Bug birthday at the Lake

Following a trip to an outlet mall I came home with a rather adorable caterpillar cake pan. I knew I could talk a certain soon-to-be five year old into loving the idea of a bug party. My favorite thing about this theme was the freedom it gave me. I could really use whatever colors I wanted and didn't have to pay up for anything with a licensed characters.

I used the cake pan twice simply leaving out the head the second time so I would have an extra long caterpillar. The icing was a bit tedious due to all the outlining, but it was worth it.

A little plastic wheelbarrow was the perfect container for the dirt and worms, of course served with a shovel. We found an assortment of bug candy to live in our dirt.


The birthday boy with his party favors: Mini sand buckets with a punch balloon, flashlight, water toy, a few plastic bugs and a magnifying glass.

And of course something feminine for our only girl guest.

I may have slightly overestimated the amount of cake needed, but cake is cheap and it looked really cute.

The Not So White Couch

This was my couch. I know it wasn't the best idea to buy an off-white sofa for the main room in the house, but it was the exact size I wanted and for the price I couldn't pass it up. I actually got two sofas from a local online auction, and they were a steal!

It wasn't long before the combination of my human and canine children had it looking pretty dingy, but I wasn't ready to give up on it. I started researching. At first I wanted to slipcover it, but I quickly realized that the only cover was going to have to be custom made and that would cost a fortune. Next I thought, "I could make a slipcover..." and then I came back down to Earth. I do have a sewing machine which I use from time to time, but this was a bit out of my abilities.

Before and After- Spray painted pillow

Too bad this couch isn't brown or something that wouldn't show stains and spots so easily. In comes google. I began googling everything I could think of to change the color of a couch. I came across fabric spray paint. Yep, you can spray paint fabric. Although after my test I don't recommend it. I'm sure this is great for some applications, but it just wasn't for me. First It was really difficult to get even coverage. There is a lot of waste if you do it right, and this stuff wasn't cheap. It left the fabric slightly stiff and with the texture of these pillows this just wasn't working. I calculated that it would cost over $200 to spray the whole couch and I wasn't willing to spend that on something that might not work.

So I bit the bullet and decided to dye all the cushions. I used RIT dye from the grocery store. I unzipped the seats and ripped the seams of the backs. I stuffed half of them in the washing machine and poured in the dye. This would have been much easier my old top loader and not my fancy high efficiency front loader. I ended up adding the dye mid cycle using the detergent dispenser. In hindsight I could have used the bleach part to automatically add it later. Despite the possibility of lingering brown dye appearing on my clothes I've had no problems.

I had to dye them in two batches and I was a little concerned the color would be different, but it actually came out pretty well. 

I obviously couldn't dye the entire couch so I ended up with a two-tone look. I didn't mind it and the bottom and arms were still in pretty good shape anyway. I read about painting fabric which would give it a leather like finish, but decided to hold off on that until I got really desperate. 

UPDATE: So this actually held up pretty well. I recently redyed it just to freshen it up since I had washed the covers and they started to fade. However the fabric on this couch isn't very tough. It was constantly getting little pulls all over. I finally broke down and went hunting for a couch cover. I ended up finding two sofa covers that were only $30 each! I did a lot of tucking and it doesn't look too bad. While it's not easy to get it on it stay in place well and is super easy to pull off when your toddler picks up your glass of wine and dumps it on the seat.
All in all, if you've got a tough fabric I'd say this is great route to revamp your couch on the cheap!

Out of this World Birthday

As B's 6th birthday approached I began to ask him what type of cake he wanted. At nearly 6 years old he's got a lot of interests. I'm sure we could have done a wide variety of themes, but when he mentioned a rocket ship cake I jumped on it. I thought it was a great theme that would allow a lot of creativity with out the restriction of buying a bunch of products with a licensed character on them.

A t-shirt decorated with fabric paint pens.

I ordered these banners online only because I got a great deal on them. I decided to get two so he could put the one with his name up after the party and the 6th birthday one could be used by a little cousin.

So this was my first ever attempt at fondant. After a little debate my husband and I decided to use a log style ice cream cake for the body of the space ship.

Rather than trying to ice the cake made some marshmallow fondant to cover and connect the ice cream log to the cake pieces. After looking at several recipes I ended up going simple: Lots of butter to keep it from sticking, microwave marshmallows, stir in powdered sugar. That's pretty much it! The biggest problem I encountered was that the fondant didn't budge once it got cold on the ice cream cake.
I also had to work on the cake in little spurts because I was afraid it would start to melt if I spent too much time on it. Gel icings were used to "paint" the cake which gave it a fun shiny finish. 

Since the cake couldn't sit out I decided space themed cookies were a necessary addition. I think they ended up being my favorite part! I used a pre-made sugar cookie dough and added left over fondant to some of the cookies. The gel icing's I found had some something resembling fine glitter in them which really worked with the space look. I have an amazing set of cookie cutters!

Other additions:
I had some wedding gift bags from Bed Bath and Beyond laying around. I decided they needed a little jazzing up and they would be perfect for the space party.

I was lucky to find lot's of little space and alien themed items in Target's dollar section. I decorated brown paper lunch sacks with glitter glue for each kid and filled it with goodies such as stickers, pencils, and alien goo. Of course, as the only girl my lovely niece needed a new necklace added to her gift bag as a feminine touch.

We recently got a little counter top pizza oven, we set up a make your own pizza station complete with alien pizza sauce (alfredo dyed green). The kiddos weren't crazy about trying the space sauce.
Also, because the plastic cups were reusable we provided alien stickers to decorate you cup so everyone could tell them apart.