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!