Baby Blocks

 It's almost that time!! I'm 38 weeks and the doctor says that it is any day now! {Please come soon little guy!!} I just had to share this idea before the baby comes and I take a little blogging break. I saw some blank blocks at The Wood Connection and thought that it would be so cute if we made custom blocks for the baby. I bought enough for our parents, our sisters, two future brother-in-laws {wink, wink}, and a few extras for Steven and I to do. Everyone was so creative! Here are the blocks that we all made...

The block on the right is the block that Steven and I did together. We did it about our hobbies. Besides the birdie stamp on the side, one of us would start the picture and the other one would finish it. It turned out really cute! On the other block I used plain stamps. 

These are blocks that Steven and I made. Don't you love Steven's Bronco? :)

Here is the other side of the same blocks...

These are the blocks that my mom and dad made. The thing that is great about these blocks is that they can be as fancy or as simple as you want them to be and they all look so cute! The only "rule" that I had for everyone is that their name had to be on the block somewhere so that the baby would someday know who made what block. 

These are my sister's blocks and one of the future family members. :)  I love how different everyone's turned out!

These are my in-laws blocks... I feel like their blocks totally show off their personalities. Cute, right? I love the self portrait going on with Ken's!

Seannie did something so creative with hers. There were enough sides for each letter of her name so she added little pictures to each letter. I love the elephant!

It was so much fun seeing what everyone did with their blocks! Because it was so fun, I decided that I am going to make this a tradition for each of our babies!

Only a few more days!! We are ready for you baby!

Bubble Quilt & Nursery

Bubble quilts! They are so much fun! I saw this link on Pinterest from Awaiting Ada and I wanted to see if I could make one. I didn't do a full tutorial because she did such a great job. I will just tell you the few different steps that I took.

I have to tell you that these take a LONG time to make. Don't think that you can take one weekend to make it and have it all finished unless you can literally use every hour from that weekend. Even just the way you have to pin it takes quite a while. But they are so cute that I think they are worth it!

Here is the bubble quilt I made to match our nursery...

The material I used is the Michael Miller and Sarah Jane fabric "Out to Sea". It's my all time favorite material!

This is the first bubble quilt that I made. I had some extra purple material and my friend was pregnant. I was crossing my fingers that she was going to have a girl so that I could give it to her. (Luckily, she did!)

 

For this quilt, I used much bigger squares than Awaiting Ada does. I already had them cut so I thought I would try it out. I think it worked out pretty good! I did use her measurements for the bubble quilt I made for our nursery though, just because I had less fabric. 

If you read her tutorial, you can see that she has a really cute ruffle that goes around the bottom and then has the minky. Honestly, I was running out of time so I skipped the minky. I tried sewing the minky on my machine, but the bubbles were already full and it was just too hard to do. So I had to hand sew the whole bottom portion. (I told you, it took a LONG time!)

This is how I did the sides instead of using the ruffle... I cut the minky so that it was just about an inch and a half longer around each side. Then I folded all the minky up so that it bordered the bubbles and pinned it..

This is how I did the corners... First you pin one whole side.

Then you take the end corner and pull it in so that it looks like a triangle... just like this picture shows. 

Then I pull the non-pinned side up and fold it down into itself, to hide the raw edge. 

Pin it and start hand stitching! Luckily, minky is very forgiving and hides mistakes well. I think it turned out really great!

A few people have asked me to post pictures of my nursery and it's finally all done! So enjoy :)

The theme of my nursery is sailing, based on fabric from Michael Miller and Sarah Jane. Isn't this mobile perfect? I got it from my cousins for one of my showers. 

On the wall behind the crib, I am going to get newborn pictures done and get one of those big canvas pictures to hang. 

This is a shadow box that Steven made for the nursery. He is incredible! 

 We found the wheel at Hobby Lobby. The weekend that we found out it was a boy, Steven and I went shopping to find some cute details for the nursery. This was one of them and we also found the wooden sailboat in the shadow box at Hobby Lobby. I made the poster hanging up in photoshop and had it printed. 

These two blankets are extra special! The one on the bottom is a blanket that my grandma made before she passed away. She had been talking to me about how much she wanted me to have a fall baby at the same time as my aunt. She said that she was making this because she just knew that it would happen. At the time I was thinking, no way! But a few months after she passed away, boom! Surprise! :) Both me and my aunt are having fall babies just like she wanted!

The blanket on top was done by Steven's great grandma Francis when he was a baby. I think that my mother-in-law said that the blanket was made for his baby blessing. So our little guy has a blanket from his great grandma and his great-great grandma! And these cute little shoes are the very first present that Steven and I bought for the baby after we found out that we were pregnant. 

Here is a toy box that Steven made! I told you... He is incredible! I had mentioned to Steven that I wanted a home made toy box and about a week later he totally surprised me with this. It matches the room perfectly! We decided that we are going to do a hand print from the baby on the front of it when we bring him home from the hospital. Then every time we have a baby we will do the same thing. By the time we are grandparents, it will be full of different little handprints!

This is the rocking chair that my mother-in-law recieved from her mother-in-law when she was pregnant with Steven. I just love hand-me-downs! They are so much better than store bought. Steven's aunt helped me re-cover the rocking chair so that it didn't have the awesome 90's fabric on it. :) I tried to do something that would match a boy or a girl so that we can use it for all our babies. 

This teddy bear was made at Build-a-Bear when Steven and I were dating. The weekend we found out we were having a boy, we bought it a little sailor outfit to match the nursery. Every good nursery has a teddy bear in it. :)

As of today... we only have 39 more days until the due date! It's getting really really close! Any good advice for what to do the last few weeks?

One Hour Baby Project... Minky Taggy Blanket

I have seen these taggy blankets before and they look so cute and fun! I had some extra blue minky from another project, so I thought I would try to make one. Seriously it took less than an hour and the only reason that it took that long is because I had to decide between all my different blue ribbon ha ha. 

First things first.. cut the minky. I made mine square, about 24 inches x 24 inches. But you could make it any size that you want. So you should now have two sides of minky that can match up in size. 

The next things I did was pick out all of the different ribbons that I wanted. I know that a lot of times these blankets just have silky ribbon, but I decided to pick out a bunch of different types of ribbon. I placed them around the blanket just to see where I wanted them, but if you have better visualizing than me you can skip this step. 

Once I decided where I wanted all the ribbon, pin them in place. Pin them on the right side of one of the minky squares. Make sure the loop side of the ribbon is facing the inside of the square. Then I sewed each of the ribbons on. 

Next step is to put the two minky sides right sides together and sew along the edges. Leave about a 4 inch opening so that you can turn it right side out. Then sew the opening closed. 

TA-DA! Done. Minky Taggy Blanket in less than an hour. :)

31 Weeks.... Only a little bit to go!

I love July!

Happy Birthday America! Isn't July such a fun month?? Steven and I both just love the 4th of July. We have been out of town and super crazy busy with life, so I need to catch up on my July crafts. 

For the 4th, I made this fun quilt! I have always wanted to make a flag quilt but I have always been to busy. After graduating and now only having one job, I finally had time to do it. Yay!! Honestly the hardest part about this was the math to keep everything proportianate. But I think that it turned out really well! I didn't take a picture of the back, but it is all squares of levi. 

Here are a couple of crafts from my friends that were too awesome not to share....

Amy made this INCREDIBLE wreath. She found everything at the DI or Dollar Store besides the wreath. For the wreath she went to Michaels (with a coupon!) and bought one of the wooden wreaths. She put everything on with a combination of wire and hot glue. Isn't it gorgeous??

Here is one that is from my friend Courtney. Her sister Kelsey made her this hat for her birthday. She had seen a hat like this that was name brand, and she figured that she could make it herself. I love this idea! She got a plain white hat and just colored in sharpie on the hat. This was the perfect 4th of July hat! And it made me excited because I thought of all the other things you could do with that idea. 

Hope you are all having a great summer!

Popcorn Cupcakes

So a few weeks ago was our cousin's birthday. For her party, we were going to see Monsters University (which I highly recommend!).  We decided to make popcorn cupcakes. I searched Pinterest for a tutorial and all I found was pictures. I finally found one but it took forever, so I decided that I would do my own little write up for those of you who also have this issue!

FirstI made the cupcakes, just using the confetti box mix. Once they were cooled and ready to frost, I got out the marshmallows. 

Cut the marshmallows into different shapes. I found that if you cut it in half in different angles, it works perfectly. 

Then just frost the cupcakes using whatever kind of frosting you like best. The frosting doesn't have to be perfect. You just need it to hold the marshmallows in place. It does need to have this shape though, because we want the marshmallows to look like a big bowl of popcorn, higher on top than on the sides. 

Next, you just stick those marshmallows all over the cupcakes. Smoosh lots of them in there so you can't see the frosting and that way it will look full. 

So next you need water and yellow food coloring. I took a water bottle and mixed some water and food coloring. Then lightly spray all of the cupcakes so all the "kernels" have a slightly yellow glow. You don't want them to get mushy, so just a couple of sprays should do it. 

Then I got out my cooking paint brush. I dipped the brush into the yellow water and carefully painted several kernels. That gives it the look of several kernels having more butter on them than others. 

They turned out really cute and they were super easy to make!