Halloween Fun

Last year I did quite a few Halloween crafts but didn't get them on my blog until the holiday was over, so I've been waiting a whole year to post these ideas.

I got the printables and recipe for these Halloween cookies in a jar from Living Locurto - so cute!  We tried to do the paper tops like she has on her blog, but we couldn't get the paper to stay on, so we just added the ribbon instead.  We gave them out to the families my husband and I Visit and Home Teach.  The hardest part was finding the Halloween colored M&M's.  You have to look in the holiday section of stores, not the candy section. 

After years of buying different treat bags for Halloween that didn't last and fell apart I decided to make some cute ones for my two youngest boys out of black Walmart reusable cloth bags.

 

I just used fabric and black fusible web and Sharpie markers to make the bags with a pumpkin I just sketched out.  I got the first one done and showed my boys and they both said, "I just want the plain black one."  I was crushed :-(   I guess I should have made them with bats and skulls and they might have gone over better.  I made the other one anyway and made them take them Trick-or-Treating.  Maybe  someone, someday will see them and think they were cute.

 

At least the next ideas wer a hit!  On Halloween night we made personal Mummy Pizzas to go with butternut squash soup and a few nights before we made Mummies in Blankets for dinner.

After rolling out refrigerated crescent dough on a cutting board I cut it into strips with a pizza cutter.  Then the kids wrapped about 3 strips of dough around hotdogs leaving a little opening for eyes, and put them onto a cookie sheet to bake.

They added ketchup and mustard eyes to them after they came out of the oven.  They've already asked to make these again this year.

The Mummy Pizzas were made with frozen roll dough (thawed of course), pizza sauce, olives and strips of string cheese.

The string cheese didn't melt very well, but it was fast and easy.  But in the future I would just slice some mozzarella cheese up into strips.  Fun for the kids to make, cute, and pretty yummy for a mummy!

Thought I would share the pumpkin creations that the kids made themselves.  The little pumpkins were from our garden and Logan carved the big one.  Happy Halloween!

More Nugget Boxes

With Valentine's Day looming, I'm going to post some Christmas photos.  Don't worry, they are for Valentine's Day inspiration.

These are photos from the Hershey's Nugget Boxes I made for my kids' teachers and piano teacher for Christmas.  The labels I made using my digital scrapbooking supplies, but the box and wrap are made from heavy scrapbook paper.  You could also use scrapbook paper and letter stickers for the wraps, just cut the papers to 1"x3".  You could make a box of a certain size to fit any message.  My daughter made some for her friends for Christmas with 3 nuggets in brown/green and they spelled JOY.  But alas, we forgot to take a photo of them.

Here's the link to the Splitcoast Stampers website where you can get patterns of all sizes for making these cute boxes.  Be sure to search their photo gallery for tons of nugget box inspiration - it's where I get mine!

Here's a re-post of last year's teacher Valentine's day nugget boxes from this post.  You can also find more links to helpful websites in this post.

After making these twice now for my kids' piano teacher I have a problem.  She won't eat them.  She told my kids that they are too cute to eat.  I, however, don't have that problem with Hershey's nuggets. :-p

Baby Burpies

I have done many seasonal things I want to post, but who wants to see Halloween stuff in December?  So I guess I'll wait a year to post them.  So here's another quick non-seasonal post until I get going for real again.

It makes me feel really old, but a couple of months ago my niece had the first Great-grandchild of our family - a darling baby girl.  I was so excited to make something cute for a baby because there are so many great ideas out there now, and well, I'm just not in that phase of life anymore although these made me wish I was.  So after much browsing, debating and shopping, I decided to make some cute burprags from the wonderful tutorial I found on the blog of the amazing Abby from A FEATHERED NEST.  Love her.  She seems like such a talented but approachable person who really inspires me.  She has many other great baby things on her blog also, so if you are in that mode, be sure to check it out.

So here's my version:

I pre-washed the purchased cloth diapers and fabric so they would be ready for baby to use.  I altered the dimensions of the strip of fabric I cut out slightly from Abby's instructions to fit these cloth diapers better, but pretty much followed her steps exactly.

Here's the basket of Burpies I wrapped up for my niece and her baby:

I LOVED these fun fabrics that I found at Hobby Lobby, and the basket I got on clearance at Lowe's.  You could totally make burprags to match your baby's outfits!

What I would have given to have these when my kids were babies!  They were the spitty-uppiest (new word) kiddos that I have ever seen so I always had cloth diapers surrounding me.  I would have loved to have been surrounded by these.  Sure I got some cute little ones from friends and relatives who meant well, but I needed something BIG and ABSORBENT!  I think that's why I had to make her these.  I could think of nothing I would have wanted more (well, besides less spit-up).

The greatest part though, is that every time I see my neice she tells me how much she loves them and that she doesn't use anything else.  Makes me :)

The Bucket Hat

With all of the frequent snow storms we have been having, I have been spending a lot of time outside either shoveling or snow-blowing.

Here are my problems with that:

1. The coat that I wear for this purpose doesn't have a hood.
2. I have naturally curly hair. Lots of it. When it gets wet, even if I've straightened it, it goes back to curly.
3. I HATE knit hats. They are usually too tight and just really look dorky on me.

I was browsing blogs one night last week and I found this cute hat pattern on the Purl Bee blog. Here's the link to John's Favorite Bucket Hat. It didn't look tight, and the pattern looked easy, so I decided to give it a try.

The yarn they recommended was out of my price range, but I really liked this yarn that I found at Michael's that is 25% wool and SO soft and only $5/skein. I thought 1 skein would be enough, but I ran out with 1 row left, so I had to go get another. The pattern was really easy to follow and nothing hard in it. All you need to know are chain, single-crochet, slip stitch and how to count. I worked on it on-and-off one day while picking up kids, but I think from start to finish it took me about 2 hours. Now that I've done one I think I could do another in 1 hour.

Although I made this hat for myself, Logan made a much cuter model.

I think I got a bit reserved with the yarn when I started running out of my first skein near the end, so my stitches may have been tighter than they should be, it doesn't flare out as much as the one in the instructions.

I love my new hat. I even wear it around the house sometimes when I'm cold because it warms me right up. My family also loves my new hat because they have all asked me to make them one too.

Hershey's Nugget Boxes

I start browsing on one blog and link to another, then another, and so on until I forget where I started. There is so much creativity out there it just amazes me and I get lost in it - usually much too late at night. So I'm not sure what blog I heard about Nugget boxes on, but after seeing how cute they were Stauney and I decided to make them for teachers for Valentine's Day.

We found the patterns on a Split Coast Stampers thread. This lady has made all sizes of them from 3 up to, I think 24. If you look through the gallery on this site you can see pictures of tons of them in various sizes and styles. If you want to watch a video of how to assemble a 1/3 box you can go to this blog Chic n' Scratch. This is a WONDERFUL blog full of so many cute things!

The patterns do not print out full-size. So be aware that you are using them just to read the measurements off of. We did the Short 6 pieces box.

I decided to use my digital scrapbook stuff to make it easier, quicker, and cuter. This is how I printed off the wrappers to wrap around the Nuggets. You make each wrapper 1"x3" and print them on a regular paper, not cardsotck. Then I used the same papers and printed them on full sheets of cardstock to make the boxes and the sleeves to go around them. You could get 3 boxes this size from one 8 1/2"x11" piece of paper, and another for the 3 sleeves.
Stauney and I had a lot of fun designing these and I think they turned out a lot cuter than if we would have just wrapped plain pattern paper around them. I get almost all of my digi-scrap stuff free. There are many sites out there for free downloads. I have been signed up on Scrap Girls daily newsletter for years and they give you a freebie daily (two a day during Dec.), so that's probably where I got these papers and embellishments. I usually use Photoshop with my digital stuff, but for something simple like this I just used Microsoft Publisher to design the wrappers.

This photo shows them all finished. The gold wrapper Nuggets have almonds in them, the silver are plain, and the top middle one is the back of one of the pink boxes. Noah's teacher is a man, so he gets the red/black ones. You can also fit 1 small Kit Kat in the place of 3 nuggets. I also saw some really cute longer boxes, like a 1x6 with a full-sized candy bar in them.

I finished them off by adding a contrasting band of paper around the middle to keep it from opening in transportation and then hooking the tag on top of the band. They were pretty quick and simple to make once I got the hang of it. We are now planning boxes for other seasons. Be sure to check out the blogs I mentioned above for tons of more ideas for dressing up candy.

Now the only problem is they are too cute to eat! Noah's teacher probably won't have a problem with that though. He is a man after all.

I'm not afraid to admit it...

...I am a bargain shopper. I get a rush when find a great deal, and I found some that I have to share. Not all are done yet, so I'll post them later.

Last week I was reading my new favorite blog, Just A Girl, and found some very inspirational ideas. So after a trip to D.I. and one of my other favorites, Hobby Lobby, (oh, and Robert's too) I came home with the stuff I needed to copy two of her ideas:

Here's the link to her BE MINE? project where I got this idea.

My D.I. is just overflowing with old wooden cutouts from everyone's past projects. Here are the ones I found. I paid $1.00 for the little one and $2.00 for the big one. Seems a little steep for a bargain hunter like me, but if I waited to cut them out myself I would never get it done, so it was worth it.
I stripped the stuff off them, sanded them with my handy-dandy sander (that I love too) and re-applied new paint to the little heart (kind of a peachy-pink that I mixed). I liked the color I got after I sanded the big heart, so I left it.
Next, I traced some scrapbook paper a little bigger than the hearts and glued it on with Aleen's Tacky Glue. Then after it was good and dry I sanded the edges again with my sander to antique them. Then I applied 3 coats of Mod Podge over the paper, re-attached the wires when they were dry and - tada!

Aren't they cute? I only bought 2 pieces of paper for them. The stripes are the reverse side of the bigger flower paper. I tried putting a tag on the bigger heart, but I couldn't stand to cover up any of the paper that I love, so I just added the little bow.

The second idea I copied was from the I Found Something! idea.
So while I was at Hobby Lobby I was browsing the clearance section and found these candle stands for 60% off. I got both of them for $13.00. I was so excited because I needed something taller to put next to the clock on the basement fireplace mantle. I then looked at the prices of candles and wasn't happy (even with them 50% off). I was going to check Tai Pan later for candles, but then went to D.I. and found these candles for $2.00 each! I just wanted red ones and wasn't really picky about the smell or look of them because I knew I was going to wrap most of them with paper. But they were in perfect shape, still wrapped in plastic and even a smell I liked.

I couldn't find any black/white toile scrapbook paper to match my curtains, but I liked this pattern that I had in my digi-scrapbook files, so I printed it out. The ribbon is little b/w checks. I should have taken a close-up, sorry. The greatest part about this idea is that I can change the paper and ribbons anytime I want to.

You'll have to check out Just a Girl for more great ideas. I already have been inspired to do more, and check back later to see what else I found on this productive shopping trip (don't you love those!). As soon as the weather warms up a bit I will be back to work in my garage with my sander!