Strawberry Shortcake

This week my sweet little niece has turned 5 years old and it is hard to believe she is growing up so quickly.  She was born a tiny 4lbs 12oz little peanut and I was honored 5 years ago to be there when she was born and when she took her first breath.  

This weekend we celebrated her birthday and in true girly spirit she picked a strawberry shortcake theme for her birthday.  When I was asked to make her a cake how could I possibly say no.  With three boys it is not very often that I get to do a fun girly cake. 

She was super excited about her cake and kept telling everyone that her auntie was going to make her strawberry shortcake cake for her birthday.  I am so glad to be part of her special day. 

Mellow Yellow Birthday Party Cake

This week was my sister in-law Lisa's birthday and my brother wanted to do up a little surprise get together. So he called in the troops to help him get ready for the day.  Of course I was more than happy to help out with the decorations and the cake, two of my favorite things to do.  

I wanted to go with Yellow, Grey & White for colors, so for
the banner I picked a grey fabric and a yellow ribbon. 

I found this triangle template over at Lovely Traub Life and simply cut them out and then sewed the edges.  I used my heat transfer vinyl for the lettering and then sewed the ribbon on top.  I love the look of the pendent banners. 

I wish I had taken some pictures of all the flowers that I had picked up, I think we had about 8 or 9 vases full of beautiful flowers.

Of course you can't have a birthday party without a cake. So going with the flower/garden theme I made these funky flower pot cakes. 

My mom had this pot that she thought would work perfectly.

I baked the cakes in here and then filled the center hole with a butter cream/cake mix. 

This was before putting all the finishing touches and fondant flowers on the cake, I know not so pretty yet.

After putting on all the flowers and leaves it sure came to life.  The difficult part for me is always to transporting, I kinda cross my fingers and hope it makes it there in one piece, lol.

Did anyone else help to celebrate a birthday this weekend?

Gardening Tool Box

For every good Birthday Party you have to have a good party favor bag

Every year I try to come up with something a little different, something that the kids can use and personalize them.

This year for my sons buggy party I decided to make these fun Gardening tool Boxes.  Each tool box included a gardening shovel, bag of dirt, a pot and a package of seeds.

For this I got all the kids involved helping me.  Makai helped get me the wood to cut, then we would pass them over to Keegan who would sand all the edges and last we would hand them off to Chase where he would stand them up together and let me know how many more pieces we needed.

If you want to make your own here is what we did.

We used 

1x6 cut at 12" for the bottom

2 - 1x6 cut at 9" for the side.  I then measured 2" down and cut on a 45' 

2 - 1x4 cut at 12" for the sides

1 - 5/8" dowel cut to fit I believe this worked out to 13.5" long.  

Once I had all the pieces it was just a little wood glue and an air nailer to put it all together. 

Each one of the boxes were painted.  I decided on Brown for the boys and Pink for the girls and then finished off with their names stenciled on the front. 

The next day my kids got right to work putting their seeds into the pots and are waiting for them to grow.