Happy Halloween!

This year I decided to let my kids decide on every piece of clothing they wanted to wear for their Halloween Costume.  Even better... I did not have to make a single piece of it. {phew!}

Paige decided she wanted to be Sleeping Beauty... and this is how her costume came together.

I especially love the stockings she picked out to wear with it. :)

Matthew wanted to be Bumblebee Transformer...

He LOVES Transformers {really anything that resembles a robot.}

We walked by this house with halloween decor and Matthew looked at the skeleton and said... "Oh No!  He fall down!"

Hope you all had a Happy Halloween... and lots of CANDY!

Good Night!

A Sewing Project...

It has been so crazy the last few weeks... I have not had much time to do much sewing... just work and kids.


I am so excited to be playing with this little toy today...

It is a Janome 1100D Professional Serger.  Love it!  Automatic Tension... Smooth cutting and stitching... no more sewing straight stitches and then go back and zig zag!  A breeze.  The threading took me a little bit to figure out  and learn, but once I learned it, it was fairly easy.

What do you think I am working on?  {Hint... it is something for the Moda Bake Shop booth at Quilt Festival next week.}

Moda Bake Shop

I am so excited about next week... the Moda Bake Shop will be having a booth at Quilt Festival!

Come visit Me, Lissa and Debbie in booth #1938 in Houston, Texas
November 4 -7, 2010

We will be doing demonstrations and handing out a fun little goodie!
{Please note: we will not be selling any goods.  There will be several Moda Customers at the show that will have Moda Precuts for sale that you can use with the Moda Bake Shop Recipes.}

Will you be there?

Homecoming Wrist Mums Tutorial

This week is Homecoming week for our school so to help kick it off.... a tutorial for a Wrist Mum. A friend gave me this idea and I LOVE IT!  It was perfect for little girls that may not want the thing pinned to them all day.  Some mums can get very heavy.

Supplies:
1 Slap Bracelet
1 Small Boa
Rhinestone Iron-on Letters
1 Medium size mum flower
1 small size mum flower
1 Mum Ribbon with your team name pre-printed
1 Blank Mum Ribbon to apply the name of recipient
Assorted spools of ribbon that coordinate with your schools colors and mascot.
Mum accessories such as footballs, megaphones, etc.
Hot Glue Gun with extra sticks of glue
Bonash Non-Stick Pressing Sheet 


Instructions:

Step One:
Lay your slap bracelet out flat.  Cut a section of boa sized to fit your slap bracelet. 

Hot glue the boa to the slap bracelet.

Step Two:
Cut out the letters from your iron-on rhineston letters and place the letters towards the end of the blank mum ribbon.

Using a pressing cloth such as the Bonash Pressing Sheet, fold the sheet over the letters and ribbon and press into place.  This pressing sheet will help protect the ribbon from melting from the hot iron.

Remove the plastic from the letters and you now have some bling for your mum.

Step Three:
Cut various styles of ribbon 12"-16" in length depending on how long you want the ribbons to hang.  These can easily be trimmed down when you are finished glueing everything together.

Step Four:
Layer your Medium and Small mums and hot glue them together.

Step Five:
Turn your flower over and use the plastic bottom to glue all the ribbons and mum extras to by layering ribbon, glue, ribbon, glue, ribbon, etc.. You get the point.

Step Six:
Once you are happy with the ribbons and mum extras glued on, apply a dot of glue to the bottom of the flower and ribbons and glue to the boa side of your slap bracelet.  To help secure the flower and ribbons in place on the slap bracelet.  Fold over a few of the flower petals and glue to the underside of the bracelet.

Flip it over and this is what it should look like.

Step Seven:
Glue on some mum accessories to the center of the mum flower

Step Eight:
Wrap the slap bracelet around your wrist and wear with school pride!

Step Nine:
To give the mum as a gift.... a shirt box is perfect size and will help keep the mum nice and tidy.  Just add some tissue to the bottom and place the mum centered in the box.

 Great way to store the keepsake as well.

GO TIGERS!!!

Favicon Tutorial

Being a web developer by day {and at times by night}... I am suprisingly shocked that I have never once posted any web developing tips or tutorials on my blog. Go figure. So... without further ado... I give you my first {and hopefully not last} web tip.

This is great to use on blogs that do not allow you to upload your own custom favicon.  What is a favicon? A favicon is the little tiny icon that sits just to the left of the http://... in your address bar of your web browser.  This favicon can be customized to brand your blog or website.

Step One:
Using a photo editor such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks, create an image you would like to use as your favicon.  TIP:  The image resolution should be 72 pixels/inch. The image size should be 32 x 32 pixels square. Save your favicon as a GIF, PNG, JPG, BMP, ICO, or TIFF and must be less then 1MB in file size.

Step Two:
Go to http://www.iconj.com/favicon_hosting.php. Under the title Free Favicon Hosting, click on the Browse button and select the saved favicon image.  Just leave the Sharpen Level to No Sharpen.  Click the Upload It! button.

Step Three:
Now with your Favicon.ico successfully generated, you are given two options. 
A: You can do a Direct Download of your favicon and save the .ico file to your web server if you are allowed to.  Simply follow the instructions they provide to add your .ico image to your website/blog.
B: You can have IconJ.com host your .ico image and link to it from your website/blog by inserting the html they provide into your code.

Option A is typically for the advanced web developer that just needs to generate the .ico image file.
Option B is generally used by the non-web developer that wants to add a more custom look to their blog. The following steps will show you option B and how to install it into your blog code. 

Step Four:
Copy and Paste the code under the title Host It at IconJ.com (Direct Link)

Step Five:
In Blogger, you will need to login to your blogger account, click on the Design tab/link, then click on Edit HTML.

Step Six:
Just before the ending head tag paste the code you just copied from IconJ.com.  It should look something like this...

Click Save Template.

CONGRATULATIONS!
You can now view your blog and see your new custom favicon displayed in the address bar and the window tab.

What's your FavIcon?

SMILE!

Today is World Smile Day! 

So go and give and Smile to everyone you pass.  You just might make their day.  :)

A Beef Challenge

Tuesday morning after dropping Paige off at school, Matthew and I headed to the doctor's office to finally have his Beef Challenge to see if he is allergic to Beef.  A couple months ago, he had a skin test and Beef came back as a border-line positive result. The only way to truly test if he is allergic to beef is to do this beef challenge.  Oh... did I mention that a beef challenge lasts about 3-4 hours? 

So... quick stop at Sonic to pick up a plain and dry hamburger and then to the doctor's office at 9am.

If you have never had any experience with this, here is the very short version of how it works.  The beef patty is broken up into fourths, each section is slightly larger than the next. {no equal portions} 

9:30am - the smallest portion is given to Matthew to eat.  Vitals checked. Check for hives. 30 minute wait time.

10:00 am - the next size portion is given to him to eat.  Vitals checked. Check for hives. Another 30 minute wait time.

{I think I forgot to mention... Matthew is NOT a big Beef fan in the first place.  So, lots of bribing, making yummy sounds and Cheering when he actually ate all the beef}

10:30am - the next size portion is given to him to eat. Vitals checked. Check for hives. Yet another 30 minute wait time.

11:00am - the final hamburger portion is given to Matthew to eat.  This one was about half of a hamburger patty. Vitals checked. Check for hives.  This was the toughest piece for him to eat.  He DID NOT want to eat this last bit of beef. He claimed it to be "YUCKY". It took him 30 MINUTES to eat all of half a patty.  Then once he finally ate it all, WAIT for 1 Hour.

12:30am - OUTCOME: Matthew is NOT allergic to beef.  HOORAY! 

I have to say, I sure have missed having hamburgers and beef spaghetti and anything else you can eat with beef in it for the last couple months.  Because of this suspicion of a beef allergy with Matthew, I stopped making meals with beef and switched everything we would use beef in to ground Turkey, Turkey Meatballs, etc {you get the point}.  I do have to admit it is a lot healthier to have turkey over beef, but beef is nice to have every once in a while.