Merry Christmas 2011

I have not posted for a while, my son who lives in NYC has just come in town. 

Also being a hairstylist, this is my busy season!!

I have also been shopping, wrapping, cooking and  cleaning.  

But the children have put out cookies and milk for Santa, food for his Reindeer too! Now they are fast asleep and dreaming of tomorrow morning when they can come down the steps to see if Santa came for a visit to them. After all the threatening I did with the Elf on the Shelf who was going to tell Santa on them, I am sure there is a tiny bit of doubt in the back of their heads somewhere! 

Here are my 3 children, Morgan, Andrew and Wyatt.

I have much to be thankful for and hope you have a wonderful Christmas day and an even better 2012!!!

the wooden horse

I saw this wooden ornament when I was out shopping, I can not remember where or how much I paid for it.
But I knew what I wanted to do with it.

Paint it! My Mother in-law has a 28 year old Paint horse named Apache. He is a pasture horse now and lives the good life. She had his mother as her first horse and has had Apache since he was born. 

This is the only photo I could find of old Apache and it was a year he got VERY skinny! He does not look this skinny now, he gets hay & grain daily and is back to his old self. But he will not be here forever, so I thought it would make a nice gift for my MIL.

I started out by painting the reddish part of the horse with an acrylic paint I bought 

at Joanne's called spice tan, It was a perfect patch!

Next I painted the main, tail and spots with Annie Sloan's Old White. Except i kept getting a pink cast bleeding thru. So I waited a really long time for it to dry and tried again. Still pink.

After painting this little horse 15 times, I decided to just add a little of the spice tan over the 

old white and give it a little wash. That worked. Plus it aged it a tiny bit.

I love how it turned out!

Now when Apache is gone, my MIL and the kids can just look to the Christmas 

tree to get a glimpse of the old Apache.

We will not be spending Christmas with my in-laws, so when they were here this weekend I gave 

my MIL the ornament I painted for her. She liked it very much!!

Have you made any of our Christmas gifts by hand?? I have really gotten into it this year!!

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Cinderella makes her debut

My Morgan will turn 7 on the 22nd. We like to celebrate her birthday either a little bit earlier or after Christmas, so we had it Saturday. I had asked her what she wanted for a cake and she wanted blue cake with blue icing.

My first thought was, oh great, a smurf. The I thought of Cinderella! I cake with a Cinderella doll and the cake would make up the dress! I have never attempted this before so here is my amateur attempt at her Blue Velvet cake. 

I did not have a skirt pan and for $18 did not want to buy one. So I improvised with an Anchor Hocking oven proof, glass, shaped kinda like a skirt bowl and 2X9" rounds. I found a recipe online using a box cake mix and other ingredients. Here is the recipe.

  Blue Velvet cake

  1         box Cake mix

1 1/4

cups buttermilk

1/3

cup vegetable oil

3

eggs

1

tablespoon unsweetened baking cocoa

2

teaspoons royal blue paste food color

1

toothpickful violet paste food color

Heat oven to 325. Lightly grease and flour the cake pans, then mix ingredients on low for 30 seconds and then medium for 2 minutes. (I had a lady tell me once that you should always mix cake batter for longer than the recipe calls for, you will get a fluffier cake. Sounded good to me!) Bake for 22-27 minutes, but I had to go longer on the glass bowl, as it was deeper.

I used a gel food coloring I had instead of the gel.

I also had a recipe for the frosting, but my cake turned out a little green, so I said NO way am I gonna do a green Cinderella, so I called up our local grocery store and bought some of the blue icing from the bakery

I remembered I had bought a glass plate and this light fixture sconce from a thrift store earlier 

this month and used glass glue to put them together for a pretty cake plate.

The cake looks horrible!! The outside has a greenish cast to it, but the inside is blue. I sliced off the top to make it flat. I used 2 round cakes, and took a small glass and cut out a hole in the center for the dolls legs.

I had to use a lot of icing around the bottom of the top layer of cake as it was a little 

smaller of a diameter than the 9", to make it a gradual slope down.

I tried to smooth the skirt as much as I could. I always knew that cake decorating was an art, 

but now I really can appreciate the detail and beauty that they can work into a cake. Needless to say, I decide this Cinderella's dress would be a little different than the original and went for a 'fluffy' dress.

I bought the doll at Walmart for $9.

I took off her clothes and wrapped her in saran wrap. Makes cleaning her up much easier!

Sorry about the blurry picture!

The Fondant flowers on her dress I bought from a bakery supply house. They are little blue forget me knots ($.10 each) and white roses ($.25 each). I already had the tiny white balls I used as well.

I am pretty pleased with the cake but I need a LOT more cakes to decorate!

(I made a smaller cake to place the candles in)

But I think that this little girl was quite impressed by her mommy's skills and loved it!

And it tasted good to boot!!

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front porch and a few Urns

I had been looking for some artificial trees to decorate my front porch 

Urns with at the craft stores. But everything was either too tall, 

small or expensive still! Then I saw these beautiful Urns over at 

Taking the Scenic Route and told Roberta how much I loved them.

So I decided I would do my own version of this.

I had a few picks left over that I hadn't used yet and some silver ornaments too. 

So after I gathered everything up I just started to create, not really having any shape in mind.

Our tree is artificial, so my husband brought home some greenery from 

a local tree farm and at the time, they only had Douglas Fur. 

I bought a huge block of Styrofoam at Walmart. I like the floral foam better, it is SO much easier to cut!!

I only needed something at the top of the Urn so the stuff would stay in place. After an hour cutting through the center, then splitting that another hour again I looked around the house to see what I could use to anchor the Urn. It is plastic and I didn't want it to tip over. So I went to the pantry and got out 4 cans of soup. They worked great.

First I added the real greenery, spacing it out to get a full look. I liked Rebecca's 

use of 2 different types of greens, but ya gotta work with whatcha got, right?

I had it done in no time after I added some silver glittered curly stems, some
green berry, some sugary red berries, a long strand of pine cones,
as well as individual pine cones at the base to cover the Styrofoam.  

Then a grouping I made of 5 silver ball ornaments strung together to mimic the larger gazing ball in Roberta's Urn. I used the same ribbon as I did on my staircase and a few silver reindeer ornaments.

Please excuse my dead plants, dirty porch, faded rug, this is typically what the 

front of the house looks like during the long, cold winters in Missouri!

I put a few of my cable knit sweater pillows out on the chair that stays out year round, 

in the hopes to soften the look a little.

I use this lantern almost every season, just switch out the contents, 

but I could not tell you where I got it.

I think if I add another kind of greens, it might break it up a bit, but overall I am pleased with the new Urns!

The whole thing really only cost me a few bucks for the greens and a 1/2 roll of ribbon I got at Michaels for 1/2 off!!

My Dad just shipped this ceramic Santa back to me. You can't tell in the photo, 

but the head is about life size.I painted it for my parents in 1989. 

There is a black pipe that goes into his mouth, we are trying to locate that. 

I can still remember making him, he is a cutie, no?!

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