it’s basically a ginormous book swap. You take your old unwanted books there, and they have shelves and shelves of donated books that are free for the taking. Yes! FREE! You don’t even have to bring books to donate to take some! Since we love books around here, we definitely had to check it out.

I’ll warn you though, it’s just a really big warehouse with no air conditioning (except for the few fans randomly placed)…so with the way the weather has been, it was super muggy and kinda stinky inside (I was hoping for a lovely book smell, but it was mostly a sweaty smell…ew). And it’s only open on Saturday amd Sunday. But it was really big – they have thousands of books! While most of the books are quote old and outdated, John found some very fun adventure books and I found some books for my mom’s library at school and even a board book for Nathan. My favorite find was a travel book for visiting DC with kids! So excited! And there were all for FREE! You know how I love a good deal. And you can’t beat free!

Look at all the books! (You’ll have to excuse the poor picture quality – I brought the little camera instead of my nice one)
Nathan was in heaven with all these fun books to flip through and throw onto the floor ;)

Then we came home and enjoyed our new finds.

Definitely recommend a visit! Yay for free books!

The Media Center Part 2–All Finished!

Okay okay okay, so I’ve had this done for like, 2 months now. But first I needed to touch up the paint that got dinged up when we brought it back up from my parent’s house. Then I wanted to ‘style’ it so it looked pretty. We finally got the door magnets put in and then I wanted to add shelves to the center console cabinets. Then we took a trip to Florida. Right before we left for Florida, I tried to put the shelves in and the stupid guy at Home Depot didn’t cut my wood accurately so they were wedged in there so tight I needed a rubber mallet to get the shelf level. Couldn’t find the rubber mallet. John fixed them when we got home. Now one of the doors doesn’t close all the way. I don’t care anymore. It’s still locked so Nathan can’t get into it.

Can you tell I’m sooooo done with this project?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty stinkin’ proud of what I’ve done. But it’s still a first-time build and I’ve messed up learned sooooo much in the process. And I’m kind of done learning for now ;)

But anyway, here’s where we left off when I posted about all my projects while John was at High Adventure

Dad brought it up in his truck (I’m so glad he has a truck – makes my life so much easier ;) ) and I attached it to the bottom and voila! You can see where it got a little banged up on the ride here, so I just touched it up once everything was secure.

Then I started bringing things in to style the bookshelves and make it pretty. I’m still considering it a work in progress, but I’m happy with where we’re at at this point.

And here is the whooooole thing, in all its DIY glory ;)

I’m really happy with it and I’m really glad I took the plunge. It has really opened up and lightened up our space and keeps everything nice and organized (read: out of Nathan’s reach). Though I have to admit I think I enjoyed refinishing already built furniture better ;)