Baby Shower - Animals

This past weekend I hosted a baby shower for probably the prettiest 9 mth pregnant woman I know. She is my beautiful cousin, Marguerite. Her and her husband will be welcoming their 4th child, Christopher, any time now. Since she has an animal theme for his room I decided to have the baby shower themed in animals as well. Check out some pictures of the items I made for the shower;

Now usually these are used for popcorn, but since we went with animals, I decided to put animal crackers in them :) I used 8.5x11 animal printed paper from Hobby Lobby and kept them together with Wasbi tape.  I dug holes into a styrafoam block wrapped in blue tissue paper to hold them together...

I found these cute zebra and monkey cupcake toppers at Hobby Lobby for .99 along with the zebra cupcake liners. Yummy yellow cupcakes with milk chocolate icing. Added with the cupcakes, I added Little Debbie Zebra Cakes and green crimped paper as grass around the platter...

Mommy-to-be has been craving chocolate, so I went all out for this and oh my did I get compliments on this cake! The cake was Duncan's Devil's Cake with Hershey's Dark Chocolate icing. In the middle of the cakes I put in homemade J-E-L-L-O banana pudding topped with Hershey's chocolate chips and surrounded by coconut. The cake was so moist and delicious!

Now my intention with the pudding was to use small clear plastic shot glasses adding layers of banana and chocolate pudding topped with crushed Oreos, but that didn't work out. I searched every aisle of WalMart looking for the big cans of pudding but nothing. I had to settle for the individual packs of pudding topped with crushed M&M Cookies.

Here are some pictures of the table and of the beautiful mother-to-be...

Thankfully my sister put in her talent as well and created some adorable gifts for her (thanks to Pinterest)

Weekend Wrap-Up

What a hectic/eventful, but very productive weekend it has been! This past Friday my husband and I celebrated 5 years of marriage - yay! - and I'm sad to say I don't have any pictures to share :( I didn't really want to carry around my big camera around so I figured my phone would make-do, until it ran out of juice and there goes my plan out the window. We dropped the kids off at grandma's and headed out to PF Changs to devour their delicious lettuce wraps, crispy honey chicken, mongolian beef and shot glass desserts. It was even better than expected! The waitress gave us a complimentary appetizer called spicy green beans - and those were really good, too! Definitely recommend them - and take it from the pickest eater of them all - they weren't spicy. Our local PFC is somewhat attached to our mall, so we attempted to walk off our dinner while splurging a little here and there. We had such a hard time deciding on a movie to see, so we cancelled those plans and headed down to nice attraction in the city called, The Water Gardens. It's become an even better place to visit since our famous Harbor Bridge added a spectacle of lights! A friend of mine who is a photographer captured the beautiful scene in this picture...

Is that not beautiful?!?! She has amazing talent that makes this all the better! I had a lovely time being in each other's company, loving on the wonderful husband I have! It's kinda funny cause even though we had a scheduled date night as husband and wife, we never lost the title of mommy and daddy. We went to pick up our kids and surprise, surprise, our little one was a hot tamale! All weekend I've been nurse mommy to my little princess with motrin in one hand and tissues in another. Staying in all weekend did allow show off some of my projects that I did while my creative juices were flowing with a mix of cleaning/rearranging. I started out my switching out all our old pictures and replacing them with updated ones. I don't have any 'before and after' pictures, but here is what I did...
Our fireplace has a great brick ledge that I used to display pictures...

Our boys got this area...our son graduating from Pre-K, our oldest loves sharks, so I put that picture of him up and I captured a really cool looking picture of Jeremy at the park, so that went up, too. In the double frame are some pretty old pictures, but I just love what they capture - everytime I look at it it just expresses so much about them.

I picked up this 'Family Rules' poster from Hobby Lobby for 40% off and put that next to the book shelf with my recently alphabatized books and updated family pictures. 

I know you've seen Valentine mantels every on Pinterest and on the blogs, but as a starter, here is my Valentine display. I had found some free printables online for each holiday/season - bought a frame for $1 from the Dollar Store along with some flowers from there and a vase I had under the sink and taaadaaaa...a very simple but cute holiday mantle. Now I know it's usually on the mantle above the fireplace, but that's currently our large family portrait and pictures of my husband and I from our first year of "dating". Our foyer table didn't really have much gonig on, so I thought that would be a great location for our friends as they come in. I plan on adding more, but for right now, this'll do...

I got this idea from this blog I came across. Thought it would be a great to make one for each of my kids...I haven't yet bought the frames, but that's the least of the project. I love how each one is (obviously) very personal to each child. It gives them history of themself, their name, origin of their name and a short description of their personality. 

  Oh! I did manage to sneak out of the house to find a gooooood winter coat for New York (t-minus 3 days!!). I found this jacket Burlington Coat Factory for just $50, regularly $150! It's so warm and I think it'll be perfect for standing outside of The Today Show on Friday :) Mostly all the department stores are having a 40-50% discount off already clearanced winter clothes - I found a beanie and scarf at Abercrombie & Fitch for just a total of $18. Express was another place I found with great finds - I bought a pair of $108 jeans and paid $32! Whoo! That's a deal!

And this here is my sweet little princess. She spent a lot of time in her bed this weekend :( I just hate when babies-kids are sick, don't you?

So, this was my weekend wrap-up. How was yours?

Felt Bows & Flowers

So I was checking out Little Miss Momma's tutorial on pom pom's and also another blog where there was a quick how-to on rosettes and thought, I can totally do that!! So I did. While I was searching through my daughter's clothes to do the freezer paper transfer I came across a shirt to work my skill on these flowers. Here is the shirt before:

The bottom shows the ruffles that I knew would be perfect for the rosette and I cut small circles out of the rest of the shirt to make the pom pom.  Again, you must forgive the quality of the pictures!! I still haven't got a new card for my camera &&& I haven't gone to get batteries, so here we are using my camera phone again!!

I wasn't too thrilled on how the pom pom came out...I think if the fabric was a bit heavier it might have stood well. 
NEXT I was on to making felt bows :) I was excited to see how this would work out. I bought one sheet of felt from HL and went at it.  I hadn't seen a tutorial on this, but I carefully inspected pictures I had seen on some etsy shops and figured it wouldn't be too hard to do. So here it is...

Really simple...sorry I was too excited to add step by step...

I had a clip laying around in the basket of bows so I thru that on back (glued)

Here is the side view so that you can see the width

And this is my beauty Sophia...

Isn't it too cute!! I love it! And super cheap! Suuuuper cheap!! 

I'm linking these to;