Mummy and Me Tea

Each year Laurel and I do a Christmas Tea. Last year she got a bug to do a summer tea and we did a flower/lady bug theme, it was loads of fun and really cute! This year I wanted to do a Halloween party. So here are some of the details of our party.
The invites:
I custom made them from a design I saw online that cost a ton. I did splurge a little and the lettering is vinyl.


The Food:
We did hot hogs wrapped in croissant rolls (mummy's), chicken salad with eyes (grapes) on croissants, fruit cups, veggie tray, decorate your own cookies, popcorn, and we each decorated our own Carmel apple. For drink we did root beer with dry ice.


The take away:
Laurel picked up cute plates, I made pumpkins out of orange table cloth and wrapped the tops with floral tape and pipe cleaner (filled with candy of course). We added spider rings and little stencils along with sugar sticks and they got to take their glow in the dark drinking cups too. All this in a cute bag to go.

The rest:
After the eating, chatting and talking about our costumes, the girls watched Witches and the Moms cleaned up and hung out. Overall, a spook-tacular party!

My halloween pieces

For my costume I wanted really nice jewelry but was unwilling to pay for it, so for about 1/6 the cost, I made these.

Hotel Bordom

While traveling for work sometimes I get organized enough to bring projects with me. Sadly its day two and I am out of projects... well I can do my taxes :(
Here are a couple of photos of what I made.

These are the tags to go with the mummies I made over the weekend.

I have spent a lot of time working on my younger daughters Halloween costume. I brought it with and did the finally beading that I needed to add, I had enough goods to make some matching earrings and a necklace to go with. I will get photos of the girls costumes (ohh and mine! made stuff for it too) soon.

Weekend get away

Ohhh how great it is to get out and focus on what crafts and projects need to be done. I am going to list a few of the photos, I have more that was done, but it goes with gifts, swapps, costumes and stuff that I want to keep wraps on for a little while.

Bags. I was going to make them reversible. I was going to send one to my swap buddy, and then realized I could make 4 and give one to each of us at the overnight scrap this last weekend.. oh and scrap buddy don't worry.. it wouldn't fit in the box. They were pretty easy.. esp since I can't sew.. it was a first for me, but the material was so cute I had to do something with it.


Want your mummy? I got the idea for these a couple of years ago from Family Fun, this year I am making about 80 of them, the girls classes and my PTA board will love them! They hold 2 pieces of candy and are just adorable!

Yes.. I know.. don't hate me! My Christmas cards were done in February, so I had time to get these mind blowing, cute as hell Christmas Tea for Mom and Me invites made. Custom design, cant wait for the party to show you the whole theme!

That's it for now.. I will have more promise.

Not limited to monkeys

I love holidays and birthdays and any excuse to create something fun and wonderful. I take painstaking details to create most things I do cuz' I am a freak like that. So in creating my oldest daughters birthday this year I have not disappointed. She wants a Limited Too party and LT2 does not have their own birthday line so that left it wide open for me! We are still working through the details but here is stage one.. the invite.. and the work put into this "masterpiece".
First task, find an image of the Monkey and the Flowers (the images for LT2). I did this by purchasing a luggage tag of the monkey and scanning him, then my daughter got a new backpack I scanned the flowers so I got these images.


Once I had these I needed to clean them up and create line art. (this took hours)


At this point I shipped the images off to the local stamp store and in a couple of days I had stamps. With much pondering and letting my daughter choose colors and ideas I went with it. I love the way it turned it and not only am I making the invites, and the thank yous, we will use them for the craft at the party too.

The party is in December, so I will have a full update later of the party.

Shoe box Swaps - Halloween Swap

We're going to be hosting swaps from time to time. We thought we'd kick it off with Halloween since it's just around the corner and the goodies will be needing to be shipped at the perfect time for Halloween. There are a few simple steps, "rules" if you will, to play along:

1. Send an email to withandwithout AT gmail DOT com, indicating you want to join this swap. Include:

Your Name
Your Address
Your blog address (if you have one)
A description of likes/dislikes to give your swap partner some direction

(This information will only be sent to your swap buddy)

2. Send the email no later than September 9. Swap partners will be assigned by September 10. You MUST ship your swap by October 10.

3. Swap items must fit in an average sized shoe box. We don’t want people going too crazy but want to have enough room to fit some cool loot.

4. This is a Halloween swap. Everything you send needs to somehow tie in to the theme. Whether it be colors, actual Halloween items, whatever, just make sure they tie together somehow.

5. Again, cut-off to sign up is September 9. Please send us an email before then.

6. Please read #2 again. It’s important you stick to the ship date to not ruin the fun for your swap partner.

7. Have fun!!

Feel free to invite anyone you’d like. We don’t have a cut-off and would love to have as many participants as possible. We have created a Flickr group that we would love for you to join. This will enable us to share pictures of all the great things we receive through the swap and have discussions about the group.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email or leave a comment! We look forward to swapping with you!

Back to School

I substitute at my daughters school, and have found I have an amazing amount of respect for the job that teaching professionals do day in and day out. For the start of each school year I check the list required for school and buy extras when I find them on sale. I also add a disposable camera, gift card to develop the film and a sweet treat. Here is what I did this year.