Gallery Wall

I've been buying ugly art canvasses on clearance at HomeSense with a project in mind for a large empty wall in my family room. It's going to be a collection of quotes, photos and art that are meaningful to our family.

Here's a peek at one of the quotes I'm using:

(Originally I found a similar one to this on Pinterest which I loved, but the colors didn't quite work with my plan. I also discovered that it was slightly misquoted, so I made up my own in Publisher. Here's the talk it came from in entirety)

I'm hoping to finish off the other canvasses this weekend. I'll post up the rest when it's done.

SLC Temple

This is quite possibly my new favorite picture of the Salt Lake Temple. For an upcoming project I was looking for a great print of the Temple, and I had originally found another. Unfortunately when I tried to contact the photographer to ask about purchasing a digital copy of it that I use to print from I never heard a reply. Her loss. I found this one instead, which I love even more. Aren't those tulips so beautiful? It just makes the Temple look like a magical palace, and reminds me of the way it looked when my husband and I got married there in the spring almost 7 years ago. I'll tell you though none of our wedding pictures came out this good (sadly, being poor college students we cheaped out on a photographer and have regretted it ever since).

 

Salt Lake City Temple in the Spring, by Scott Jarvie found here. I'm not being paid to say this, but he's got a lot more really beautiful temple prints as well, and he allows free downloads for personal computer use. What a doll! I actually wanted a hard copy print to use in a project so I purchased a digital download from his site.

Mexican Star Pinata

For my son's 5th birthday we had a Mexican fiesta theme. I wanted to make a pinata and let him choose the style. Lucky for me he chose the traditional star shape which looks great and is fairly simple to create.

I wanted a perfectly round ball, so I bought a punching balloon from the dollar store. It blows up pretty big, so I ended up with quite a large pinata. The make the points of the star I cheated a little and used birthday hats (If you want a longer point then you can roll of newspaper into a cone shape).

After adding several layers of papier-mâché to my balloon, and letting it dry completely, I added my hats.

I started with one on top, and then about a third of the way down the balloon (longitude)  I added three more (just imagine a triangle shape when you are looking directly down on the pinata/bird's eye view). Then at about two-thirds of the way down I added three more hats with my "triangle" shape rotated slightly from the one above so they pointed out evenly in different spots on the pinata. (Sorry if this sounds very confusing!) To attach the hates you can either use hot-glue, or more strips of papier-mâché (that's what I did). There is no hat at the very bottom of the pinata, because it will actually get flipped up-side down and have a hole for the candy there.

After the hats were in place and dry, I popped the balloon inside, and made the opening a little bigger, and then attached string.

Next for decorating I decided to use a variety of colors. I have 7 cones, and wanted each to be a different color.

I started by decorating all the cones. I cut 4-5 inch lengths of streamers, with snips cut into them to make a fringe. Then, started at the tip I used more papier-mâché paste to attach them, wrapping them around the cone. overlapping slightly and working my way down to the base of each cone. 

For the body I cut lots of little squares from each color and then stuck them on with the paste in little clusters of color.

 A view from the bottom of the pinata.

I also added some skinny strips of streamers at the point of each cone. It's really pretty when the pinata swings on it's rope with the fluttering steamers! (sorry this isn't a great photo, I forgot to take one before the party started).

Cake Number 5

I'm really not much of a cake decorator. I want it to look good and all (things always taste better that look pretty, am I right?), but I just can't really get behind the idea of spending hours to decorate something that will be eaten in about 2 minutes by a bunch of unobservant five year-olds. When I saw this idea, I knew it was the cake for me! Simple and cute.

Once again, sorry for the poor quality pictures, I decorated this right as the guests were arriving (which is why this cake idea is so great, it only takes a few minutes to do), so I didn't have a chance to get a great picture of it.

Basically you ice the cake, the lay a piece of paper, whatever number or letter you're using in the center and carefully spoon the sprinkles all over the exposed icing. I learned pretty quick to just do a few sprinkles at a time, or else they just bounce off the cake and all over the counter. It helps to gently squish them into the icing too, so they stay in place. After the cake is covered remove the paper template and you're done!

Here's the birthday boy!

Diaper Cake

I made my first diaper cake this week. I like the simplicity of it. I didn't know the gender of the baby, so I tried to keep it pretty neutral. I can't believe how tricky it is to make these things, but I'm really happy with how it turned out.

¡El Cinco de Lincoln!

Last week we had my son Lincoln's birthday party. Sometime a few months ago I was brainstorming ideas for a theme, and I had a stroke of pure genius to do a Mexican Fiesta and "El Cinco de Lincoln" was born. Nothing like a good old fashioned Mexican Fiesta to chase away those mid-winter blues.

For the invitation I was able to find a free template online. Here's the front:

The inside:

I was so excited about the theme I really has a lot of fun planning and making decorations. We had a build your own Nachos table:

My mouth is watering looking at this spread: tortilla chips, shredded chicken, cilantro-lime rice, refried bean dip, salsa con queso, shredded cheese, guacamole, black beans, pico de gallo, tomato & cucumber salsa, sour cream, black olives, and green onions. Oh, and pineapple at the back too. 

 

 Drinks, and some treats: Las frutas and Mexican Jumping Beans.

 Festive ruffled streamers, and Mexican inspired banners:

(¡Feliz Cumpleaños! : Happy Birthday!)

 These are the same fiesta fans we had hanging in our dining room all week since Lincoln's actual birthday:

Once all of our little amigos arrived we got busy with activities. First off was Pin the Tail on the Burro.

Next each of the boys got to get dressed up like little Mariachi's with their own sombreros and homemade ponchos (from a garbage bag).

 They also made little maracas out of plastic spoons, Easter eggs filled with popcorn kernels and wrapped in masking tape.

 

El Don Diego himself. I'm so happy he agreed to wear his sombrero. It was adorable. 

Showing me his finished maracas:

 We had all the mariachis line up for a photo op. Adorable I say!

Next they had a little maracas race. They each lined up on one side of the gym and had to dance and shake their way across while we played la musica de los mariachis (aka Mariachi music). When we stopped the music they had to freeze in place and if they moved they'd start again. 

Honestly it was pretty cute and hilarious so we actually let them go on for awhile, going from one side of the room to the other before we actually declared a winner. 

After the Maracas race was everyone's favorite: A Piñata! I've actually been really excited about making one for the party even before I came up with the El Cinco de Mayo/Mexican theme. This one is the first I've ever made  and if I don't say so myself it's a beauty! I was actually pretty sad about it getting smashed to pieces though. After spending more hours than I can count making it I kind-of just wanted to hang it up in our house as part of our decor!

At first I was thinking of doing the classic burro shaped piñata, but I let Lincoln choose what he wanted, and I was very relieved when he chose a much simpler star shape. Here is a step by step of how I made it.

 

The boys loved hitting it. The great thing about homemade piñatas is that they are so much stronger and takes a long time to break them open so everyone gets a lot of hits. Each time one of the points of the star would get hit off the one of the boys would claim it and wear it like a party hat. After about 3 rotations I think we were all starting to get worried that it would never break, but fortunately at about the same time I was thinking that Tony Wood hit the strings at the top and it fell to the ground and then he proceeded to smash it open.

Zach Wood wearing "the ultimate party hat"

 Here is also the first birthday cake I've ever made.Instructions can be found here.

Shut The Front Door.

No really, shut the front door. It's so ugly I can't look at it anymore. When we first looked at this house I really didn't even notice the condition of the door (among other things, in my defense it was night time). Look at this sad front porch, not a very welcoming "welcome home" each day.

 Fortunately our landlord has been really good about letting us fix up some things around the house, and this was one of the first things on my list of things to do. It was tricky picking out a color at first. I wanted something that would really stand out, and look inviting. I took a photo and played around on my computer with a few options:

Green, Red

Yellow, Dark Blue

I've seen quite a few people paint their doors red in an effort to make them pop. This doesn't always turn out to be a good decision (in my opinion), but for awhile I was really wanting to do red (although it was one color our landlord specifically said not to use, along with black). I just thought that a red white and blue theme could really work here, but oh well. I didn't want to do yellow, because that's also been a bit too trendy lately, with yellow-grey combinations popping up everywhere. Blue seemed to be too much of the same and I was trying to get a fresh look for this house. So I settled on green. I had found some really cute houses on Pinterest of light blue houses with green doors that seemed quite charming.

While I was in the midst of trying to decide my husband and I were watching our semi-annual worldwide church conference on TV and I noticed that one of the speakers had a tie on that seemed to speak to me. The light blue color was so similar to our house and I just loved the stripes of cobalt blue and yellow. Aah, inspiration comes in the funniest places. Using a screen shot of the speaker I played around with my house picture to try and match his tie to a paint color I could use.

So I quickly abandoned my thought of a green door and headed off to the paint store to pick up some Daring Indigo by Behr. What really sealed the deal for me going back to blue was that it reminded me of the dress Kate Middleton wore to announce their engagement a few years ago, very elegant.

Now with a color picked out it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty. Or rather the rusty and musty.

Even once it got to this stage it looked so much better!

This sad little mail box had to go. 

I can't believe what a little bit of sanding and fresh coat of paint will do for curb appeal! So much more inviting. I love it, thanks Elder Clarke for wearing such a fetching tie for your general conference talk!

 I've since added a wreath, and am looking for a cute new mailbox (I saw an adorable red tall "Post" mailbox at HomeSense and really should have not passed it by because I think it's long gone).