Cool Thing- Clair's Creations

Ok, my friend Clair is the most creative person I know, especially when it comes to baking. I've been wanting to post some of the things that she has made for a while. For our daughter's 5th birthday she wanted to have a ladybug party, and Clair offered to make her cake along with some cupcakes- so we would have enough to feed the crowd.

They turned out so cute!

Carissa loved it!

We also had a squirrel invasion in our house this past May. I went down to our basement to grab something from the dryer one morning before taking the kiddos to school. When I opened the door I noticed that a bag of chocolate chips from our food storage was opened and scattered on the floor. My first thought was that the kids had gotten into them, but then I turned my head to the left to be greeted by a squirrel perched on top of a shelf in our basement. He looked as if he were ready to pounce on me at any moment, so of course I did what any sensible person would do. I screamed, turned and shut the door as fast as I could, then ran upstairs and called my husband! Animal control came and got rid of that squirrel, but 4 more followed. They were hiding in the ceiling of our basement. We had to set live traps for them and then take them to the local park to release them. Seriously, who gets squirrels in their house? This whole experience was captured on Facebook (it was way too crazynot to be), so when we showed up at baseball practice Clair had these cookies for us:

Complete with chocolate chips! :)

Clair makes all kinds of cool things. If you are interested in contacting her to make something for your next big event or squirrel invasion, you can find her at:
http://clairscreations.blogspot.com/p/clairs-cookie-co.html

Lemonade Cookies

I got this idea from Parents Magazine in their Cookie Jar section of the August 2010 issue. The cookies looked so cute in the magazine, and I loved the idea of using lemonade mix in cookies. I thought the kids would love it! They were fun to mix up and make, but they didn't quite turn out like I thought.

The sugar melted, on the sides of the cookies, so they ended up being stuck together on the pan in one big sheet of melted sugar. I may have used the wrong kind of sugar, or maybe I should have altered the recipe and put the sugar on after the cookies were baked instead of before.

I also had problems with my cookies coming out nice and smooth like in the picture, and the icing that I mixed up ended up being too runny. I bet my friend, Clair, could have made these look even better than the picture. She's amazing!!! Anyway, I ended up with cookies that weren't that pretty to look at and with the sugar mess they were a little hard to separate, but I bet you're wondering how they tasted. That's the most important thing when it comes to baked goodies right!?! They were pretty good, but not a huge hit. The lemon flavor was kind of strong, and had a bit of an after taste. Maybe from the powdered lemonade mix? My 3 & 5 year old wouldn't take more than a bite, and the older people in our house ate them more because they were there than because they were yummy. LOL.

If you want to give these cookies a try you can find the recipe at:

http://www.parents.com/recipe/cookies/lemon-slices/

I'd love to see pictures of your attempt, whether it's a flop or a success!


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Super Great Idea- Edible Crayons!

My kids love to color, and these are just super cute! Check it out:

http://thecraftingchicks.com/2010/07/take-that-crayon-out-of-your-mouth.html

Foam Frames

This was an activity that my sister and I did with the kids in our family. It was super fun and easy. You just need foam frames, foam sheets, magnets, foam letter stickers and shapes. You could use anything you want to decorate the frames with. You could use glitter, paint, markers, pom pom balls... the list is endless. Then print off some pictures for the kids to choose from. Half of the fun for them was going through the pictures and picking the one they wanted for their frame.

You just glue the frame to a sheet of foam, then decorate the frame. We did this before adding the picture to keep the picture from getting messed up while we were decorating. Let the frame dry if necessary, especially if you attached your decorations with glue. Then attach magnets to the back of the frame. We found some really inexpensive magnet strips that were peel and stick. They worked perfectly. We attached a magnet to the top of the frame and one to the bottom as well. This will help the frame to stick to your metal surface better. Since we were putting ours on the refrigerator, we wanted to make sure they would stay put when the doors to the fridge would open and close, or people would walk past them, etc.

Some of the kids wanted to make more than one or two frames, and we didn't have enough foam frames. We found that gluing the picture directly to a foam sheet and decorating around the picture works well too.

This craft was anything but complicated, and it was a great way to keep the kids busy on a summer afternoon. Plus, even our youngest kiddo (age 3) made a super cute frame.

Book Purse Tutorial from Hungry Panda

I absolutely love this idea. I'm going to have to give it a try.

It's a purse made out of a book. I am a purse-addict. My family is always giving me a hard time because I buy a new one so often. Books are another one of my passions, so this project is perfect! I'll post pics. of my attempt to make my own book purse, in the near future. Hopefully I can pull it off! It looks so cute! Now to find the perfect book to use. Hmmm...

Check out the link below to try making your own book purse. I'd love to see pictures of how yours turn out.

http://www.hungrypanda.net/blog/2010/02/book-purse-tutorial/

Balloon People

This one was just a spur of the moment idea that I came up with because it's summer & the kids were bored and looking for a project. I looked around at what I had in the house & came up with this idea.

You just need a paper plate, a balloon, and some things to decorate the balloons with. We used googley eyes, yarn, markers, etc.

It was a lot of fun for the kids & the faces turned out pretty cute!

Accordian Style Birthday Card for Grandma

This is a Birthday Card that we made for Grandma. I started out by cutting a 12 x 12 piece of paper in half, attaching the 2 sides with ribbon, then folding the pieces accordion-style. Then I just decorated the pieces. It was super-easy to make. I didn't follow a pattern. I had seen accordion-style cards before, but I'd never made one. I just decided to feel my way through it, and it turned out really cute.

This first picture is the finished project tied up with a ribbon:

Front:
2 kiddos:
The other 2 kiddos:
The back:
Grandma loved the card! I wish I'd taken a picture of it standing up to show you, but I didn't. It is now standing up on her mantle, and she loved it!

Birthday Present Cake

I got the idea for this cake from an issue of Family Fun. I thought it was so cute that I just had to give it a try. The only thing that I did differently was use Skittles candy instead of Spree candy. Oh, and I added a little gift tag too. Either way this one is cute & super easy.

Here's the cake & how to make it on familyfun.com:

http://familyfun.go.com/recipes/pretty-package-cake-687401/

Ric Rac Side Snap Baby Shirts

I found the cutest idea on http://homemadebyjill.blogspot.com/. She made these little "take me home tees". They were so cute that I decided to give them a try. Here's how mine turned out. They were super easy to make. If I can pull them off then I know you can. If you want to know how just click on her blog mentioned above. Jill is amazingly crafty. There are tons of other great ideas on there as well. It's so easy to get lost in all of the fun ideas on her site. :)

My Crocheted Baby Blanket Attempt

I have a love/hate relationship with crochet. I love it because it's fun to do, and I like the way the needle feels in my hand. I like to work on it while I'm watching TV. It's a relaxing, fun, little hobby for me. The hate part comes in because I always end up with uneven, crooked shapes instead of nice squares. I've tried counting my rows to make sure that they have the same number of stitches, but I always seem to add or lose one here and there. I've also worked on my tension. I finally decided to just make a blanket and see how it turned out. This is actually my 2nd attempt at making a whole blanket, and again I have a wavy-square. I tried to improve the look of it by going around it with a border, but it didn't get much better. Still, I don't want to give up on crocheting. It's so much fun, but I want to make an awesome project one of these days. This blanket has inspired me to sign up for a crochet class. I'm pretty sure that I'm making my mistake when I finish one row and move to the next one. I seem to add in a stitch where I shouldn't, making the rows uneven. Hopefully I can figure this out.

I am glad that I persisted and finished the blanket, though. It was still fun, even if it isn't a perfect blanket. I could still use it. We don't have any babies right now, but we're planning on working on that in the near future. This blanket will be a blanket for at home use instead of when we go out, and I definitely won't be giving any of my blankets away as gifts until I can learn how to make a really nice one, but I can still say that I did it, and I'll keep trying til I get it! :)

Flower Power Side Snap Infant Shirts

I got the idea to decorate some side snap shirts from a friend of mine who is super, super crafty. I'll be posting my attempt at one of her ideas a little later on. After I bought the side snap shirts, I ended up having a few extra shirts, so I decided to add some iron-on flowers to them. I think they turned out super cute, and you can't get much easier than iron-ons. You could use any kind of iron-on that you like for these shirts too. These flowers just happened to catch my eye.

If you've never done iron-on before the main thing I would suggest is that you use a pressing cloth. I have tried it without the pressing cloth in the past and sometimes the iron will stain the clothes from sitting on too long, or the heat from the iron could damage the iron-on itself. It's not that difficult, though. Give it a try. They are super cute & super easy. It was only about a 10 minute project from start to finish, and there is nothing like a little instant gratification.

Cookie Behavior Chart

Okay, so like I mentioned in my last post, I am a busy mom of 4, and with 4 kiddos life is always busy. Someone is always grabbing, poking, or heaven forbid, looking at someone else. It happens in my house & I'm sure it happens in yours, so I've decided to make a behavior chart for my kids. I thought of the idea myself, but I'm sure there are a lot of similar things out there.

I decided to go with a Cowboy Cookie (Chocolate Chip Cookies with Oatmeal- Supper Yummy!) theme because I thought they were cute & my family loves them. I decided to give each kid 3 cookies that they need to keep on their chart each day. Cookies can be taken away for bad behavior, and cookies can be kept or earned back for good behavior. When a kid ends up with no cookies on their place-mat then they will loose some privileges: TV, computer time, etc. When they keep all of their cookies they will get a reward each night- maybe 5 extra minutes on the computer, an extra story at bedtime, to have their nails painted... Then when they keep all of their cookies on for a week we can make Cowboy Cookies as a family on Saturday. My kids are going to love it!

You can change this up however you'd like for your family. Maybe your kids would rather have pizzas up there or ice cream cones. You could even do pictures of ducks or animals and have the reward be a trip to the zoo or a local park to feed the ducks and play. Use your imagination. Have fun with it & involve your kiddos in the process. They love that!!!

To make it, I just printed off 12 cookies using free clip art that I found on-line. Then I used contact paper to laminate the cookies. You probably don't want to skip this step because it will help the cookies hold up when you take them off & put them back on again. Next, I used sticky Velcro to attach the cookies to the place-mat. Then I decided to attach the place-mats to a posterboard so that I could keep them all together neatly and Viola. Bring on the cookies!

Welcome

Welcome to Crafty Adventures and Cool Things! This blog is for all of you craft enthusiasts out there who just love to craft for the heck of it. It's for those of us who aren't nearly as skilled as Martha Stewart, but we still like to give it a shot, and we're pretty happy with our slightly imperfect projects anyway. It's for those of us who are still beginners at sewing and crocheting and a lot of different things, but we aren't afraid to give it a try. Sometimes I'll feature a craft that I thought of myself, and other times I will share with you some cool things that other people are doing. You'll also get to see my attempt at making some of the craft projects that I've found from other people. We'll see how it goes & have some fun along the way. :)

This blog will also highlight some cool things that grab my attention. These things could be anything from a new product that makes life easier or just looks really groovy or fun. It could be something for your home, your car, your kids, your pets, or yourself. I'm a busy mom of 4, so I'm always looking for things to help the day go a little smoother. Feel free to send me your craft ideas and/or tell me about any new cool things that you find.