I have a bunch of little sewing and knitting projects planned for Christmas gifts again this year: - maybe an Amy Butler bag or two, - some matching pajamas for the whole family from Heather Ross Mendocino fabric to start off a Christmas Eve tradition, and - some fast bow tie knitted scarfs because god knows anything bigger than that has a 50/50 chance of being left uncompleted - oh, and a little " village frock " from Sugar City for monkey pants which I plan to have done before Thanksgiving.

Trying to decide what to dress up the kids as this year didn't come to me very quickly. I certainly didn't plan to slave for hours over costumes that would probably only be worn once and likely be stained with sticky stuff, mangled, and who knows what. After shooting down the idea of Batman (for my 4 year old girl) and Robin (for my 1 year old boy), I decided to go back to basics and I couldn't resist this costume idea from MarthaStewart.com I convinced myself that I didn't really have to sew anything and it didn't really look too hard. And it wasn't. I did end up having to make the pilot's cap which could easily be found here due to time and money constraints. I'm not too fond of making up my own patterns for things so I searched high and low for a free pattern download for this very basic cap and came up with nothing. But somehow, I managed to make my own pattern in two different sizes even. And, it came out great (aside from the dreaded trip to J...

Having done the 3D pumpkin and frog cakes for my daughter's previous birthdays, I decided to do something more of a traditional cake shape but stylized this year. I thought I would do a cute polka dot and bows type of thing to tip the scales more towards a feminine balance. So a couple of days ago I came up with this idea inspired by a Meomi 's September desktop calendar that I totally loved. It didn't turn out exactly as I had envisioned it and I wish I had more time to have added a couple extra details. Because I've only been doing cakes in fondant, I'm not used to making decorations with butter cream anymore so my fern leaves were very blob-y. I should have used royal icing but that pesky time thing again. Although this cake is pretty gender neutral I think it fit the "cute" requirement I was looking for. "Monkey pants" gets so excited about cake she even ate the pine cone guy. She also caused me a lot more work when I left her eating her l...

For my daughter's upcoming birthday party, I decided I might try my hand at face painting. I collected some photos from the internet I liked, check out a book at the library, and bought some face paints at the party store. The face paints are not very cheap but cheaper than hiring a face painter, right. Here's a couple of the faces I've tried so far. Now if I can only get my face painting time down to ten minutes from twenty minutes a face for the party. I think I may have to enlist a volunteer to help out too. The painting part is actually much easier than it would seem. The only thing that makes it challenging is that the canvas is constantly moving around (at least my canvas). It's not too hard to wash off, but the black takes a bit more scrubbing as the paint is grease or oil based. It makes for a fun activity especially as it gets too cold to go outside. My 3-year old thought it was "amazing" when she looked in the mirror. I even talked my husband i...

This is the first wedding cake I've ever made. It's a very simple cake but it was very stressful not knowing if I would be able to pull it off for such an important occasion. There's not exactly a plan B scenarios if something goes wrong. But it all worked out. The cake was french vanilla with raspberry filling; butter cream on the outside covered with ivory " Fondx " fondant. This was the first time using this fondant which I had to order online. I've only used Wilton fondant before on birthday cakes. I was hoping this fondant would be more workable and taste better, plus I wanted to get one that was already colored ivory. I took a gamble but it paid off. It had a lot more elasticity than the Wilton fondant so it didn't wrinkle as much when covering the cakes and it tasted way better, more natural. I used a milk glass stand from a set of stands I got for my birthday last year. I love these cake stands because I have them in four different sizes and they ...

Here is the flower girl dress I made for my daughter. I don't have any pictures of the sewing progress because I usually didn't get started working on it until late at night. It looked like a simple enough pattern ( McCalls 5570 ), after all, little girl dresses are pretty simple, a plain bodice with a gathered skirt, right. I was somewhat oblivious to all the layers that are required to go under a dress like this to make it puffy specially because the length was all the way to the floor. The puckered up effect also made it hard to determine the right length as the pattern had no finished length measurements for the dress. My daughter turns 4 next month, but patterns in my experience always run big so I started off making the 3 year old bodice size. It was too big. I had to unpick it all and make the 2 year old size. I also ended up cutting the skirt for the 2 year old size as it look gigantic. This size turned out exactly right even though my daughter is not small. I was a bit...

Apparently, staying at home is proving to be more work than going to work. And somehow, more time at home means less time overall. Still trying to make sense of that but really enjoying being at home. This month I'm ramping up for a few projects though; the first of which was a cake for my son's first birthday. This cake took me .... um, all day long. I almost started regretting it as soon as I got into the third animal but I decided to press on. This cake is from Debbie Brown's 50 Easy Party Cakes which is probably a very misleading title for this book but I guess they are easy compared to the cakes in the rest of her books (of which I have purchased none because the "easy cakes" are still proving very challenging for me). This is the first cake I've made that we decided not to cut and serve during the party as we were having more family visiting the next day and we wanted it to have a longer viewing life. Really, it doesn't make any sense not to cut it....