Birthday Boy

#1 son (I only have one...) turned 5 a couple of weeks ago. I can't believe I have a 5 year old! He is the best little boy I could ask for. Caring, kind, smart, and defiant are some of his fabulous traits. I wonder where he gets the defiant from? He was set on having a monster truck party so we tracked down Monster Jam party supplies. B was so excited to open the box and see all the paper goods and treats. The best by far was the pinata. A huge Grave Digger. I changed it into a pull string pinata so it wouldn't get destroyed and more importantly my furniture wouldn't get destroyed by a bunch of 5 year old bat wielding high on birthday cake kids. These days, Grave Digger resides on top of a dollhouse. B wanted to crush the house. 

I made the cake the night before with hubbies help. It's become a yearly occasion for us to stay up way too late the night before drinking and making/decorating cakes. The later it gets the more crazy the decorating gets. We are so tired and have ingested way too much icing and candy. The cake was a bit simpler this year. 2 layers of 9x13 cake iced together. We then made a ramp with a graham cracker held up by trimmed cake bits and a lot of icing. Cover the whole thing in graham cracker crumbs, a few cars and trucks and your done. 

I'm not sure why I decided to do this but I thought it would be a fun idea to put a custom Kansas plate on a t-shirt for all the kids. Again hubbie came to the rescue with finding an empty plate and using power point magic. It was a bit late (after the cake) so they didn't actually get ironed onto the shirts until the morning of the party. We also laminated plates that we printed out on card stock to play "pin the plate on the truck."  The kids loved that. It worked out great actually. Everyone got a t-shirt with a monster truck pencil, the laminated plate and various goodies won/collected during the party. I put everyones names on a brown paper snack bag so they had a place to collect everything during the party then take home after. B had a good a good time so I guess it was all good.

Favorites

I just love Annie Lennox. I could listen to her music all the time (which I guess is the point). She seems to have this amazing sense of humor - just look at her video's! So she is releasing a new compilation album "The Annie Lennox Collection." It has a great site packed with info. I just spent way too much time looking at all her videos on the site. Check out Shining Light and No More I Love You's. The first time I listened to Shining Light I waan't sure I liked it but now I want to hear it over and over.

Over the (organized) rainbow

As much as we move I have to stay somewhat organized. I have really fallen behind on this front! I would get fabric and it would go into one of many bins. Sometime later (often MUCH later) I would vaguely remember buying something that would be perfect for the current project and not be able to find it. I finally bit the bullet and went through it all. I actually got rid of some fabric that I thought I would never use. I was impressed with my pack rat self letting go. It felt to good to let go though. It really did.

So... I organized the fabric into a bunch of different drawers. I made a fat quarter plus drawer, a large cut drawer, a wool drawer, a linen drawer, a flannel drawer, a decorator weight drawer, a batik and vintage drawer, and a kit drawer. I also have a bin with batting and fusible web as well as a bin with vintage sheets that I hope to use in the not too distant future. My living room was a complete mess while I was getting this done but it is so satisfying to see it all in it's folded glory. I did it mostly at night after the smalls were in bed. I tried to get them to help but they wanted to fold it all origami and teepee style. (They are 2 & 4). Sweet helpers.

Whipup has had some amazing craft space re-do's featured as of late. Super inspiring.