Just in case anyone is interested :) I started a new blog! Click HERE to check it out! thanks!

Pick your plum goodies!!!

This week has been a little crazy. My kiddos have been getting into everything and making the biggest messes, I swear I've been cleaning constantly. Which is totally normal, but this week has been a little worse then normal. So it's been a little tiring, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. Love my kids! They are so darn cute and make everything worthwhile. So anyways, after taking 5 kids aged 5,4,3,2 and 1 to costco yesterday (my mom came too, i'm not that crazy), I was definitely worn out, but when I pulled into my house and saw this BEAUTIFUL box sitting at my door i was ECSTATIC!!! I hurried and got the kids in the house, then tore the box open to see what goodies were inside!!! After going through all my loot I did finally get all the groceries out of the car.

I thought it would be fun to show all the goodies that were in the box! Below we have: square scallopped tin that would be cute as a picture frame, Flower silicone cups (I really wanted to buy them when they had them, but didn't so I was SO excited about these), 2 little wooden words that say believe and laugh, a super cute and funky metal flower hook, some "crocheted" looking headbands (will make a great baby shower gift), some cute bottle caps, blue and white striped little envelope things, some super cute wire headbands that I am IN LOVE with ( already wore one and LOVED it), some super cute bow scrunchies, a cute brown with white polka dots hanging pocket thing (I wanted to buy this when they had it last year and didnt, so I was stoked!), 2 packaged of cupcake lines (cute).....

.....a super cute little kids whisk and spatula set (again, wanted to buy these when they had them and didn't), some little pink sparkly boots (future baby shower gift), some red organza bags, black shirt (size small, so will definitely gift this), some purple ribbon that says "happy spring from Cassie" (love personalized stuff), two packs of tulle circles (these will be great for showers or parties), some fun vinyl colors, cute little party/snack cups, a funky hook thing, some little bubble chipboard things....

all of it out of the table...

lastly, this little packet was inside the box too and it had all the jewelry goodies, a bunch of earring and necklace accessories, it even had some cute little charms that I need to find a bracket for (I"m a sucker for charm bracelets), then some bobby pin blanks and mini cabochons that I was really excited about (wanted to buy these when they had them, but didn't). WHEW, that's all of it! Isn't that an AMAZING amount of goodies!!! I was pretty much in heaven going through it all, LOVE!

 Now, if you're wondering how on earth I got all this great stuff, it is a Pick Your Plum Grab Box, they list them every few months on their website on a Saturday morning (I set my alarm for 5:45am Saturday so I could grab one, I was so glad I did because they sold out in 5 minutes). They don't tell you about them until the day before they post them. You can find out on their facebook page the day before, and the last few times, they've listed it on their website with their Friday deal. They post a daily deal everyday, you should totally check them out, I absolutely love their stuff!

Teachers...

Whipped up these cute teacher gifts! I really like how they turned out :) yay for all the ideas Pinterest gives me!

Kisses from the misses...

Had a gal request a kitchen themed board, so I mentioned one of my favorite kitchen quotes and she said she loved it! So I whipped this up an thought it turned out pretty cute!

Wow! I did it!

Last year one of my goals was to make a quilt! Well....the first week of December I decided it would be way fun to accomplish my goal AND make a wonderful gift for brycen's preschool teacher that was moving. I knew that she loved to read and I had some fabric Christmas story blocks. So I cut them out and chopped some strips and squares and threw them together. So I am happy to say... I HAVE MADE A QUILT! WOOT!!!

Greenie Care Package!

 An awesome friend of mine left on her mission in February (if your wondering about the our church click here), and ever since she left I have been wanting to send her a "greenie" care package. I originally saw the idea here while looking on pinterest one day. Well I ran to the store yesterday morning and grabbed all of these "green" goodies.

 I tucked them all nicely in this box (while walking around the store I found quacker pop ems, quacker oatmeal, pizza flavored goldfish crackers, lifesavers mints, gogo squeez apple sauce, popcorn, sunflower seeds, mike and ikes, ring pops, fruit roll ups, keebler mint chocolate cookies and gum all in green packaging)!

 Then proceeded to write "greenie" all over the box, I only had one green marker that happened to be a fine point sharpee, so it took a while to write all over it.

But I'm sure she will love getting it, so it was totally worth it!!!

Super Yummy and Inexpensive Ice Cream Cake!

 On Easter we celebrated my grandmothers, sister in laws and my baby girl's birthdays! It was SUPER fun! I love that I have such a wonderful relationship with all of family. Anyways, back to the reason for this post. Several years ago my bought an ice cream cake...it cost ALOT and it didn't even taste that good. There was hardly any cake in it. So my dad came up with wonderful idea to make our FAVORITE cake recipe and turn it into an ice cream cake (well really, my mom made the cake part and my dad did the ice cream part - woot for team work!). After watching my dad make them when I was in high school, i took over making them for birthdays, except for when it's mine, then my parents makes it :) They always made the 9x13 cakes, but I like to do 2 flavors at times since there are some that don't like chocolate. Long story short, here is how you make this AMAZINGLY DELICIOUS  ice cream cake:

The night before I made the cakes and froze them, in fact, I couldn't get the chocolate one to come out of the pan, so in trying to get it out it all broke apart. No worries, you press all the broken cake back into your pan and freeze it overnight. Then the next morning, turn it upside down and drop it on your counter a couple of times and voila, you'll have the perfect base for your scrumptious cake pop out of the pan in one piece! 

Now for the ice cream part, I buy baskin robbins ice cream, because it is seriously wonderful, if you're making a 9 inch round you'll need 1 quart, if you're making a 9x13 cake you'll want 2 quarts. I bought a quart of mint chocolate chip and a quart of pralines'n'cream. To speed up the process I microwaved each quart for 30 seconds, or you can let them sit out for 20-30 minutes. I then scooped it onto the cakes (it doesn't have to look pretty, you'll smooth it out in a bit). Try to scoop it somewhat evenly, you don't want the whole quart on half the cake. Then you may need to pop it in the freezer for about 30 minutes to let it harden a bit more.

 When you pull it back out of the freezer slowly work the into an even layer. I kept dipping my knife in warm water to make it go faster. Plus the ice cream will stick to your knife or spreader, so you'll want to rinse it off a couple of times. Once you the layer of ice cream pretty much smooth, and evenly layered over the cake, pop it back into the freezer to harden again. (yes, this is a process)

 Now it's time for your "frosting" layer. I used about half a quart of vanilla ice cream for this part, and I bought a store brand of vanilla bean to cut down on cost. Again, I microwave the icecream for about 30 seconds to speed up the process. Then I put globs of it all over the top of the cake, I spread it a little bit, but normally have to freeze it for another 30-60 minutes before I can finish it because it will melt quickly.

 So after it sits a little while longer in the freezer, you'll pull it out again and keep smoothing the ice cream around until it looks good (it may take 10 minutes of smoothing). And voila! You have a Baskin Robbin's Ice Cream Cake that has your favorite flavors of cake and ice cream! BONUS: It only cost 15$ for 2 cakes!!! How can you beat that, it costs way more than that for 1 cake this size. Now go enjoy your hard work (really it was only about an hour of work to whip up the cake batter to throw in the oven, and spread ice cream in between freezing - you can do whatever you want while the cake part bakes and the ice cream freezes).

And for those crazy people that don't like ice cream (or those lactose intolerant like my hubby), you can whip up some tasty cupcakes!

1 whole year!

My sweet baby girl turned 1 last week and we are celebrating it with family today! I can't believe she is already 1! Love her so much and she totally brightens my day!

So to celebrate I used my silhouette (best 'tool' ever!) to cut out this cute little 'happy birthday' design. I had bought some heat transfer vinyl through pickyourplum.com (best deal site EVER) last month and was super excited to use some. Seriously took 20 minutes to d, and turned out so cute! Here's a quick pic of the birthday girl sporting her cute onesie!

No Soliciting!

I was asked to make one and have had fun making a few different colors! I loved making these teal ones, and I love the shape if the black! Grateful to have had the opportunity to make them since they were so fun!

Family rules Signs!

Had fun making this a few weeks ago for a market I was selling at and had the opportunity to make the brown one for a gal this past week. I love all the family rules signs everywhere. I will say that I switched up "be happy" for "be awesome" because I think it's way more fitting! Being happy is great, but being Awesome is absolutely wonderful!!! I totally want to be awesome all the time!!

Oh and I will be posting all the time now, I finally downloaded the blogger app so I can now post super easily! Thanks to my amazing sister in laws for letting me in on that little secret :)

I look forward to showing you all my fun creations!!! I've becomes pretty obsessed with crafting lately...LoVe!!!

Craft tutorials for a friend...

 Hello Kitty Necklace, I set the glass tile over the printed image and traced it (pen or pencil works great).

 

then I use the glaze and squirted a little bit onto the tile, then I used the tip of the glaze bottle to swirl the glaze around the tile somewhat evenly.

 I then placed the tile over the image, glaze side down. I pressed it smoothly, some of the glaze may come out the sides, that's ok, you can use your finger to wipe it off and once you're done making it and it's all dry you can take a wet cloth to the glass to clean off any remaining residue. I used scissors to trim any paper that wasn't covered by the tile. Then you take the cement glue and glue the bail onto the back.

 

 Then thread the necklace through the bail and voila, you have a cute hello kitty necklace for your little girl!

 For the fabric pens, just start at the tip with a few dabs of hot glue, I actually dab a strip of the hot glue all the way up one side of the pen as I wrap the fabric around. When I get to the end I just do an extra dot of hot glue for the overlap of fabric. Then take your flower and hot glue it on. For the instructions of how to make the flowers click HERE. Hope this helps, I'll take some pictures later with how the pen looks with the flower, but this should allow you to make the two crafts :)

Vinyl Fun!

Someone else requested this and I had so much fun making it, the top was a little crooked so I redid it before I gave it to her.

A friend asked me to cut some vinyl for this tile and I was SO excited that I was actually able to! See that, the black vinyl is layered on the cream...makes me SO happy!

This was my fun day!

Target Junkies!

Hey all you Target Junkies, here's some great sites that show some awesome free stuff and great deals at target this week:

Cheap Hefty Storage bag - gallon and quart size zipper bags

Free Nuetrogena Facial Wipes

Huge Savings Trip to Target - I seriously check out this site weekly, it's got some great deals!

Some other good deals at Target - If you go to target.com and check out their coupons, they have:

1$ off one paper mate writing instrument - in their school section you can find a 10 pack of pens for 1$ - which makes it free with the coupon!

There's also a 50 cent's off one scotch magic tape - in the school section at target they have scotch tape for 1$ which makes it 50 cents!

There's also a danimals, 1$ off one coupon, my kids love these but I hate buying them unless they're on sale. A lot of times you can find 1$ off 2 danimals, then you could print 2 of the 1$ off 1 and get 1.50$ off each package.

Remember - you can use target and manufacturers coupons on the same item to get double the savings :) LOVE target!

So much to catch up on - check it out!

So about a month ago I won a super fun 25$ worth of craft goodies giveaway from Mindy Mae's Market! It came last week and it was SO much fun, that I hopped onto the gals website and ordered another goodie box - 50$ worth of craft stuff for 25$! It's shipping today, so I should get it by next week...i'll let you know all the fun stuff that's in it once it gets here :)

These giveaway goodies included - 3 washi tapes, a pouch of buttons, wooden earrings, pink paper straws, 10 belt bracelets, 2 pkgs of fabric tape and some neon green tags! All this stuff will come in handy for this big craft day a friend of mine and I are throwing!!! Can't wait!!!

Onto what I've been working on lately - I finally got up the desire to start crafting again...during the pregnancy I had NO desire at all, it sucked all my crafting mojo from me! SO...last week I went craft with my Silhouette Cameo cutter that I won back in December, I've used it everyday for the last week and am totally addicted!!! So for fun I put this on my craft room door:

Then two nights ago and decided I wanted to try cutting something for the wall...it was kinda tricky since I can only cute 12 inches at a time (need to order the 24 inch mat), but I did it! It's not perfect, but it's pretty good! Note - I took this at 10 o'clock at night, hence the awful lighting! Now I need to go to home depot and get some wood so that I can make a frame to go around the vinyl, I'll post a pic once it's done!!! I think it's going to look AWESOME!

At church I get to work with the 8 and 9 year old girls, we get together about twice a month to do something fun and to help them pass off goals. Last week the activity was at my house and we were supposed to talk about positive qualities in themselves and qualities they like in others. So i put together this little craft for them to make, they got to sand their wood, paint it and put the vinyl on. I think it went super smooth for 15 girls and 2 leaders :) They loved it!

Last week my mom, sister and I started a weekly dinner swap, we each cook twice a week for everyone, and then the last day of the week we can have leftovers or cook something for our families. We live within 2 minutes of each other which makes it super easy to drop off meals! It's SO nice not to have to cook everyday! So last week I attempted homemade Chicken Stir fry...I think it turned out pretty good! I LOVE snow peas so it was kind of hard to mess this up! I was practically drooling as i made it, the smell was so good!!! I can't find the recipe anymore, it was on all recipes, but all it had was cornstach, soysauce, ginger and dry sherry (I used chicken stock instead).

The week before 4th of July I got together with some girl friends to have a crafty afternoon, my wonderful husband cut all the wood for us, so when everyone came over we sanded, painted, sanded some more and glued in our little wire pieces and tied some twine around it all! I LOVED how it turned out, it was super cheap, easy and fun!

Homemade Flower Pens - has anyone else ever wondered how to make these? I looked up a tutorial and found out that you have to pull the bottom cap off the pen...this took some effort, but I was finally able to get all 6 caps off, though I did get a minor battle wound...

see - it's pretty minor, but it did hurt; I'm pretty sure I hit the bone, it was bruised for about a week!

after getting the caps off I hot glued around the top of the flower stem, then pressed it into the pen. Yep that's right, the stem goes inside the pen next to the pen ink thingy (totally technical here, can't tell)!

Once I shoved it into the pen a little bit of glue came out the top, I took advantage of that and wrapped the floral tape around the glue, all the way down the pen and back up to the flower. So it was some heavy duty wrapping ;)

And Voila! Cute flower pens :)

Click HERE for a great tutorial of how to make these!

Lemonade Cake - YUM!

Lemonade Layer Cake

Lately I've been on this new recipe kick! I'm loving trying out new recipes! Pinterest has such a wide selection of wonderful recipes linked that I just want to try them all! So I'm trying out at least 1 new recipe a week, of course some weeks I try more :)
I pinned this recipe months ago and finally made it, definitely a keeper! We all loved it and it was the first layered cake I made that didn't break...very exciting for me! So if I could do it, so can you :) it's fool proof! Just click on the name of the cake and it will take you to the recipe!

Teacher Gift :)

After lots of thought about trying to come up with the perfect teacher gift for my son's preschool teacher I finally found it!!! I put together all the gifts I liked into one BIG gift :)

I got the idea HERE! Where you do one thing for every letter of the alphabet. Then I used several of the other cute ideas I saw as inspiration for the letters...love it! My sister and I went in on it since both of our kids go to pre-school together. It would be fun to do among several parents and come up with bigger stuff to do :)

Here's our ABC's (I got several of my ideas HERE):
A - Our teacher is AW-some! (A&W rootbeer)
B - Thanks for helping us BLOOM! (Burpee flower seeds)
C - With you as our teacher we'll be one smart cookie! (container of mini oreos)
D - DONUT you know you are the best teacher! (hostess donuts)
E - You are EXTRA special! (EXTRA Gum)
F - You are o'FISH'ally the best! (sweedish fish)
G - Thanks for helping us GROW! (mini plant kit)
H - Thanks for making our school year BRIGHT! (highlighters)
I - To break the ice with your new kids and keep you sweet! (Icebreakers gum)
J - Thanks for sparking our creative juices! (juice boxes)
K - Teachers cannot live on apples alone, they need hugs and kisses too! (Hershey's Kisses)
L - Thanks for all the laughs! (Left, Right, Center Game - found it at Target)
M - We've had MOUNDS of fun! (Mounds bar)
N - Take NOTE, you are our favorite teacher! (sticky notes)
O - Stay cool this summer! ("otter pops")
P - Roses are red, violets are blue, this pencil bouquet is just for you! (pencils)
Q - Dairy Queen needs no words :) (5$ gift card to DQ)
R - We just love you to pieces! (reese's pieces)
S - We SKORED have you as our teacher! (SKOR bar)
T - Teacher's Treats - to share or not to share (Turtles)
U - Don't U-NO you're wonderful?! (UNO game)
V - for future spills (Viva paper towels)
W - You have been just WRITE for our kids! (pens)
X - X-TRA Special Gift (10$ Subway Gift Card)
Y - You were MINT to teach! (York Peppermint Patty)
Z - Best Teacher "Bar None" (Zero Bar)

Homemade Modge Podge

I couldn't find my modge podge the other day when I remembered I had pinned a link a while back for how to make homemade modge podge! I looked it up and was super excited that all I needed was elmers glue and water...super easy! So I grabbed an empty jar, dumped the bottle of glue in, then guesstimated about the same amount of water and shook it up. Voila! I tried it out and I love it so much more than bought modge podge, the coat is so much clearer and it's not as sticky, plus it dries even faster!! Super cheap too, I suggest this to everyone!!!

 

Oh and if anyone's wondering why i've hardly posted the last few months, here's what I've been cookin up:

This sweet little girl will be 4 weeks on Thursday!!

Shamrock Hats

My little guys St. Patty's Day party for preschool is tomorrow, so I decided to make something that I saw on pinterest :) These cute little Leprechaun Hats, made out of glad-ware snack size containers. They were super easy, the thing that took the longest was letting the paint dry.

I filled each one with 8 rolo's instead of chocolate coins since it was a little cheaper. Plus, rolo's have caramel, so they taste better!! Made 10 of them, one for him and each of his class mates. I'm sure he'll be super excited to share them tomorrow!!!

I found a shamrock clip-art on Microsoft word and just cut them out! Easy peasy! I used tacky glue for the ribbon, shamrock and yellow square.