A Lovely Surprise

The little bunting birthday cake that I made for L's birthday party this summer has been featured in the One Pretty Thing weekly flickr friends roundup.

What a fun little surprise :)
I hope you all are having a great weekend!
Hugs,
Rosina

Happy Birthday

Today we celebrated L's 7th birthday.
Her actual birthday was last Wednesday but with my dad being in the hospital and all of us spending so much time with him we thought that it would be best to postpone her party so that we could really make it special for her and I think I succeeded :)

I wanted to make a fun cake for her along a princess theme and I had previously done the castle cakes with towers so this time I thought I'd experiment with fondant. Now that is some fun stuff!

I baked a chocolate cake for the two layers and then rolled out a large sheet of the white fondant and popped it over the base of the cake. It went on so nice and smooth and it just took on the circular shape without much effort at all :) For the castle top I worked in some pink gel food coloring into the remaining fondant and then rolled out another rectangular strip to wrap around the top layer of the cake. I put a dollop of icing in the top of the base layer in the center and placed the second cake on top of it and then wrapped the pink castle tower shaped fondant around it and inserted another circular piece of pink fondant inside the top so that it was completely covered.

For the circular embellishments all around the bottom I just used various small objects I found around the kitchen for the circles and when you dampen the backside of the fondant it instantly becomes tacky so that you can just press the shapes onto the other fondant and they stick like glue.

Of course I couldn't resist making matching miniature bunting flags to adorn the top of the cake to go with the larger set of special birthday bunting that I made for her just days before :) It turned out so cute!

The weather cooperated beautifully and the rain held off long enough so that we could have her party out in the gazebo like we do every year :) With the amount of food my mom and I made you would have thought the entire neighborhood was coming but it was only the six of us *grin*.

There we were outside in the garden sipping raspberry spritzers with little strawberry & umbrella garnishes...

and nibbling on our ice cream cake cones *grin*.
L was definitely one happy birthday girl :)

~ Rosina

Birthday Girl Bunting

The countdown is on with only one more day until the birthday girls party! One of the larger projects for L's party that I needed to complete was making her special birthday bunting that she had asked for. True to form I left it to the last possible moment and hurried to finish it today *grin*. Actually I quite enjoyed sitting at my sewing machine listening to it whir along. There's something so therapeutic about sewing and it was probably the least stressful moment of my day :)

Armed with a stash of fun ginghams and summery fabrics I set to work cutting out flags, twenty-seven in total.

Now I know you might think I'm a total sucker for punishment or am just crazy but I decided to sew a backing onto each of the bunting flags. Twice the work but I was thinking about durability and washability when I came up with my plan *grin*. Knowing my daughter she is going to want to move and reposition this bunting multiple times and it may even end up outdoors in her tree house so I wanted to make sure that it will stand up to some heavy usage!

I always have tons of unbleached muslin on hand so I cut enough for each of the flags backing and then sewed each flag with right sides together along two sides leaving the tops open so that I could clip, flip, press and top stitch each of them before attaching them to the hot pink rik rak that I used for the string.

In case you are curious as to how to measure and cut your own flags so you can make a fabric bunting as well you can check out my previous birthday bunting tutorial which has photos and complete instructions on how to do it :)

Here it is all complete :)
I just had to sneak it outside and hang it in the plum tree for a quick photo *grin*. I just love how fun the fabrics and rik rak went together and from end to end it is roughly 20 feet long. I can't wait to give it to her.

~ Rosina

Tutorial ~ Make A Felt & Fabric Birthday Banner

I'm so pleased with how the Happy Birthday banner I made for my son's birthday last weekend turned out that I just had to share it with all of you :)

You will need:

Printed ABC's
an assortment of colored felt
coordinating cotton fabrics and thread
cookie cutter, mug or something else round to trace around

I started by tracing 3 inch circles on my felt using one of my water glasses as a tracing pattern :) Then I found a 4 inch scalloped cookie cutter that was just perfect for the white accent underneath the colored circles and traced around it, then cutting both styles of circles out. Don't worry if you don't have items that are the exact measurements that I used, check out your cookie cutters & glass cupboard and match up sizes that you have :)

Next using my word processor program on my computer I typed in 'happy birthday' and adjusted the size until the letters printed out at a suitable size to fit on the top circle comfortably without being to close to the edges. I used the 'Arial' font at 200 points for the size :)

With all of your circles and letters cut out, stack them together the way that you want them to look and start by sewing just your letters on through all 3 layers of felt. This is much quicker than hand sewing and I was in a bit of a time crunch *grin*.

With all of your letters attached it's time to get your flags cut. You'll have to excuse my hodge podge assortment of measuring tools! LOL. I only had one ruler that was long enough so I had to resort to fabric scraps for the other side *grin*. Not a big deal at this point though, all you want to do right now is visualize how big you want your flags to be so that your felt circles are going to fit nicely and jot down your measurements for when you are ready to actually start cutting!



Now that I knew exactly what size my flags we're going to have to be to look good, I started to cut. I used a 10 inch wide strip of cotton cut parallel to the selvage along the width of my fabric leaving me with a nice rectangular chunk.

With my flags planning to be 7 inches wide at the top, I lined one end of my ruler up at one of the corners on the narrow end of rectangle sized fabric and moved the other end of the ruler diagonally across the fabric so that it stopped 3.5 inches further up the fabric on the opposite side. This first cut was going to create one side of one flag. Once that was cut I repositioned my ruler so that it stayed on the 3.5 inch mark on the one side and slid the opposite end of the ruler up the fabric 7 inches and made my second cut which then created my 7 inch wide triangle like in the above photo.

To continue cutting your triangles out of your rectangular piece of fabric you just alternate what sides you count up your 7 & 3.5 inches. Hopefully my photo is worth a 1000 words and helps clarify my instructions *grin*.

With my assortment of colored flags all cut, I laid the entire banner out so that I could alternate flags & felt alphabet circles around until I had it looking just like I wanted :)

As soon as I had my line up decided I took them to the sewing machine, positioned each circle 3/4 of an inch below the top of each flag and then edge stitched inside the colored felt circles to attach them permanently to the flags.

Since I never turned under any of the raw edges on my cotton I was a bit concerned that with all of the handling it was going to start to fray. So I took my pinking sheers and quickly cut down each of the edges tidying up any stray threads and giving them a fun finish :)

The last and final step was to attach some pre-made bias tape along the top, connecting all of the flags together :) Now if you're really industrious you can actually make your own bias and the thought did actually crossed my mind but I opted for the easy way out and used the pre-made stuff *grin*.

That's it! One fun and super colorful birthday banner :) These could be used for anything to, not necessarily just birthdays. They'll gussy up any festivities and you could personalize it with your child's name to! The only thing that I would have changed was to put on the number 4 with velcro so that I would have been able to remove it every year and update how old he is. Alas, hindsight is 20/20 *grin*.

Have fun making one of your own and let me know when you've finished it. I'd love to see what you do to make yours special :)

~ Rosina

Happy 4th Birthday

It has been party central around here since December with 6 birthdays in the last three months and yesterday my baby turned 4!! Above is the cute little birthday card we made for him to match the 'Happy Birthday' banner that I made :) You'll have to excuse the backwards 'a'. We had a bit of a stamping malfunction! *grin*

To please all the men in the family I went with the super deluxe meat and cheese platter from our favorite German delicatessen. So yummy and not a piece left for a midnight snack!

I don't know what it is about ice cream cake but everyone has requested it for their birthday cake even though it's wintertime!

It was absolutely hilarious to watch M open his gifts. My mom had hidden them around the house and gave him clues as to where to find them. He would race around hunting for them but little did he know that Omi was going to make him work extra hard to open them. She had wrapped them in mass amounts of tape! He wouldn't let K or L help him open them either. So we all giggled as he strained and pulled making the funniest faces as he worked so hard with his little hands to unwrap them :)

One of his favorite gifts was this cute stamp set. We've been drawing roads on paper and he stamps in all of the vehicles traveling while making up little stories to go along with them. Stamps & playdough are his favorite playthings right now so this will provide endless hours of fun for him :)

No more birthdays now until August. Time is moving so quickly though this year that it'll be here in a blink of an eye! If only I could bottle time and slow it all down :)

~ Rosina

Party Banner

I'm feeding my felt fetish again LOL.
I've been working on a happy birthday banner for my son's 4th birthday tomorrow and I've just about got it completed :) Last night I hauled out my jumbo bag of felt and started cutting up a storm. I love working with felt, it's so easy to work and forgiving of mistakes. Just a little tug here and there sorts out little imperfections *grin*.

He's turning 4 and thought that I'd surprise him with a special birthday bunting with 'Happy 4th Birthday' on it. All that's left is to sew a string of bias along the top to tuck all of the flags into and it'll be ready to string up tomorrow afternoon :)

We just finished putting on a big shin dig for big brother's 11th birthday so we're going a little more low key tomorrow with cheese & crackers, salami and landjaeger from our favorite German delicatessen and of course one jumbo ice cream cake!

~ Rosina