Handmade Baby Shower Gifts

I went to a baby shower for my cousin this past weekend and and had some fun making gifts! These are fairly simple projects and I used many materials that I already had on hand. One thing that is great about baby items is that you don't need a lot of fabric and tutorials and patterns are so abundant all over the internet!

For the onesie, I printed out a giraffe silhouette that I found online. You could do this for almost any shape! I used fusible webbing on the fabric so I could iron it on to the onesie. Then, I used a zig-zag stitch around the outside. I also used a small piece of black ribbon for the tail. Don't have any small pieces of thin ribbon? Go to your closet. I'm sure you have a couple dresses or sweaters that have the ribbon loops in the shoulders to keep them on the hanger! Yeah those things that you probably don't use once the item is home!

The pacifier clip is another easy gift to make. There's a great tutorial from Ruffles And Stuff. If you don't have a small piece of elastic for the loop end, you can use a hair elastic!

I just love this hat! Does the fabric look familiar? Remember the turtleneck I refashioned? The turtleneck that I removed was the perfect amount of fabric for the hat! You could make a mom and baby outfit :) I got the tutorial and pattern from Zaaberry.

I also made a rag quilt alphabet! I got the idea and printable letters from the blog, Happy Together.

I layered scrap fabric, batting, and old denim then quilted around the edges of the letters and the inside. It doesn't have to be perfect! I did it really quickly to get through all those letters! To finish them I used pinking shears around the edges then washed them.

I packaged them with twine and mini clothespins so they can use them for decoration or play when baby is a little older.

Do you like hand making gifts for baby showers? If so what do you make?

Cake!

It's my birthday today! Let's drool over these cake photos, ok?!

Over the weekend we celebrated my husband's grandma's 88th birthday! (February is a great month for birthdays, by the way!) I made her a cake and I wasn't planning on sharing it on the blog since I decided what I was going to do somewhat last minute, I didn't know how it was going to turn out, and I didn't take in process photos. Well, I ended up making the.best.cake. I have ever made and it got fantastic reviews! How could I not share that! It must have been all that butter, chocolate, and love.

I don't have in-process photos, but I'll share where I found my recipes and some techniques. It went so well that I thought it was too good to be true. The only thing was though, that I took far too many trips to the grocery store. It must be like how my dad says,  "it always takes 3 trips to the hardware store" when working on a project.

The cake was a marble cake made with 1 box of Duncan Hines French Vanilla cake mix and 1 box of Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge cake mix. I used 9 inch cake pans. I cut out parchment paper circles and made sure the pans were nice and greased up so that the cake came out without fuss. There was about 2.5 cups total batter per pan. I made 4 cake layers.

For the filling I made 2 batches of raspberry cream filling using a recipe from Une Gamine dans la Cuisine. I still have some leftover.

I found the dark chocolate frosting recipe on the blog, Bakeaholic. This frosting was so fantastic to work with. It worked well spreading it on and piping it on. I also love that it's not too sweet. The dark chocolate is a nice contrast to the very sweet raspberry filling. Beware, chocolate frosting some how gets everywhere! I made 4 batches and this was way way way too much!

There is a great tutorial on assembling a layer cake from the blog, Whisk Kid and then also one for doing a crumb coat and frosting your layer cake.

I got the inspiration for the piping from a cake seen in an anniversary party featured on the blog Oh Happy Day. As far as piping frosting goes, this is very easy to do. It didn't take too long and looks impressive! I used a Wilton #21 star tip. Start at the bottom of the cake making continuous clockwise circles/swirls going straight up the side of the cake, overlapping each one ever so slightly. Use consistent pressure and size. Sorry if this is hard to understand I don't have photos or video of it.

 My favorite part about making this cake was that Grandma was over the moon about it! It makes the time and energy put in to it so worth it :) It helps that everyone else loved it as well!

Cheers to birthdays and cake! Does anyone else have a February birthday?

The Macklemore Thrift Shop Challenge

I decided to join in on the fun over at blog, Young House Love, for their thrift shop challenge! This was so up my alley!

If you haven't heard the song, take a listen! I'm not really into rap but I love this song -- seriously how many songs can you name that are about rocking thrift store finds?! Beware it's catchy (and this is the clean version, but it's not thaaat clean).



The challenge is as follows:
Step #1. Go to a thrift shop with – just as the chorus of the song says – “$20 in your pocket” and take a picture.
Step #2. Spend that $20 any way you’d like and photograph your spoils.
Step #3. Find one item (or more) referenced in the song and snap a pic.

I went to my trusty Value Village ready to "pop some tags" with $20.

My scavenger finds:

"I’ma take your grandpa's style, I’ma take your grandpa's style. No for real, ask your grandpa, can I have his hand-me-downs?" this is one of my favorite lines :)

"Thank your granddad for donating that plaid button-up shirt"

 "velour jumpsuit"

"I’m in this big a$$ coat from that thrift shop down the road" No shortage of coats like this in Wisconsin!

"They had a broken keyboard, I bought a broken keyboard."

Now for what I actually bought:

A pillow form.

 8 embroidery hoops! I'm doing some wall art with these babies!

And this rusty, dusty mirror that needs some cleaning up!

My husband also bought a book, but I didn't grab a photo of that.

Aaaand the grand total was $8.21!

My husband and I had lots of laughs doing this and rocking out to the song! If you want to get in on the fun too, the challenge is still open and you can add your link here.

Have you had some good recent thrift store finds?