Hugs & Kisses

Good morning! We hope everyone is having a great week so far, and thank goodness it's already Thursday. The last few days have been going by kind of slow here. Maybe it's the dreary weather we've been having. It's been a few days since we've posted, but we've been coming home and napping. It's an exciting life we live.

When I started working on this, it wasn't supposed to be a card. It didn't come out quite like it was planned. I really wanted to use the saying on a wall hanging, but unfortunately, it wasn't working out. I found this cut with a little couple and thought it was a perfect fit for the quote. It's not perfect, but it's still kind of cute!
Thanks for stopping by this morning! Have a great day.

So we just had to double post today! We just got this beautiful piece of artwork from our good friend. We wanted something to put over the couch in the empty space.

She takes pictures and does them in oil pastels. Here's the original picture of Mount Rainier that we took from our apartment.

 It looks great hanging up on our big (not so bare any more) wall.

Check out her etsy shop at http://www.etsy.com/shop/TakeTwoDrawings!!

DIY Kindle Book Cover

We both got Kindles for Christmas this year and have been trying to find a case for them. The ones we've found are either too small or just too expensive. So after doing a Pinterest search, I found a couple of different types. I wanted a little more than just a sleeve, but also kind of like a book, too. Here's what I came up with.

 Since this was a first-try sample type, it doesn't look quite as awesome as I'd hoped. It doesn't look too bad, but hopefully the next one will come out even better. There are some things that I will change on the next one.

I used a cheap-o composition book as the base of the cover, and lots of hot glue. I'm going to do a tutorial on it when I make the next one for sister. (I kind of have to make her one. She made the beautiful flower on the front!)

Here it is standing up so you can use it on a table or other flat surface.

Thanks for stopping by!

Happy Birthday!

Good morning! Today's one of our really good friends birthday, and here's a little something we made her.

We wanted to try making a candy cake, since you can't send cupcakes too easily. You can tell that it's our first one, but I'm sure she'll appreciate the Starbursts and chocolates. What teacher wouldn't like to come home to some chocolate after a hard day? The candles on top make it easier to tell that it's supposed to be a birthday cake, as long as they aren't lit. We wouldn't want any melting chocolate.

And here's the card that goes with it. We used the same color-scheme from the cake to the card. It is a little hard to tell, but the front of the card says "birthday wishes". We used the same paper design for the words as we did for the band around the cake. The inside of the card says, "Wishing you a very sweet birthday!" And, of course, we had to add some sparkle to the card, with a few red rhinestones along the edge.
Thanks for stopping by! Hope everyone has a wonderful day!

Cupcake Saturday!

I hope everyone is having a great weekend so far! It's been pretty productive here and hopefully it will continue. And as our east coast friends have been having really frigid temperatures, it's been almost spring-like here. Almost. We've had some "sun breaks" the last few days, which has been great.

Well, we have some cute little cupcakes to share with you today. They aren't really Valentine-y, but the color definitely is. These are Cheery-Cherry Vanilla Cupcakes.

The cupcake is a vanilla cupcake with cherry pieces and it's topped with a cherry vanilla frosting, and garnished with a maraschino cherry on top.

Even though they taste great, my favorite part of these are the wrappers. We found them at the dollar area of Michaels and thought they were perfect for Valentine cupcakes, or any cupcakes really! The paisley design is so pretty.

Thanks for stopping by!

A Change from the Norm- A Super Simple DIY

Happy Friday night, everyone! I know it's practically Saturday morning, but we hope you all have had a fantabulous week and have plans to enjoy the weekend. Today was the perfect end to a pretty dreary week here- 50 degrees and sun! That's like spring back home!! Oh, so much better than bone chilling temperatures and snow. There's room on the couch for anyone who wants to visit! Today's project is a little different from most of our posts, but it can be used in either warm weather or cold, or just to wear around the house.
Since most of the schools around here had half-days (silly, I know), I was 'fortunate' to start my weekend a bit early. When I woke up this morning, I had big ideas on how to spend my day. The biggest one was cleaning. It needed to be done. But no one really likes to clean, me included, so my brain decided it wanted to do something else more fun. I could have done a paper project (and probably should have), but I really wanted to make something out of fabric. One of the accessories I like to add to an outfit is a little scarf, sometimes to add a pop of color, others because some of the classrooms get uncomfortably cold. We have a huge bin in the closet full of scrap fabric and so I decided to make a scarf with some of the scraps. This is what I came up with:

(It was either the lamp or the vacuum cleaner...my model has gone to bed and I haven't quite mastered the art of taking good self-portraits.)
Now, it was super easy to make this scarf. The project (if done correctly the first time) could be done in under an hour and with only a little bit of fabric. After spending more than enough time trying to figure out what kind of scarf would look good in white flannel (there are quite a few differnet types- scarves, fringed, frayed), I decided to make a 'curly' scarf. There are a whole bunch of tutorials on how to make these, but the idea is super simple. You take your fabric (old t-shirts work well, too) and double layer it. Trace a circle, about 10" in diameter, onto the fabric and cut it out (for an 'adult' length. The bigger the circle, the longer the scarf.) The next step is to cut both layers into a spiral. They don't have to be perfect and you can most likely cut more than one at a time. My scarf has 10 strips, but you can add more to fluff it up. I wouldn't go smaller than this. Find the half-way point of each strip and then put it on. It's that simple. You can add a few stitches to the back to keep the layers in place, but they've stayed pretty well all day, even after taking it off a few times. Onto the flower:

This is where I spent most of my time- trying to figure out what kind of flower I wanted to add to the scarf. I tried the rolled ones, but it was just not working for me. It was a hot mess- figuratively and literally, with all the glue from the hot glue gun. After three failed attempts, I decided on this one. There are also tutorials out there on how to make these, but again, they're super easy. This is the tutorial that I followed. I cut out a 3.5" flower from some black and pink fabric and tulle. She said to use 9 flowers, but I added a few more to make it a bit fuller (OK, I also misread one of the directions and glued my black layer down by accident.) I folded the matching tulle into the flower, to give it a little pizzazz. I sandwiched a cheap black elastic between two pieces of felt, so my flower can be interchangeable. This flower just happened to match the rest of my outfit (socks included) quite nicely! I guess tomorrow's project is to make some more flowers. Or to continue cleaning....such a hard decision.
Thanks so much for stopping by! Join us tomorrow for another Cupcake Saturday!

Bamboozled!

Good Thursday evening! We hope everyone has had a wonderful week so far. Tomorrow is finally Friday, and it happens to be a half-day for most of the schools around here. ALthough we can't complain because it has been a short week.
Anyway, the idea for today's project came to mind yesterday, and it was completed today. Some of our favorite projects use fun puns, and there are plenty of them come Valentine's Day. One of the puns we found was the basis of today's layout:

How cute is that saying- "bamboozled by love"?! This is a simple 12x12 layout we created, and it includes two photo mats- one 4x6" and one 4x4". And our favorite part of the layout? The two little panda bears:

So the color choices were a little hard to work with when it came to the bears beause we wanted to work with the colors in the fun photo mats and not add new ones. We decided to go with a light pink 'boy' and a darker pink 'girl', and the little bows add a nice touch to each one. We added some little gems to the heart to accent it a bit.

This picture shows the little bamboo border we added to the larger photo mat. You can't have a panda-themed page without including some bamboo- and we almost forgot to include it! And the little strips on the top and bottom were cut out with a new toy we got last weekend. It is a paper cutter that cuts fun borders. This one is like a torn edge.
How cute is this layout?! Now we just need to find someone to use it for...It doesn't help that we finished putting this together and writing the post for it while watching tonight's Glee. Those darn high school crushes. Anyway, thanks for stopping by!