Sunday, March 19, 2017

Industrial Farmhouse Bridal Shower

I ♥ the theme of this next shower. The bride to be has chosen Industrial Farmhouse for the theme for her wedding and I know it will be amazing! She is a wonderful party planner and I always love seeing all the parties she hosts and will have to say I was a little intimidated giving this shower. I mean...giving a party to the party planner??!! But it turned out to be a nice shower even with the bride to be not feeling well.

It all started with this invite. I used Cutting Cafe's Mason Jar Shaped Card Template cutting file and altered the file by "squishing" the jar down to a squatty one.

The bride to be's wedding colors are metal and mints/aquas so I used those colors along with metals, woods, and glass for the industrial part of the theme.

The backdrop is an old vintage tablecloth to cover up the ugly white board.
All of this below was taken from my home. I have a little vignette I put together every year and this was for my St. Pat vignette and the colors worked perfectly. Obviously, I don't have "from miss to mrs" in my home. LOL I spray painted the primary colored magnet letters a cream color and then spell out phrases. I framed a piece of sheet metal I found in our shed that I cut to size.

The dried hydrangeas I have used at several showers and they were really starting to fall apart. I spray painted them with mint and aqua glass paint. ♥ how that turned out on the brown petals! The glass "vase" is a starbucks coffee bottle that I spray painted with mint glass paint. For added fun, I used blue glass insulators and stuck them in a rusty bed spring and added a battery operated candle which fit perfectly.
 It was fun to do a different layout using long tables instead of round ones.



 keeping with the metal theme, we had gold paper plates and silver plastic cups. for added whimsy, turquoise and white polka dot napkins, turquoise forks, and aqua striped straws.
for food we had donuts (bride to be's favorite), key lime bars, chocolate covered pretzels, 
and fruit cups.
sign in table
 here is the gift I made her with DH's help as I was running out of time and had to be gone a lot that week. He glued the wood together for me and I did the hardware. Now I want one!


inspiration for the industrial tray
key lime pie bar recipe
mason jar clip art

Chocolate Dipped Key Lime Pie Bars


Prep time
Cook time
Total time
Author: 
Serves: 16
Ingredients
Biscoff Crust
  • 4 tablespoons melted butter
  • ⅔ cup ground pecans
  • 1 cup Biscoff Cookie crumbs
  • ¼ cup sugar
Key Lime Pie Filling
  • 3 large egg yolks
  • 1½ teaspoons finely grated lime zest
  • ⅔ cup fresh Key lime juice (you can also use regular limes)
  • 1 can sweetened condensed milk (14 ounces)
  • Melted dark chocolate
Instructions
Biscoff Crust
  1. Preheat oven to 350 F and line a 8 x 8 inch baking dish with parchment or foil.
  2. With a food processor, blend the pecans, biscoff cookies and sugar. Blend in butter until it resembles wet sand.
  3. Press into the bottom of the baking dish and bake for 10 minutes. Set crust aside to cool.
Key Lime Pie Filling
  1. In a large bowl and using an electric mixer with a whisk attachment, beat the egg yolks and lime zest until it thickens (5 minutes).
  2. Add condensed milk and beat on high for about 3 minutes.
  3. On low, mix in the lime juice until just combined.
  4. Pour on top of cookie crust and bake for 10 minutes until the middle is just set.
  5. Put aside to cool and then refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight.
  6. Once they have chilled for the preferred time, slice into 3-4 inch squares and dip the corners into dark chocolate. Sprinkle with sea salt and lime zest. Place them on parchment paper on a cookie sheet and chill until the chocolate sets.





Saturday, March 4, 2017

New Biker's in Town

This fun baby shower was inspired by the baby's parents who love motorcycles. The colors were inspired by the parent's wedding colors.
I saw a motorcycle diaper "cake" on Pinterest and had to give it a try.
 Here you see the bottle/pom poms show up again 

Invitation inspiration
motorcycle image I turned into an svg cutting file
Layered Labels 3 Cutting File: Pretty Paper Pretty Ribbon labels mounted under motorcycle
Diamond Plate Embossing Folder
White Ink: Paper Trey Ink
My Pinterest Board

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Mission Conference Ladies Supper

Every year our church has a mission's conference where local missionaries and/or missionaries home on furlough come and speak at our church. On Monday night the men meet together for supper with the male missionaries and the women with the women missionaries.

Through conversation before the conference, I found out that one lady in our church was doing all the work! I offered to help her out and she had me do the decorating and dessert. Since it was close to Valentine's Day, I went with that theme. I like to decorate with reds, pinks, and aqua for Valentine's Day.

We had strawberry spinach salad, baked potatoes with BBQ pork, green onions, sour cream and shredded cheese and yummy chocolate and vanilla raspberry cupcakes.
 We kept it very simple for the decorations, letting the salad and the cupcakes be a part of the decor.
I spray painted cold coffee jars with aqua glass paint and made yarn pom poms. With my Silhouette, I cut hearts and layered them and tied around the jar with a little tag that had the mission's conference theme on it.


 


Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Book Review: Amish Weddings by Leslie Gould.

Amish Weddings by Leslie Gould is the newest book I've read from Bethany House.
Amish Weddings (Neighbors of Lancaster County Book #3) by [Gould, Leslie]

This third book in Neighbors of Lancaster County series is about Rose. She is in love with Rueben, who is predictable, stable, and taking his time to set a wedding date. Then in walks Trevor, an army buddy of her brother-in-law. Trevor is exciting, unpredictable, and easygoing.

I liked this book in that I really didn't know how it was going to end. There were some plots, twists, and turns that definitely were not expected.

I don't want to give too much away, as I pass these on to some of my readers to read when I am done. I definitely would suggest this whole series by Leslie Gould.

**I received this book for free from Bethany House in exchange for my honest review.**


Monday, January 23, 2017

Old Pickup

Happy National Handwriting Day! Tombow sent the DT a kit of pencils which also included an eraser and pencil sharpener and a moleskin notebook. Since I'm not a letter-er, I decided to show other ways you can use the pencils. *my 'handwriting' will be the note i write inside the card ;)

I colored this digital image (from Tiddlyinks) with 3 different pencils from the Mono Drawing Pencil Set and 3 Irojiten Colored Pencils.

To get the color I wanted for the pickup, I used King Fisher V-7, Porcelain blue Lg-8, and Peacock Blue V-6. Using the pencils from the set I shaded under the pickup and windows with pencils 2B & 4H and the tires with 6B. Then I just blended with a dry blending stump.
I used Mono Adhesive Dots to adhere the panels together on the card.


 Here is what the pickup looks like before it's colored.

Friday, January 20, 2017

Elephant Valentine

Hard to believe January is two thirds over and Valentine's Day will be here soon. The Cutting Cafe design team is creating Valentine projects for you this week. As always, there will be lots of fun ideas to help inspire you with your own ♥ projects.

I created this card using VALENTINE ANIMALS AND BUGS...PRINTABLES and 
The elephant is a colored printable and I traced the ear and paper pieces it using some patterned paper for a different look. I added the red and white thread to imitate the  string tied around the elephant's trunk. Using a light colored gray marker (N89) from Tombow helped "ground" my elephant and add a little shadow on and around the image.
Be sure to visit the Cutting Cafe Blog on the 7th and 21st of every month to see the design team's projects in which you can leave a comment to be entered into a drawing to win 3 FREE sets of your choice from the online store.

Friday, January 6, 2017

Happy Birthday Chickadee

Clean and Simple with a solid backgroung is this week's design team challenge over at the Cutting Cafe. We could use Every Day Greetings Set 1 or 2 and I chose the chickadee sentiment from Every Day Greetings Set 2.


Clean and simple is hard for me to do, I always want to add a stuff and I did sneak in some glitter on the birds hat. I used Tombow adhesive for my layering and Irojiten colored pencils for coloring.

free Chick image

Be sure to visit the Cutting Cafe Blog on the 7th and 21st of every month to see the design team's projects in which you can leave a comment to be entered into a drawing to win 3 FREE sets of your choice from the online store.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

Candy Pocket Treat

For the month of December, Tombow sent me and the other team members a package of Adhesive Dots. I have used these before and love how strong they are. For this month's project I used the dots to adhere the snowflake to the medallion and the medallion to the pocket. We made these at our December Ladies Night Out with 33 ladies attending. They all loved the project and L♥VED the Tombow adhesives that were used. (also Mono Multi Liquid Glue)

The Adhesive dots are colored which is perfect for seeing exactly where you need to place them. They fit the punched snowflake center perfectly.

Here is a card my great niece made using Tombow's Irojiten's Colored Pencils and 3 Adhesive Dots with glitter rubbed over them.
I am entering the candy pocket in DL.ART's Thankful Thursday Anything Goes Challenge 

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Happy Birthday Aaron!

not very good photos, but birthday pics of Aaron's 22nd bd and first InstaPot cheesecake.


cheesecake recipe (I used peanut butter oreos)

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Book Review: For the Record

For the Record by Regina Jennings is the latest book I've read from Bethany House.
Cover Art

Betsy Huckabee is from Pine Gap, Missouri, a tiny town in which she lives with her aunt and uncle and works for her uncle's newspaper. Betsy writes articles trying to capture attention from someone in the bigger cities. No one is taking her seriously and she is getting frustrated. She comes up with an idea to write a series of articles for a big city newspaper about a story she has created herself with the new sheriff in town as inspiration.

The antics between Betsy and the sheriff (who has issues all his own) cracked me up and kept me reading til the end without too many breaks.

This is the 3rd book in Regina Jennings Ozark Mountain Romance series, but the author did a great job in writing that this really can stand alone. However, after reading this, I would really like to read the first two now.


**I received this book for free from Bethany House in exchange for my honest review.**

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Recycled for Christmas

I bet you are all shocked! Four posts in four days! LOL

Today I am sharing a project I made for this week's Cutting Cafe challenge. Regina challenged the design team to create a project using a jar/tin/recycled container. Oh how the ideas flowed and I had ideas for jars and tin cans and then I remembered I have over 100 of these in the basement. My mom buys LOTS of peanuts (because dad loves peanuts and she makes salted peanut rolls) and fruit that comes in these containers. Knowing that I like to make something out of containers like this and I was looking for something to use for a camp craft, she's been saving these for me for a couple years.

I finally got around to actually doing something creative with them. We have used them for freezing our apple cider and I like to use them for tea bags, hot cocoa mix, chex mix, crackers, etc and have them sitting out esp when the kiddos come home. Now after decorating ONE, I can't wait to do some more. This time, I will have a fun coordinated set for the Christmas goodies I have around when the kids come home.


As you can see in the first photo, the lids are blue. I spray painted the top and sides only with a hammered metal paint. I also had a hammered brown, but I think next time we go to the city, I will see if I can find a black and switch out lids. What do you think? Think black would look better?

So, for the deets...I used Cutting Cafe's 3D Christmas Tree Set and resized them to fit the panel I had cut for the front of the container. Then I just inked them with PaperTrey white ink and adhered them with Tombow's Mono Multi Liquid Glue. I wasn't sure what adhesive to use to adhere the whole thing to the plastic container, but tried the Mono Multi and it worked perfectly.

Be sure to visit the Cutting Cafe Blog on the 7th and 21st of every month to see the design team's projects in which you can leave a comment to be entered into a drawing to win 3 FREE sets of your choice from the online store.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Visions of Sugarplums ~ Day 3

This has been so much fun creating for Lori's VOSP. I hope that you have been inspired and have taken a chance to win some great prizes. If you are here from Greta Hess' blog, you are in the right spot. If you happened upon my blog, be sure to start at Lori's blog so as to not miss all the wonderful inspiration.

Today is the last day of the hop and I have a combo gift card/candy treat project to share with you today. I was inspired by 2 different youtube tutorials on how to make these. I created the size according to BJPeters channel and the tips from Dawn's Stamping Thoughts.

The pretty designer paper is from Bo Bunny's Altitude collection and the solid is from a company I used to design for that is no longer in business. The sentiment I typed and printed myself.

The black that you see where the notched end is on the right is the gift card. It fits right inside.


Here is a closer look at the Hershey Kisses inside. Five fit perfectly.

Challenge Info:  The challenge is to create a project with a Christmas/Winter theme. You can go and get the details on how to enter HERE.   The prize is $25 gift certificate to Freckled Fawn.  

Here is a list of the companies who are giving prizes:
The Cutting CafĂ© :   Orange You Cute Kit
Paper Sweeties:  $25 gift certificate
Lawn Fawn:  $25 gift certificate
Pretty Pink Posh:  $25 gift certificate
The Funkie Junkie Boutique:  $25 worth of new Tim Holtz Christmas Idea-ology Products
Birch Press Design:  $20 gift certificate
TheTwinery:  Sample Pack

And here is a list of everyone playing today. Be sure to start with Lori's (our host) blog as all the details on how to enter for prizes and play along in the challenge is on her blog. Leave a comment on each blog as well. Every time you comment, your name gets entered for the prizes. 

Thank you for stopping by and for all your kind comments the last couple of days. Now it's time to head over to the super talented Lisa Bzibziak.

Here is a list of the designers posting today.
Debbie Fisher {you are here}