Just a Fruit Tray

A friend of mine was having a party, so I asked what I could bring. She suggested it would be great if I brought some fruit. And that is how this began....

I started making jokes that I was going to make the greatest fruit tray ever; so, I started looking at fun ideas to bring a fruit tray, and got pinterest-spired and it snowballed. I saw a really great pin about how to make a watermelon pirate ship, which I obviously concluded would be the coolest thing EVER. But, then I saw a tutorial for apple swans. Well, I had to make those as well. What other opportunity would I have to do so?! And hey, swans and ships are both in the water... so it could work right?

I enlisted a friend to help...and hubby stated that this was my project, and he wasn't helping. My friend bought all the fruit at costco and brought it over for me. We had put the kids to bed already, so it was about 8pm when we started. The party was after church the morning, so it had to be done before bed.

I used  this tutorial for the pirate ship. Hubby quickly came over to assist me (as he almost always does). We didn't to put a skull, because part of the party was for a baby dedication, so we ( I mean hubby, because really he did most of this part) cut a cross on the mail sail. We (I mean my friend) used a melon baller to get as much out of the watermelon as possible We used some of the watermelon to make waves at the bottom as well.

 

As pieces were done, they went in the fridge overnight and were just fine the next day. 

We also cut out letters out of the watermelon. I had seen this posted somewhere.. like this, and they used cantoloupe I believe, which would have been easier because it is harder. Watermelon was finicky. We cut out flat slices of watermelon and used little letter cutters (that I use for fondant).

Lastly, we (I mean me) carved apple swans. Now, this looked like the most difficult part, but was really simple. I followed this video here.

Doesn't it look fun?! Everyone was very impressed. It was a great project... unfortunatley, now my kids always want their apples cut into swans before they will eat them...
Oh well.. What can you do...

400 Triangles Sewn Together ... Baby Love quilt

Well, Well, Well, I'm back. I didn't feel like I had enough time, or was doing enough projects to make this worthwhile. Now, I have a whole backlogs of things I've done, so I am going to give it another go. I really enjoy blogging, and really feel I need to focus on things I like doing, for a break from everything. Life as a working mom of 2 gets stressful... So here I am!

I have been quilting a lot. I still only do baby quilts... I always want to move on to the next project, so I keep them small. And seriously, Wikipedia (thats a legit source right??! ... sorry every professor I have ever had) says that quilts are traditionally made to commemorate a birth (and other stuff.. blah blah)... so there! This quilt is not the last one I made... but, it is the favourite one I have ever made.

I found this tutorial at Must Love Quilts. I had it sitting on my pinterest board for a long time, but my silly friends never found out the gender of their babies! I knew I wanted pinks, so this was not going to be a gender neutral quilt. FINALLY, a friend from church, who lives down the road told me she was having a baby girl (her 3rd BTW), and I knew this would be for her.

 

 

On "Must love Quilts" one of the ideas was sort of ombre looking and this was my original inspiration. I was a little intimidated by the idea of cutting out over 400 triangles and I spent a few hours pondering some shortcut to do this. I realized there probably wasn't one and decided to just get going. After picking out my fabrics, I started cutting out my triangles. When I had a bunch ready, I decided to lie them out to get an idea how it may look. 

 

 

 

At this point I wasn't convinced. It never looks like I am picturing in my head, and I started to get discouraged. So, I impatiently sewed my quilt together in chunks, in no particular order, in the hopes of seeing what it may look like. 

This hodgepodge of strips finally started getting finished, and as I was hanging them in rows on my wall (which Hubby does not appreciate, having pins in our walls) I was starting to like it.

 

 

Now, a few weeks after little Ella was born, I was almost done. She was actually born in February, very close to Valentines Day, so I knew this was perfect!!

 

I love the backing fabric, I had bought it on a whim, knowing I wanted to use it as backing at some point!





 And Done! I am working on taking better pictures of my quilts. After working so hard, I want to have a record of all these things I have made!!

 

 

There are so many variations of this quilt you could make! I know this is definitely not my last equilateral triangle quilt! It was time consuming, but I love it!!

 

Glider chair revamp

Another project I ( well we... My mother helped) took on, was recovering the glider chair. I purchased fabric online at fabric.com. I found it in the clearance section and ordered 3 yards, for a total of $20.94! This covered the chair and the ottoman and we even have a bit leftover. There are tutorials all over the net on how to do it, but we basically traced all the actual cushions for a pattern.

We then simply placed the new pieces over the old, rather than ripping the whole thing apart. The only spot this posed a problem was the arms because they needed to clip back on the chair and placing the fabric overtop made the, a bit shorter. They took a bit of fiddling to get them back together.

On the ottoman, we made a cover almost like a fitted sheet for a bed. It can be removed and washed if need be. Also, we didn't need to rip it apart and use the staple gun.

It looks like a whole new chair now that it's done! And for less than $25.

 

 

Owl mobile

While putting together the new nursery I wanted to reuse as much as possible from little dude's nursery. I hated the idea of throwing anything out, but I also wanted something "new" for our new little guy. Always seems unfair that the second child (like myself) gets so many hand-me-downs. When I was going through all the baby stuff I found the old crib mobile and wanted to spruce it up.

Before, it looked something like this...

I really did not like it. I looked on etsy for some inspiration and really fell in love with all the felt mobiles. And honestly, they looked simple, but were so expensive... So as usual I decided I could do it myself. I went and purchased felt sheets (really cheap at dollar store or even michaels with a coupon) and embroidery thread. Otherwise, I just used old buttons, pillow stuffing and scrap fabric. For tools, I needed sewing scissors, embroidery needles and a hot glue gun.

I made a paper pattern for my owls. I had one for the main body, one for the stomach and one for the eyes. I used them as a template for each owl. I used felt for everything but the stomach circle, there I just used scrap fabric. After all the pieces were cut out I glued the stomach and eyes to the main body. I then added the detail to the back, the buttons and embroidery. I then stitched the front and back of the owl together, leaving about a 1 cm opening for the stuffing. Using a pencil to push the stuffing in tight and then finished sewing it closed. I then did the same for the stars and moon. I used the embroidery thread to hang it all from the mobile. I also took a long peice of scrap fabric to cover the long plastic bit. Just sewed the two edges together, flipped it inside out and slipped it on.

I love the way it turned out. It is however missing the moon now... Not strong enough for a 3 year old to hang off of...

 

Leftover pizza

How do you get rid of leftovers? I could not get anyone in my family to eat them! They don't want to eat the same thing again... So, I started putting everything ( well a lot) on pizza. They love it. Not only do they get something different. They also get pizza!!

I love homemade pizza, but I always forget to make the dough early enough, so I started using this recipe. It uses regular yeast, but is very quick. Also, I never roll the dough out anymore, I stretch is out. Pulling from the center. I get a rounder pizza and the bread gets us much nicer consistency when baked.

Almost any left over meat works awesome on pizza. Had a BBQ last night, take the left over steak and make a BBQ steak pizza. It works well to mix tomato sauce 50/50 with BBQ sauce for a great base, without an overpowering BBQ sauce taste. Fajitas on Monday? That filling is an awesome topping for a pizza, with a bit of tex mex cheese on top.. Mmm. Chicken and mushrooms left, throw it on...pulled pork? That could be an interesting flavor!

I hope everyone gets creative, has a great pizza night and that less food goes to waste!

 

Cloth diapers?! A Gdiaper review.

Not something I'd ever thought I'd consider. Definitely not something I did with my first little guy. Becoming a mom for the first time is so overwhelming. The information overload in unbelievable. All these products, parenting techniques, advice.... I learned what I could with number 1, but focused on the essentials, which was time consuming enough. Picking a Carseat for example; sounds simple, but there is so much to think about and five million options; and not with simple differences like, which colour do I like best, but type, weight range of the seat, handle options, weight of the seat itself, expiry date lengths (seriously Carseats expire)... I didn't have time to get into anything but the essentials...
Anyways, this time around, with much more time on my hands not learning boring stuff like the difference between powder and liquid formulas, I was able to explore some more interesting alternative options. In a prenatal class I took someone mentioned a product called gdiapers, a hybrid cloth diaper. They have a disposable and a reusesble option. This sounded right up my alley, I could do cloth without committing completely.

Let me explain for those, like me, who are completely confused about this whole concept. These diapers are considered pocket diapers. They have a soft outer shell, called the gpants, a snap in plastic part- the pocket and the insert. The insert, is stuffed into the pocket. Gdiapers sells cloth inserts, which are washed and reused, as well as disposable ones, which can be thrown away or flushed.

They can be purchased online at www.gdiapers.ca, or in Canada at London drugs. If you're not picky on colour you can buy 6 diapers for about 85$.I bought one pack of cloth inserts and then made the rest. Here is a tutorial you can use. Their cloth inserts are really expensive,but doing them yourself is so quick, easy and really cheap! I also purchased a few extra plastic inserts because they tend to get dirty. 6 gpants is more than enough because they done need to be washed each time. The plastic liners and the inserts are what get dirty.
I thought I would use disposables while I was out but I don't find I need to. I purchased a wetbag at a Canadian online retailer called snugglebugz. It's a fabric bag with a plastic liner and you can simply throw all the dirty inserts into it and when it's time to wash, just dump it all in the washing machine and wash the bag right with it. It holds the smells quite well and they come in fun patterns. There are a few reasons I find its working better than I thought. One- exclusively breasted baby poop is water soluble, no rinsing required, just throw it in the wash. Two- babies have a lot of laundry anyways, as a result of poop explosions, puking, ect... So throwing an extra load of diapers in at night really isn't a hardship. Three- I let myself use regular disposable diapers at night, this means that baby doesn't need to be changed as often and less chance of having leaks at night. Lastly, cost! I love that we are barely spending any money on diapers. And when we are done we can actually resell them all... Oh and we are heling to save the environment...
Overall, I love using these cloth diapers. We are pretty much doing exclusively cloth during the day and disposables at night. I find them extremely user friendly (even hubby is one board) and are easy on the wallet as long as you buy the value pack of gpants to begin with.
If you have any questions about your gdiapers, drop me a line :) I'm not an expert yet, but I'm working on it!

Little dude turns 3!!

This year for little dudes birthday we were very busy. I had just finished my last semester at university, I was working full time and I was 7 months pregnant. I didn't have a lot of time to make a huge time consuming birthday cake. When I saw someone do a similar version of this cake I knew our little dude would love it. He's obsessed with machinery.

I went to walmart and found a cheap set of construction vehicles. Then I made a box (! I know shocking...) chocolate cake and iced it with a simple chocolate buttercream icing. After it was all iced, hubby took a knife and simply chopped out a chunk from the side. We positioned the vehicles on the cake and added some Oreo cookie crumbs to the cake to make it look more like dirt. And tada... It was that simple.