We have a winner!

Congratulations to Games (aka Ginger)! She came up with oodles of phrases using my Simply Sentimental file, to be honest I lost count several times there were so many...or maybe it was the 5 and 7 year old helping me, LOL! I'll email the file out to you Ginger!

A monsterously good time!

Thought I'd share a couple more monster cupcakes with you...

And now, for the craft we did during the party...Continuing on with the theme of creating your own monster, we used these Iron-ons from SEI.

Each kit has about 50 pieces, with plenty of eyes, horns, mouths, and appendages. They've got some great You tube videos showing you some techniques for creation, even a video teaching you how to make additional bodies to stretch your dollar and use all the leftover body parts. (Unfortunately I didn't find this one until AFTER the party, but that means we have lots of monster creations left for the future!) You can see some of my daughter's shirt in this pic (along with her PURPLE monstrous cupcake)...

And my son wanted to prove that the kids actually LOOKED like the monsters they created...

We found the My Own Monsters at Michael's and Hobby Lobby, but you can snag them on Amazon too!

Sorry I've been MIA...(pic heavy)

So, it's been a little while since I updated, and I wanted to pop in here and let you see why. My kiddos had their birthday party last week. As you might remember, we do the party at our house, and have a theme for the joint party. This year, it was monsters!

I made the invitation on my KNK. Since it's an odd size I also made my own envelopes. Unfortunately it fell outside of "normal" size for the USPS, but it was super easy to make with the Martha Stewart Scoring Board. I love the little envelope tool with that thing!

The invite is a Pop-Up card. It's a combo of printing on my laser printer and paper piecing. I love how the monsters turned out! I grabbed the good old blue Fiskars embossing plates and ran the monster bodies through the Cuttlebug with the Spellbinders tan embossing mats to add some texture (fur, scales, and ridges).

Here's the "big picture" of the cake table. My son decided he wanted the cake this year and my daughter picked cupcakes. BTW, those cute little monster cake plates (back right hand corner) are from Target. I think they're Spritz brand and were with the party supplies.

My son wanted 5 eyes on his monster cake, so after frosting the cake with the Wilton fur tip, we made cake balls (thanks for the ideas Bakerella!) and dipped them in melted chocolate then added pupils to make them look like real eyes. *NOTE* My son wanted the eyes to fan out at a bigger angle, but we found the cake balls were too heavy and the cake was too tender, so they started ripping through the layer cake if we "tipped" them too much! It was my first time making the cake pops, according to the family it shouldn't be the last, LOL!

Now, on to the cupcakes! I apologize in advance for the "purple" fur. I guess I should have actually looked at the instructions for tinting the frosting purple, but I "assumed" it would work to mix red and royal blue...well I kinda got a purplish gray! Looks like pretty boring cakes, right?

Well, the original idea for this party was sparked by some stinkin' adorable cupcakes I saw at SnowyBliss last year. That's right, the kids got to build their own monster cupcakes! The body parts were all made out of Wilton vanilla candy chips, so they were all edible too. We've got tentacles, hands, bows (there are girly monsters too, you know), and wings in this first tray.

Then there's googly eyes, teeth, horns, forked tongues,and rows of fangs in here!

The kids had a pretty good time, here's a few of their monstrous creations...

I'll share some more pics tomorrow (gotta show you the craft they did too!)


ETA: Woo-hoo! The monster cake was featured on Bakerella's Pop Stars!

One, two, three...jump!

Time to jump in for some summer fun! I don't know about you, but summer + sun always = pool for me.

My SPLATS! file has 5 different diecuts perfect for water balloon fights, swimming, mud, and so much more.

You're funny looking!

You'd say the same thing if you saw the wacky faces kids make when there's a moustache, tiara, or monacle attached to their bathroom mirror.

Great fun for vinyl or window clings on the mirror, silly 'staches on breakfast glasses, or stickers to modify extra 4 by 6 prints!

(Click the pic to go directly to Paperthreads.)

Sometimes simple is best...

Simple can be beautiful...check out this new file, Simply Sentimental, which contains a huge variety of script words you can rearrange to make a multitude of phrases for your layouts. It's also got a stained glass like cut for BOY, BOYS, GIRL, and GIRLS. Customize with a background cut to match your page perfectly.

And now, a little contest...hmmm???!!!

I want to see how many different phrases you can come up with using the words in the file pictured above. How's about it?
Mix and match these words:

be

boy

boys

girl

girls

hanging

little

my

our

out

playing

rough

shopping

sweet

the

tumble

will

with

& (and)

Leave me a comment on this post with your list of phrases. Don't worry, they won't show up until the contest is over (so nobody can cheat off of your list, LOL!) I will try to update the post (or place a comment at the end) prior to the end time with a list of names of commenters so you know yours wasn't lost in bloggerland somewhere.

Check out some quick sample pages below...

And yes, I would count "my sweet little girl" and "my sweet little girls" as different phrases, so they count as two! Any questions? Alrighty then, you've got until Tuesday night 6/14 at midnight Eastern to submit your phrase list!

Oh yeah, the prize? Well, the person who comes up with the most phrases will get a copy of this file for electronic cutters for free!

Sweet Summertime!

Goodness, it was so hot here over the Memorial Day weekend we nearly lost an entire bed of annuals we had been so excited about getting in the ground the week before. Hopefully (*fingers crossed*) they just lost some foliage and will regrow. The weather has also been a little cooler (not upper 90's, LOL) which should also help.

I just wanted to give you a little look, or advance notice, if you will, of some new files coming up soon at Paperthreads...

Watch out for more coming soon!