Don't Cry Over Spilled Juice

Juice boxes are great...convenient, portable, and fun for kids.  However, my two year old always insists on squeezing the box to watch the laws of gravity squirt the juice out the top of the straw and then all over everything in a two foot radius.  A dear friend taught me this little trick...there are tabs on either side of the juice box.  Flip them up, tell your tot to hold those rather than the box, and you will should be mess free!  My daughter was the perfect model this weekend as she sipped on a juice box while we boated!

Homemade Play Dough

It's been a long while since I've posted anything.  However, I've been keeping up with my obsession of browsing other crafting blogs and my list of crafts to try is getting forever long.  With a second baby on the way in five weeks, I better get my butt in gear because I don't foresee myself having a ton of time with two little munchkins just eighteen months apart! 

I subscribe to Skip To My Lou, as she always has a lot of great postings.  Today she posted a recipe from Homemade By Jill for homemade play dough.  I was so excited because over the weekend I brought out the play dough for my seventeen month old for the first time ever.  She seemed to like it, but it tends to crumble a bit.  My mother-in-law claims that homemade play dough has a much better consistency and does not crumble.  Not to mention...it's completely edible!  My daughter would probably love to help make the play dough and it could make a good little gift for the kids in her class at school!  Click on the image below to link to the homemade play dough tutorial! 

Baby Fever

It seems like there is another baby boom going on this year! I think my husband and I counted fifteen (or more) of our friends that are having babies this year, including us. It is a very exciting time for so many families. Ironically, most of the babies are GIRLS! As the mother of a 16 month old girl, and another girl due in two months, it is so exciting to know that many of our close friends will also have girls. There is nothing sweeter than seeing the bond between a baby girl and her father.

While baby registries are always so fun to peruse, I figure that I will leave those gift ideas for the not-so crafty. :) I have some cute ideas (many of which I have not yet executed) but with many baby showers approaching, I plan to finally accomplish over the next couple of months, so stay tuned!

While planning a coworker's baby shower (for her baby girl), I made this diaper cake. Not only will it be a useful gift for the proud parents, it will also double as a beautiful center piece for the shower.

This was the first diaper cake I'd ever made, so I plan to come up with some more creative ways to jazz up future cakes.

Ingredients for this cake:

• Cardboard cake circle (can be purchased in cake making section of a craft store - I went with the 16" size but you can choose a smaller size)
• Cake doily or lace
• Wooden dow rods (12" or longer, depending on how high you anticipate your cake to be)
  
• Rubberbands
  
• Ribbon
• Diapers (about a case)
  
• Glue gun (optional)
  
• Any other decorative accessories (stuffed animals, pacifiers, bottles, bibs, etc.)
  

1. I first rolled five to six diapers and put a rubber band around each group. You can rubber band each diaper individually, but this would be more time consuming.
   
2. Once all of the diapers are rolled, you may need to rearrange the number in each group so that you can stack them in a tiered formation.
   
3. Once you have the basic form of the cake developed, you can put it all together.
   
4. I purchased white cardboard cake rounds so I didn't have to cover them (although you could cover them with cute fabric). I then adhered the lace to the cake round with a glue gun.
5. I put the first layer of diapers on the cake round, trying not to leave much excess space around the edges.
   
6. I then stacked the second layer and inserted the wooden rods so that the first layer and second layer were 'connected.' (This will make it easier to transport).
   
7. I continued this process to the top layer, ensuring that all layers have wooden rods running through the diaper rolls for one or two layers so that you don't have to worry about a massive landslide of diapers.
   
8. I put a stuffed animal in the center of the top layer (rather than another roll of diapers) to add a little bit of flare. You could us anything for the top layer...onesies, bottles, etc.
   
9. Once the entire cake was stacked, I wrapped thick ribbon around each layer, using a glue gun to keep it tight. You can use additional ribbon, bows, or any other accessories to jazz it up.
   
10. Feel free to stuff other goodies in the ribbon and diapers - bibs, onesies, socks, burp clothes, bottles, baby spoons, etc. (perhaps some of these things could be retrieved from the recipient's registry).

Use your imagination! I will post some pics of additional cakes I make, as I am sure there will be many in the next six months!

TUTORIAL: Photoshop Batch Edit

Photoshop has a a convenient tool that allows users to effortlessly compress, resize, and/or perform Actions on a multitude of photos with the click of just a few buttons. This is sometimes known as Batch Editing.

1. Open Photoshop
2. File -> Scripts -> Image Processor
3. The Image Processor window will open up.
4. Select the folder where the images you want to process are located by clicking Select Folder.
5. Select the folder where you would like your processed images to be saved by clicking Select Folder. (This creates a new copy of of your images so your orginals are not altered).
6. Select whether you would like the images saved as a JPEG, PSD, or TIFF file. For each of the file formats, you may select a quality value (0-12, with 12 being the highest quality), as well as height and width of the images. If you want, you may save the images in multiple file types by checking the appropriate boxes.
7. In the Preferences section, if you want to run an Action, you may click the Run Action box and select the appropriate Action. If all you want to do is compress/resize, be sure the Run Action box is unchecked.
8. Click the Run button on the top right side of the Image Processor window.