Happy (Belated) Mother’s Day

This year for Mother’s day I was fortunate enough to celebrate three Moms!  But what to get for the super women who do it all?

Well, I love sharing our family recipes because my mother is particularly notorious for accidentally leaving out ingredients or crucial steps.  So it’s important to write them down to remember exactly how to make them!  Since chalkboard style printables are all the rage (see a million examples on Pinterest like this board), I decided to craft up a few family recipes chalkboard style – one for each of the ladies.

I started with finding a chalkboard background and downloading a few key chalkboard fonts.  There are tons of great posts on chalkboard fonts from Jenni from the blog, Lil Blue Boo, and Side of Sneakers just to name a few.  Don’t forget to download some doodles, dingbats, and ornaments.  I found quite a few helpful ones like LCR Kitchen Dings and Sugar Coma that were cooking themed.

Then I grabbed a few family favorite recipes and set to work with my Mom’s favorite dish from her mother.  This particular recipe cracks me up because when my Mom gave it to me, I got practically NONE of the actual assembly instructions.  So I was pretty anxious to see if I was able to interpret them correctly to see if this is actually how Nana makes the mac n’ cheese.

I haven’t gotten any edits back yet, but she may be saving them up to let me know in the future 🙂

Next up was my Mother’s chocolate chip recipe which I like to enjoy sans chocolate chips.Finally, Heather’s recipe for my favorite – Black Bean Hummus.  Probably not her signature dish (see Jello Pretzel Dessert) but this one had so many comments in it that I thought it was pretty funny to see how she’d changed it up from the original. 

So there’s the whole set!  I put them in frames and all the Mothers had a great treat on their celebration day.

–Martta

Golden Oscar Party Decorations

Every year I’m trying to add just a little bit more to Oscar Party.  This year design inspiration came from (where else?!) Pinterest.  I saw Hank & Hunt’s giant gold wall decoration and I knew I needed that sparkle at my party.  While I loved the medallion, I really wanted it to scream Oscar and what better way to do that than with a lovely Oscar statue?  

Isn’t he cute? To begin, I used the projection method to trace the outline of my statue onto foam core.  I then spray painted the foam core gold, because I figured a bit of the edge would be visible and I didn’t want any white peeking through. I used the same method as it inspiration post and bought the same gold mylar cord for my Oscar statue.

But since my design had a few more subtle curves than just a circle, I needed to cut the rope pieces a bit smaller – just about 1″ long.

I then taped the pieces down to both sides of the statue.Make sure to only over hang the edges of the foam core a little bit or the statue will come out looking like a giant sparkly blob. You know I know this because I first made a giant sparkly blob and had to go back and redo it.

But he’s all done and I love my shiny gold Oscar man!  I inserted a pin in the top and tied some fishing line to the pin and then thumb tacked it into the ceiling.  He’s right at home with my tissue paper pom poms and ready to be part of a fab tablescape……which I’ll have to take a picture of when it’s all decked out.

But if a tablescape isn’t in your future, I think this would be a great addition to the photobooth prop box.

–Martta

Handmade Thanksgiving Place Card Turkeys

I had some free time with the kiddos this past weekend and with the Thanksgiving holiday this week, I thought it was time to get crafty!  So Caroline and a non-participating Jack created some adorable Thanksgiving turkey place cards for our table this year.

I’m sure you’ve seen tons of samples of these on Pinterest – I found this adorable one here from this source.

Non-participating Jack was NOT down AT ALL with putting his hand in paint so that was an utter fail right out of the gate.  Caroline however was a bit of a better sport and I was able to convince her to do all the hand print feathers.

But even Caroline cried “fowl” when I asked if we could paint with her foot.

No way.

So we called an audible and painted the turkey bodies with the side of her hand for more of a “profile” turkey look. 

Once the painted hands were dry, we cut them out and glued them to the back of the body with a glue stick.  I cut out beaks and feet to attach as well. Then I created a stand for the place cards by cutting strips of card stock about 3″ wide.  I folded the paper into quarters and glued two of the sides together to create a triangular stand.  Then I glued a stand to the back of each turkey.  Caroline wrote out each person’s name in festive Thanksgiving colors and we attached that as well as a goggler (whoops!  How did we forget that before!).  Done!

Now we’re all ready to be festive!  Happy Thanksgiving!

–Martta