Thought this could have been a cute picture by the playset.  I was wrong.  Still, it is a nice full view of the dress, especially the sleeves, don't you think. [Click to see a larger version for the full effect of the face]  This is the part, where she tries to melt the dress off without touching it because her arms can't take the torture of the soft, light, warmth of poly-fil.  I'm the meanest mom.  I decided to make a princess costume for my 2nd grader the night before the school's Renaissance Fair. Yes. It makes sense to do this, you see, because had I planned to do it a week before, it would not have been realistic. After all, where would I find the time to delve into such a preposterous project. I would have to look for patterns for hours, pick the best one, then search for fabrics for hours, this would take several trips to the fabric store to find just the right fabrics, not to mention timing my purchase just right to take advantage of sales. And t...

[from marthastewart.com] I saw this organizing idea from Martha Stewart many years ago. Our small linen closet in the upstairs hallway finally got to me and I decided to plunge into this little project to add shelf dividers. Now, if you're a neat person, you don't really need to have these. If you have people in your family that still don't know where their shoes, underwear, and toys belong then this might help. Unfortunately, I don't have a before picture showing the closet vomiting out all it's contents because, like most projects now a days, I start them with absolutely no planning and out of pure desperation and necessity. I was having a little nervous breakdown while trying to put stuff back in there that simply wasn't going to fit, and also over the prospect of having to pull out all of the sheets and figure out what size they were because someone in my family, that is not very short, decided to jumble them all up! I explained the system to this per...

Cruise Almond Cake. I had already started eating it when I decided to take a picture of it. We recently got back from a cruise (we almost never go anywhere, so this was a first) in which I gained three pounds in five days.  That's because, the main activity on a cruise is eating.  While a lot of things were good and a few were terrible (i.e. the popcorn), only one thing really spoke to my heart -the almond cake. When something speaks to my heart this way, I want to keep eating it and only it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Unfortunately, I only had one piece and I could barely get that to go down due to the amount of food I had already ingested that day. When I got home, I was craving this deliciousness, but it was about nine o'clock at night, the kids were in bed, and I wasn't about to discover how to make almond cake.  So I figured I still had time to indulge myself without being serious about baking.  I ground up some sliced almonds and put them ...