Genius

I saw the most genius thing on HGTV's Color Correction. They were redoing a purple bedroom and gave her a tufted headboard with gorgeous white satin fabric. I've seen them make tufted headboards before, normally they take a piece of plywood, drill holes for the needle to go through, cover it with foam and wrap it with fabric, then tuft. This time instead of plywood they used a piece of pegboard, no need to drill holes! I've always wanted to make a tufted headboard and I have a piece of pegboard in the basement. Unfortunately no room needs a headboard, but maybe tufted wall art??

The Youngest Jonas Brothers Fan

My Madison got a MP3 player for her birthday and she's been asking me everyday to put the Jonas Brothers on it. Yesterday I caved and downloaded 2 songs for her. Burnin up and Lovebug. Her favorite is Lovebug, I have now heard it 203 times! She sings along to the chorus and everything. Yesterday we were at Walmart and I stopped at the magazines. She said "Hey it's the Jonas Brothers," so while I looked at decorating magazines she looked at J-14. She's only 3 but I guess I can't say anything, I'm going to see the New Kids On The Block again in March.

My Kitchen (part 2)

Ok so I finally finished my kitchen cabinets. It was more work than I thought it was going to be and I was stressing to get them finished in time for my girls birthday party. I am sooo happy with the finished product though!

I only have one pic to share. I now have to get out the ceiling paint to touch up my black roller marks. Oops! I am a horribly messy painter, but I only ruined one pair of pants this time :-) I'll have to dig up the pics of my kitchen when we bought the house and I'll post before and after pics of the whole kitchen soon.

Rate My Space

I love Rate My Space! Anytime I need motivation to work on my own house all it takes is looking at a few pages of RMS. Today I'm tackling my bedroom. It has become a dumping ground for everything that doesn't have a place and we desperately need a storage solution to our clothing situation. I'm not an infomercial person but I will definitely be buying these. I already have my bedding and pillows and curtains but I need new furniture. I'll be on the lookout for anything I can turn into a trash to treasure project. I can't decide on the furniture or wall color. the bedding and curtains are white and I have accent pillows and a throw that's a pretty grey/green/blue (not sure what the actual color is called). I'm thinking I'll take that color and maybe just do the bed wall with it and the rest white? Currently the bed is black, I'm not sure if I want to keep it that way or go with white furniture. Oh, the choices!! I just can't wait to get to the accessorizing! HomeGoods I'll be there soon...

Two Girls, One Party

I had a birthday party for my girls last Saturday. I didn't go with a theme this time, just lots of pink.

Favors: I wanted to do something different for party favors so I made these Kool Aid playdough kits. The Kool Aid playdough idea I got off the Split Coast Stampers website and the package idea came from this post on Stamp A Sweet Impression. http://stampasweetimpression.blogspot.com/2008/10/taylor-tuesday.html. The little girl stamp I used is by Amuse (my favorite brand).

Entertainment: My mom did face painting on the kids. My 3 year old wanted everyone to color, so I got little packages of crayons and I printed off some clip art for everyone to color. We also made homemade vanilla ice cream. We got this ice cream maker a couple years ago and haven't used it. I thought it would be fun for all the kids to pass it around to shake it up. It was super yummy too.

Cake: I made my 3 year old a barbie princess cake. My dad took all the pictures of the party and I haven't got them from him yet so I can't show you pics of my disaster of a cake. I was really excited with the barbie I found. It already had a painted on bathing suit type thing so I didn't have to worry about trying to decorate her with frosting, which was my biggest worry, or so I thought....

So I made the cake mix and poured it into my Pampered Chef batter bowl to cook it and it only filled half the bowl. I made hubby run to the grocery store to buy another cake mix to fill the rest of the bowl. When he came back and I finally put the cake in the oven, I started panicking because it takes an hour to cook and 3 hours to cool and I only had 2 hours before the guests arrived! After an hour of cooking I thought it should be done, I opened the oven and realized why the recipe said to use one cake mix. For some reason I completely forgot that cakes rise!!! So I had no idea how much longer the cake was going to take to cook. I kept checking every 20 min and at some point the knife inserted in the center came out clean! I let the cake cool while we did other party activities and came back to decorate it soon before it was time to blow out the candles. Decorating it was a disaster too. I couldn't find my food coloring. My plan was to tint the frosting the same color as barbie outfit and then use my new Pampered Chef decorating tool to make cute flowers and swirls on her dress. Well, I had to go with plan b instead. Frost it with plain white frosting and throw on some sprinkles. Everyone was still impressed and said it tasted really good.

My favorite cake is what I call strawberry jello cake. My family has been making it forever and no one knows where it came from. I made a cupcake version for my 1 year old. Now you all can make it too. My cousin found the recipe on the Jello website. Here's the link for "Gelatin Poke Cake" http://brands.kraftfoods.com/jello/recipe.aspx?s=recipe&m=recipe/knet_recipe_display&wf=9&recipe_id=53184 Enjoy!!

Chalkboard Paint

I love chalkboard paint! I like the idea of painting a pantry wall or door to write down needed ingredients, making a message center, or painting playroom walls. Now you can make your own chalkboard paint. I just stumbled upon http://studiomdesigns.blogspot.com/ and there was a recipe for chalkboard paint off Martha's website. Here's the link to the recipe http://www.marthastewart.com/article/make-custom-color-chalkboard-paint. If you don't want to make your own I found they have tintable chalkboard paint at Home Depot. They also carry dry erase paint, glow in the dark paint and magnet paint. I had an idea to paint one of the insets on my kitchen cabinets with magnet paint so you can stick up a recipe that you're currently working on.

My Kitchen

I bought two cabinets at a salvage store for $10 a piece. The doors didn't match each other or my other kitchen cabinets but I thought it would be easy to find other doors for them. Well, turns out they are odd sizes so I'd have to have custom made doors which would be around $100 which is more than I wanted to spend. Yesterday I was on theletteredcottage.blogspot.com and there was the answer to my problem! I looked at pictures of her kitchen and she had door less cabinets! She added a little moulding around the openings to make it look intentional, added baskets and other pretty stuff. I'm headed to Home Depot to buy moulding and I'll post pics of the finished product.