Bridal Shower - Tiffany Style

I threw my best friend a bridal shower. She lives up in the mountains, so we had to bring everything up with us, but I think it turned out pretty good (I am jealous of the grass, how does he get his grass so green and fluffy, yep this is totally real, not that fake stuff, and it's so soft to walk on). So the first table on the left is where the gifts went, the next table is the drinks, and the far table is where the food went.

I got pictures of the bride and groom as kids and then made frames using my cricut, and put the pictures in them, used some ribbon and there you have frames in trees.

Drinks, you can see the pictures a bit better from this view.

I hung some of paper lanterns from the trees above where the food was going to go. These were bought at Micheal's, they are reusable, so a good investment in my opinion.

Here's the table when we got the food on it (top left - quinoa salad, top middle - fruit salad, top right - chicken sandwiches on criosants, bottom left - strawberry spinach salad, bottom right - chinese chicken salad). We had about 20 people and this was the PERFECT amount of food. I couldn't believe how pefect it was, there was about 1/2 a serving left on each plate.

 

We knew that it was going to be outside and sunny/hot in early August, so we found some EZ tents, so people had shade to eat lunch under.

 

The table just had mason jars filled with Daisy's, and then we put a fork and knife in the napkin tied with ribbon.

Here's those tissue pom poms  I know you were dying to see! Don't they look great? 

If you look close there are little chocolate favors, they have Hershey kisses with a tag that says the bride and grooms name along with their wedding date.

There you have it, a bridal shower fit for a queen. Considering we had to bring everything up the mountain with us, I think we did pretty good. Everything turned out perfect and I couldn't have asked for a better bridal shower. Up next week, another bridal shower, I threw with my mom and sister for my brother and his wife.

DIY Tissue Pom Poms

Okay, so I didn't get great pictures towards the end. I had 20 of them to make, and had people helping me make them, sooooo, here are the pictures I did get. It's super easy. When looking up how to make these online, like on this site, it calls for 20 x 30 tissue sheets, but those aren't really readily available at the stores. Well they might be, but at the cheaper stores, like the Dollar Store or Big Lots they come in 20 x 20, and trust me, you can make them with this size too. So I started off with tissue paper, some good sharp scissors and some wire, mine was white but you can use anything.

First unfold the tissue, the best pom poms have more tissue (the tutorial calls for 10 sheets), but I did one with just 10 sheets and that worked too, but since I only had 20 x 20 sheets, it was a little on the light side, and "airy", with 15 sheets, it had the more full affect, I think some of mine had 16 or 17 (yep I can't count, those suckers are thin and hard to separate)

Then you need to accordion fold it

Continue the accordion or "fan folding"

When you're done, you'll have something that looks like this. The folds don't have to be totally perfect.

Then you need to wrap the wire around the middle. Like so:

I added a little loop in there, so that I had a good place to add the string so I can hang them easily. You'll thank me later for this part. Make sure you make the loop is on the flat part, if you put the loop anywhere else, like on the the side where the folds are, it won't work, I tried that, and the pom pom didn't "fluff" right when hung.

Next, if you want to make the edges rounded, or pointy, this is when you cut. I wanted rounded for mine, but the same application can be used for the pointy, etc. The tutorial shows them cutting it all at once, I found this REALLY hard, so I did it phases. As you can see below I took about half the stack and cut my rounded edge.

Then took the second half and matched it, I found this much easier, and nicer on my fingers and my scissors.

In the tutorial it's this nice pile, this is what my pile looked like, don't worry, it's slightly messy, I think they stage stuff in those pictures to make it look easier then it really is, just to make people feel bad when ours doesn't come out the same. Join me in a messy pile!

When you're done, it should look something like this:

I added a string at this point, I tried doing it after, but it didn't work out as well, and the string really doesn't get in the way.

Now here comes the long part. Spread out your "fan" and then one by one start separating the tissues from each other. When you're separating the tissues, if you try to separate as close to the middle as possible. If that makes sense.

See how my model (aka, best friend who's shower I'm throwing and I'm making her work), starts her separation from the center? The more separation you can get from each sheet, the fluffier your pom pom is going to be. So you're going to "fluff" half of the stack up, then flip over the stack and fluff the other half in the other direction.

Looking at the picture below, she's fluffing alternating sides. She's fluffed the right side, and is now fluffing the left side. You can either separate from the left, then the right and switch back and forth (I found that this worked better), but you can also separate the sheets from one side, then the other side, then flip the whole thing around...

This is just part of the stack being fluffed, maybe 3 or 4 more sheets and we're going to flip the stack the other way and do the same thing to the other side.

After you fluffed both sides, you just need to move the tissue around so it looks seemless. Sorry I don't have a picture of this part. But you'll get it, and if you tear some of the layers, don't worry, you won't be able to see it. These are all the pom poms we made that night. You can tell they don't look "perfect" but just wait till you see them hung (post coming tomorrow). Until then...happy Pom, Pom'ing'!

 

Foxy Presents

It was my birthday today so the Mr. took me out to a nice dinner. My parents came to watch Baby Fox, it was nice to have a slow dinner without interruptions. We found this shop and the Mr. wanted to take pictures in fron of it.

Dress is from Old Navy, sweater is from Ann Tayor Loft (old),

shoes from DSW, Purse from Coach (Old), Necklace from Brighton

Bracelet is from Brighton and the ring is from Macy's (old)

Add Some Color (A Little At A Time)

I realized while looking through my closet that I have three colors, yes you read that right, 80% of my closet consists of red, black and grey. I really need to start expanding my closet, seriously. I try to find different colors, this summer I found a few different colors. When putting my outfit together this morning, I went for a comfy skirt, and normally I would grab my black tank top. Really, I've had this skirt for 4 years and EVERY time I've worn it with the same shirt. BUT today was different, when I went to grab the shirt, it was dirty. Uh oh, the skirt was already on, I had my mind set already (don't you hate when that happens?) anyway, I decided, this is the day I'm going to try something different. It's nothing to write home about, but I think I pulled together this outfit pretty nicely for it being 5am and not having my go to shirt.

Normally I NEVER tuck in my shirts, I ALWAY wear them out. But today, I decided I've added some color, why not tuck in my shirt. If I do say so myself, I think it looked okay. I do have to admit that I didn't think to tuck in my shirt till after I got to work.

Baby Fox wanted to get in on the action too

Where's the Fashion?

So I had set out to try and fix my fashion. Try to mix and match, add some accessories. So far I think I'm failing. I have added some accessories, but still don't mix colors that much. I figure I'd start today, since I just got my hair cut. I love this dress, but need to figure out a way to spruce it up. Add some sort of color perhaps? But I do love my new do, yay for new haircuts! While looking through my closet I realized it mostly contains, reds, pinks, black and grey...wow, I need to broaden my horizons. Imagine just plain black pumps, perhaps I could have spruced up this outfit with some colored shoes? Hmm...something to think about for next time.

Tissue Pom Poms

I'm going to try and make these using this tutorial: 

http://www.marthastewart.com/how-to/tissue-paper-pom-poms-how-to

I have high hopes, I couldn't justify spending $20 for 5 of them (okay if you use the Michael's 40% off coupon, it still makes them $13)

I'll let you know how it goes.

Cars Themed 1st Birthday Party

My son's first birthday has come and gone, but that doesn't mean I can't relive that day, a million times over. I love pictures how they capture each moment of the party. I wish I had taken more picture, or dedicated someone to take pictures, but at least I got the before shots of everything before everyone stared showing up. I decided on a Cars them party for my son because...well my sister knows someone who worked on Cars and could get us a bunch of stuff for free...what more could I ask for? Free stuff...woo hoo! So here's the party break down.

Walking up to the party we made a road with trash bags and white tape, totally easy right?

We don't have any furniture in this room, rather very little furniture, so it was going to be the perfect place to set up shop.

The stickers on the back wall are removable (provided by friend, but you can find something sort of like them here), the stuffed cars on the back of the table were also provided by friend. I went to Party City and bought the Cars themed paper plates, napkins, cupcake tree, the paper tablecloth, flags, little toothpick flags for the cupcakes and for people to use to retrieve meatballs (what's in the crockpot). We had extra flags from the banner (see below), so we attached them to the side of the table, since the tablecloth wasn't wide enough for our table. We made "tire" stacks with chocolate donuts (funny enough, everyone LOVED the donuts, I guess people don't buy those, they were gone within minutes).
 We specifically picked a time so we wouldn't have to feed people lunch or dinner, but snacks, so we went with meatballs in BBQ sauce, hummus and pita chips, some spinach dip and veggies which could be dipped in the hummus or the spinach dip.

I made the cupcakes, chocolate with chocolate frosting, and pumpkin with cream cheese frosting. Who doesn't love a mini cupcake? You can't tell but the cupcake wrappers have Cars theme on them...boo for using chocolate and it covering them up. Lessoned learned.

 I made this for Colton. I just made a 13x9 in cake and then cut out shapes to make the number "1". I should have taken pictures, but forgot. I ended up being able to make this a two layer cake with just 1 pan. I tried to buy the number "1" cake pan, but that thing in GINORMOUS! This was a much better size. Especially since it was just for my son and he probably wasn't going to eat it anyway.

It was Christmas time for the party, so we used what was already up, and used some checkered streamers as garland for the staircase.

We also decided since Colton was born on Christmas that we would make him a Birthday Christmas Tree each year, where just his birthday presents would go. Here's his Cars Themed 1st birthday tree. I just used the streamers and then we bought a bunch of Cars, both big and small to put on the tree. You can see it, but the top of the tree is an orange cone.

I made a banner that says "Happy 1st Birthday Colton" bought the checkered flags and then used my Cricut to cut out letters.

 With the copious amounts of pictures I've taken of my son, I've managed to take pictures of him each month with the same doggy. We printed them out in 5 x 7's then put a white background and pasted that to the 12x12 scrapbooking paper. The letters were cut out with my Cricut, if you don't have one of those, I highly recommend!



We wanted to provide a little craft for the kids to do while they were there. So I made up personalized license plates for each of the kids. The month of the expiration date was the month that they were born in. The year was 2012 (duh).

 Here's my cute son. He didn't like the cake and didn't want to get his hands dirty. So serious Baby Fox!