My Baby turns 12!

OK since I was going to post this 2 weeks ago and did not, I will go ahead and add this now!

MY BABY TURNED 12! My little Y2K Millenium baby is 12 years old. In one more year he will be a fledged teenager! I am WAY TOO YOUNG to have a teenager! Even worse, he already beginning to act like one sometimes. I would post a picture of my baby from his party, but alas, we had battery problems with the camera, so I used Cole's camera, but the card I used in it has mysteriously gone missing, which is code for, it is probably hiding on my craft desk and I cannot find it! But when I do find it, I will put them up.

We had a lot of fun, my boy has an awesome group of friends and we did his party with a Mission Impossible theme because we went to see MI at the theatre for his birthday. So in honor of that we had a Mission Impossible Hot Dog Bar.

As much as my boys loved the elaborate birthday parties I threw them as younger kids, the older they get the less elaborate they want them. I am hoping that this passes soon so that I can do another BIG BANG UP PARTY!

Here are some menus we had for the kids to make different dogs, and I sure wish I had pics to show you the HOT DOG BAR! I renamed all the items to secret agent names!

So Since I do not have party pics because I need to find that other card, I'll just show you his BOMB cake!

I cooked 2 cakes in a bowl, but I took it one step further, I made one batter Black and one batter Green , then I layered the cake batters into the bowl so it had a striped effect when you cut into it.

Here is top view of it after I cut the end off of it so I could level it on the cake board. the inside cut looks way cooler, but again it is on the missing party card!

So anyway here is the cake before it was done, obviously. Since I still had Pneumonia when I made this I did not want to fool with Fondant, so I iced it real smooth with some buttercream and bough black Spray paint for cakes and I was just going to spray it black and save me a lot of time, mess and nasty flavor of black food coloring. Well that was an epic fail, it only turned the cake purple and I was sinking fast with being tired. So I Improvised, and I will say that I paid a little more at Michael's for some Duff Brand food coloring, but it was so worth it! That stuff is amazing, it has no funny taste like wilton's and he has an awesome black, but I digress, so back to my problem at hand, a purple bomb! I got inventive and did not have any more icing so I mixed up some black food coloring with lemon juice and used a pastry brush and painted it black, and it worked like a charm! I also added a touch of silver glitter for cakes to the mixture which I think helped. If you looked closely you could see the brush marks, but ass Cole said, that made it look more authentic like brushed steel painted black :) I love that kid! I added some pipe cleaners for the fuse and VIOLA a bomb. If I had not been sick, I would have gone and gotten some sparklers and lit them when we sang but I was too tired, but I will say that cake was the BOMB! And a group of 12 year old boys agreed!

Craft Masters Competition

WOW! So much has happened since I last posted!Ok, I did not go away, I was just so overwhelmed with what was happening in my life that I could not form the words to post! About 2 weeks ago, I got an e-mail from Michael's advertising for a new show they were doing called Craftmasters. It was a crafting type reality gameshow. They wanted a 30 second video submission for anyone who was interested. I deleted the e-mail and went and took a bubble bath. By the time I was out of the tub, I 2 Facebook messages and 3 forwarded e-mails from friends telling me I should try out. Ok, I thought, what the hey. They were only looking at the first 300 submissions to come in and the deadline was 2 days away. thinking I probably would not even make it into the top 300, I sent a text to my sister asking her if she would come over to film me. Well she had a stomach virus so would not be able to come over and I thought that was an omen I should not do it, but then Matt came home with a fancy video camera that night to film me. Took me a bit to get it 30 seconds and not 2 minutes long, but I described my new menu board and ended it with "There ain't nothing I can't craft" So here is the video I submitted I hope it shows up on here, I am a little computer illiterate:

So, thinking I was too late but still holding out a glimmer of hope I checked my e-mail relentlessly all day Thursday and friday, even though the deadline was Friday the 8th. Matt and I went out friday night and when we got home I logged on to check my e-mail, do my usual prowl of FB and Pinterest and then I was going to bed. I saw I had an e-mail from Michaels and before I read it I was sayin"Oh look, an e-mail from Michael's I bet they want me on...." and then I just stopped short because it REALLY WAS AN EMAIL SAYING I HAD BEEN ACCEPTED TO BE ON CRAFTMASTERS!

I can honestly say getting to do this show marked a few things off of my bucket list.

Now Fast Forward one week to this past Tuesday and that was the day of the competition. Now I cannot post all the pics, because you cannot know who the winner is until it airs, but I can tell you a bit about it and show you a few pics.

The premise is, there are 3 contestants. We are brought into a room and each given a box inside each box we are given the same items and a theme and we must be overly creative to do something with those items. we are also given a Gift Certificate and 10 minutes to come up with an idea and shop for other items to help us to complete our project.

Well our theme was OFF THE PAGE because most of us were paper crafters. inside our box was a plain shadowbox and 6 skeins of Yarn. We must use those items. We have about 2 minutes to formulate a plan and then they handed us each a $50 Gift Certificate, other groups got $100 and some got $30 it just depended on the theme. We then had 10 minutes to shop in Michaels to get anything else we might need to complete the project. My first thought when opening the box was "OH CRAP" I put in my write up I can't knit or crochet but can do anything else. But then I quickly formulated another plan. I had gone to scope out this Michael's the day before and saw some knobs I liked. I decided I was going to turn it into a jewelry display and possibly use the yarn to help be earring hangars.

So they set us up with a basket that has a camera on it plus my own camera man to follow me as I run through the store shopping, he kept encouraging me to talk so I did even though I felt silly. When they announced time is up, whatever was in my basket I got to keep if I had something in my hands I had to drop it. then we went to check out. I knew I had more than $50 worth of items n my basket, so I made sure to put up what I wanted first in case I ran out of money before I got to all my stuff and sure enough I was left with 5 items in my basket and I was not all that upset about that, but they made me refilm myself being sad about it :) I had $1.73 left on my card when done, one girl had $20 left on hers!

Then we headed off to the studio and walked into what I like to call a Craft room on Crack! We had every tool imaginable to us, including power drills ( which BTW led to me have a very blonde moment on the show, I won't go into detail about it here, you will just have to watch)we had toaster ovens, pasta machines, every color imaginable of Martha Stewart Glitter, paint, punches. Tons of ribbon, papers and adhesives!

That last table there was my workstation and I messed it up quiet well! They gave us 90 minutes on the clock and let us go at it!About 30 minutes into the competition they threw us a curveball. they told us to open up our tool chests because we had another element we had to add somehow to our craft. It just so happened it was another Michael's gift card and it was not in my pallet of colors!

You see that Butterfly? Well I cut that puppy down to be pretty small and made it an unobtrusive embellishment.

When time was up they let us explain our project then sent us away to do interviews while the judges deliberated.

Well, Win or lose, I cannot tell you, but I can say I had an absolutely FABULOUS time! Met some great women and got to hang out with Jo Pearson, the face of Michael's videos!

She is an absolute doll!And I might dare say, a WHOLE LOT like me!
I also ended up with another Gift card, all the left over supplies I did not use, my project and lifetime of memories! I am so glad I stepped out of my comfort zone and went for it! I have really grown as a crafter I can tell and am ready to get that ETSY store up and running and I might just start making my own crafting videos to put online! Here is my final project hanging.