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!

Rock Path in Bloom

Thank heaven's all of the spring rain has finally let up a bit.  It did wonders for my flowers (and weeds too unfortunately), and it's hard to imagine needing sprinklers again.
My front yard flowers are in full bloom, or nearing, so I thought I'd share some of the recent beauty.  It even looks better now that my Mom has been staying with us for about a week and weeded!

So from this previous post FALL PROJECTS from a while back I showed the new pathway that I put in leading up to my front door.  Here's a photo of what it looked like just after it was finished.

And here it is now.  Not from the same angle though because the irises are so big it wouldn't show any of the rest of it.

Most of this I just transplanted from other areas, some I brought with me from my former yard, and some I got from family and neighbors.  I have many varieties of sedums, some lamium and some creeping thyme that has filled in nicely between  the stepping stones.  Last year I filled in empty spaces with annuals while I waited for them to fill in, but this year they are looking gorgeous and make a patchwork quilt of color on the ground.

I had daffodils that came up in the spring, and hope to add more bulbs this fall.

Another friendly insect to pose for me on one of the sedums, which I love because you just break off a chunk and throw it in the ground and it grows!  That's how I got the area so filled in cheaply.  Hardly needs water also.

We also have a very interesting cross-pollination side-effect that has happened in the front yard.  Our house had white iris:

My Mom and Dad brought me some purple iris:

So the formerly white ones in between the two now produce these irises - which I LOVE!

And even though the petals are about to fall off of this Peony I have to share it.  They are the same color as the ones my Grandmother had planted in the house I grew up in, so the scent always brings back childhood memories.

And since my Mom brought Chloe out front and watch while she weeded, we also get to enjoy this photo of a very happy Beagle!

More teacher appreciation

No, I haven't dropped off the face of the earth, but I have been working on some big projects (and have more to come) that have been taking all of my time.  I hope to blog about them soon.

In the meantime, here's something that may, or may not be useful for the rest of the school year.  We just had our teacher appreciation last week and I kept it really simple due to lack of time.  I bought cute necklaces at a boutique and put them in pink bags with some candy and chocolate and used these for the toppers.

I was recently made Relief Society president in my church and we wanted to do something fun for the women in our Ward for Mother's Day to let them know they are special.  My counselors, secretary and myself made some chocolate covered popcorn to hand out, and this is the topper I made for the baggies.  So I just modified it slightly with a new saying for the teachers gifts.

The clipart was in my digi-scrap files so I don't know where it came from, but it was a black and white image that I colored in Photoshop.  I got the quotes from one of my new favorite sources.  Goodreads.com has a quote section where you can browse through tons of quotes and then save your favorites in your own section to refer back to easily.  Very helpful and fast.


So I made two easy, simple, cute and different gifts for the work of one!  Yes, I'm lazy, but I like to think of myself as resourceful too!

Teacher Appreciation Gifts

Unbelievably, the end of the school year is soon upon us.  So it's nearing the time of year that we thank those who put up with our children day after day so that we can keep our sanity.  Oh yeah, and so that they can get an amazing education too.

Last year, the day before the end of Teacher Appreciation Week I finally came up with this idea.  So I'm sharing it a bit early this year in hopes that I can save someone else from a last-minute scramble.

My original idea was just for the vases filled with yellow candies to go with the bee tags, but then I thought the bees would like some flowers to buzz around too.

I filled the vases with all of the gold and yellow wrapped candies I could find: Rolos, Wherther's caramels, butterscotch candies, Lindt truffles, mini Butterfinger candy bars, and Hershey's nuggets.  (I wanted Bit-O-Honey candies but couldn't find them anywhere!)

Then I made some flowers out of my digital scrapbook supplies in Photoshop, cut them out, stuck them through a wooden skewer, and then stuck a Lindt truffle on the top.  I added one bee on a wire buzzing in the air around the flowers and some more with pop-dots on the tags and flowers.  Then a black ribbon to finish it off.

This worked for two teachers, but Noah had a man teacher, so the flower idea didn't fit.  So this is what I came up with for him.

I also made a different variation for an inexpensive and easy gift for a friend's birthday using a clay pot with a Styrofoam ball in the middle to support the wooden skewers.

I covered the white ball with brown crinkly paper filler and strawberry candies. It would have been even cuter to cover the skewers with green floral tape and add leaves.  Or you could use big silk flowers with the truffles in the center of those.  To make a nicer gift you could also fan-fold money to use for the leaves and hook them on with mini-rubber bands.

I LOVE Lindt truffles.  If you do to, make sure you buy extras to taste-test before you give them out, because I'm sure you could use a little appreciation also.

Time to get my green thumb ready

The snow is gone, my daffodils are emerging, things need pruned, the Burpee catalog has been requested - spring is here!  I have so many projects I need to be working on, but I really wanted to get this post up.  These photos make me so happy, and that's what spring is all about.

Last year we spent a ridiculous amount of money creating a new garden space.  Not just any ol' tilled up piece of ground though, we built my actual dream garden!  Yeah, I know, who has that?  ME!  I wanted a pretty space to garden in.  Neat, organized, weed-free and fenced to keep our animals out (it partially worked).  My husband and I picked a spot, sprayed the grass, and then proceeded to spend enough money on it to daily say, "This garden better produce lots of food, 'cause we're gonna need to live off it." as we filled it with wood, dirt and rocks.

My parents started doing raised bed gardens like 25 years ago with great success.  So with the resurgence of the Square-Foot Gardening craze due to the economy, we jumped on the band wagon.  We had been planning to do raised beds, and it was finally the year to get that project done.

PART 1:
We ended up with a plan that has 256 sq ft of garden space!  Yes, that's enough to feed a small village.  But we do have 3 boys, remember?  It took us about a month to get it all done, so we ended up planting just after Memorial Day.  Sooooo......da da da DA!  Here it is a few weeks after planting!

The fencing is pricey, and the same we use for our animals, but it's sturdy and we use it as a support also.  The front edge, where the gate is, we plan on putting an arbor over the gate and planting grape vines along the fence this year.  The small box on the right center is my herb garden, and the one on the left is my strawberry patch.

My neighbors probably thought I was a little crazy because I spent so much time photographing my garden, but here are the photos of my lovely little vegetables.

Beets (yeah, I know - duh!)

 

 Bush beans.

Cucumber vines.

Squash blossom.

Cabbage (ended up going in the compost bin later after a bug infestation).

Strawberry flower blossoms.  We got SO many strawberries off our first year plants!  I had plenty of help picking them, none ever actually made it into the house.

Romaine lettuce.

My one and ONLY spaghetti squash that my dog didn't reach through the fence and eat.  Apparently she has a thing for squash and pumpkins.  They will be moved further in this year.

Lovely green tomatoes.

Cherry and Pear tomatoes.  SO yummy and sweet.  Makes my mouth water just looking at the photo.  I totally snacked on these every day when I watered.

My butternut squash took over half of the garden like a giant squid!  But we got some great squash from it that turned into the most awesome soup.  I'm preparing to post the recipe soon.

I'm so proud of this photo.  Tears.  I not only grew these two blond cuties, but the watermelon they are holding also!  Yes.  I grew a watermelon.  The plan was for the kids to partner up and help raise certain parts of the garden.  They planted, I ended up doing the rest of everything with some help watering, and picking.  But they all got to decide some of what was planted in their boxes.  They wanted watermelon, so we tried it and I was totally amazed that it worked.  I had never planted watermelon before and this Sugar Baby was so good and sweet.

PART 2:

So, after all that planting, I needed a way to remember what I had planted, where, what varieties, and how it worked out.  I found some garden planner ideas, and this is what I came up with for my garden.

 

Front: Really simple design for now in a 1 inch binder.

On the back I have the whole garden plan labeled.

Each box corresponds with it's letter on the plan.

On the right side of the page is a place for the info.  I HIGHLY reccomend Scarlet Nantes carrots!

Close-up of my lovely little herb garden plan.

I just used Microsoft Publisher to do all this, so it was really easy.  I printed everything on cardstock to make it sturdy, and the blank pages in between, will be for photos.  Now that I'm done with 2009 they'll go into page protectors to keep them clean and I'll print out new pages for this year.  If you click on the photos you can read them larger to see more of the details of my garden.

The best part of our garden was that nothing went to waste.  Anything we didn't eat or didn't work out, went to the chickens to eat, or into the compost bin.  As you can see, it really made me happy, and I can't wait to get started again.  It was a huge initial investment and a lot of work, but this year, other than cleaning up old plants and re-stringing, it's ready to go.  Hopefully I'll be planting, and eating, spinach soon.  Of course I'll take photos.

When Cupids Go Bad

My six year old son Evan loves to draw. He has been drawing a holiday scene (or two) every month on his much beloved IKEA easel whiteboard.  I do my best to capture the images with my camera before someone comes along with another idea and erases them.  I get a real kick out of his perception of things and his creativity.  Here are some recent favorites:

 

I thought the castle scene with the bats and dragons was nice, until I noticed my name (and the rest of the family's) on headstones along the grassy hillside.  It's good to know we're all buried together though.

Then the alien invasion picture was interesting.  I personally would have a hard time walking with that many legs (upper right corner).

A family favorite was the mad scientist for Halloween.  The skeleton was a nice touch, as were the skulls on his shirt, and even Spiderman dropped in.  But I loved the fact that he had a remote to fly in the airplane that dropped little mice by parachute all through the scene.

But when I asked him to draw me a nice Valentines picture and I got this, I wonder if I should start to worry?

Yes, those are cupids.  Shooting each other.  And due to the quadruple weaponed yellow cupid in the upper left and the "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh" in the bottom right corner, I don't think they had love in mind.  But, at least I know Evan's interpretation.