Cupcake Facecloth & some decor inspiration…

Hi everyone, I have been in such a crafty mood of late! My family thinks I’ve lost it totally as each day I present them with one or other craft – be it a new crocheted square for a blanket I’m making or a bag full of wool for a tea cosy or these cute cupcakes.

On my recommendation my mom visited a new store in a mall near our home called “Succulent décor and café”.  She came back gushing about it.

Now this store is what I would call fabulous! Two of my friends told me that when they saw it they thought it’s just my kind of shop. I would say it has a unique flea market style. They love to take old furniture and revamp it by painting it and/or re-upholstering it with some funky fabric in amazing colours.

They have the most amazing funky light fitting hanging at the entrance – it’s an enormous drum shade covered in pink fabric – it must be almost 1.5 metres in diameter! Then hanging from underneath it is, well, – stuff. All kinds of things – even a little kids tricycle, a teddy bear, large cups, a painted egg... quite strange, but so cute!

Have a look at their Facebook photos here – I find it totally inspiring, I just wanna go and do some serious crafting! (Though this is not unusual for me LOL!).

Anyway, I digress…. My mom saw some gorgeous cupcakes made from facecloths there and commented on what a cute little gift it would be if you added a soap with it. I had seen them too. So I decided I wanted to know how to fold the facecloth.

Out came my old friend “Google”…

And it lead me to this blog – Paola’s My {Creative} Place. (a fellow South African no less!). Paola has some great tutorials on all kinds of things – just check out the labels on the left column. Fun to browse around.

I watched her video on how to make these cute cupcake facecloths and they are really so easy and quick to do. Try it!

I made up a couple for two of my daughter’s friends having birthdays this weekend. I love giving teen girls a gift bag filled with girlie goodies for their birthdays. Lip gloss, a soap, some kind of jewellery, perhaps some hair clips, basically whatever I find. So these cupcakes are perfect!

My daughter chose the facecloth colours as she knew what her friends would like.

I rolled up the facecloths and popped them into a cute cupcake wrapper I had bought. And as my ‘cherry on top’, I found some red foil-covered chocolate balls – perfect – now they even get a chocolate to nibble on while they bath LOL!

I packaged them in clear cellophane tied with an organza ribbon and popped one into each gift bag along with a handmade soap, a charm bracelet and some lip gloss.

Thanks Paola for a great tutorial – so much easier than trying to figure this one out on my own!

Have a great week!

Veronica xx

I am linking up here:

 

 

Halloween @ our house

 A   Last year we decided to have a fun Halloween evening for the kids. Although we don’t really do the Halloween-thing here in South Africa as much as it is done in the US, my kids have grown up with it {having cousins living in the US}.

We couldn’t go from house to house collecting sweet treats as unless it is organised in one of the estates, no one does it. In our previous home, we used to have trick or treating each year as the estate we lived in organised a fun evening for the kids and they could safely go from house to house collecting goodies.

In our new home, our estate is simply too big and the houses are too far apart for any trick or treating to take place.

So I invited some friends & family over and asked each family to set up an area in our garden {in the dark!} & equip it with some scary stuff & loads of candy so the kids could go do trick or treating. They had so much fun dressing up {and I had equally as much more fun designing invitations, the menu and decorating the table}.

Here’s the email invitation:

{digital elements from Weeds & Wildflowers design}

Here’s the menu…{just to clarify – we had hamburgers for dinner!}

{Can you see why I had more fun than the kids?} g

At the time I was so busy with the decorating, preparing the food and sorting out costumes for the kids that I didn’t take many photos of my decor. {And not good ones either!}.

My overly-dramatic and orange-obsessed pre-teen wacky-witch daughter (middle) with her cousin {who was dressed as a victim of some or other monster attack} and my daughter’s friend the other “wacky witch”:

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{Gotta luv that face!!}  d

 

My son and his best friends- taking the “vampire” thing a little far!:

 

 

 

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The table – I unfortunately took this pic after the kids had destroyed it a bit, but you can get an idea. The balloon topiaries were made by tying 5 balloons together with ribbon and placing them on top of a dowel stick pushed into a pot filled with sand. The pot was wrapped with purple cellophane and to finish it off, I hung curly ribbons down from the balloons. “Easy peasy” and great for recycling for the next party – simply add new balloons & ribbon and in need, change the colour of the cellophane.

 

These little jack-o-lanterns were a cute idea for candles – but unfortunately not too well thought through! {Note to self here!}    Flame + plastic = melted jack-o-lantern!! So I ended up with one candle becoming an orange blob which has now left a permanent stain on my sandstone counter top! {You live & learn!}

Eyeballs {plastic toys} floating in some punch…

The trick-or-treaters…

   And now for a freebie…

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I also made popcorn boxes decorated again with Weeds & Wildflowers’ cute digi Halloween elements.

I have a download for you of this popcorn box – so go ahead and grab it. Click on the picture to enlarge, right click and save.

• Print out 2 copies onto A4 cardstock and cut them out.
• Glue the two pieces together by gluing a side flap under one of the straight sides (matching the edges to get the box straight).
• Glue the bottom flaps overlapping each other and glue the other side flap to the inside of the box. Easy!(

If you have any problems, send me an email or leave a question in the comments here – as I’m not sure if the picture will be the correct size. {If you have problems, I’ll load it on 4-shared this afternoon}.

{If you like the cute dingbats I’ve used in this post – they are a free font called “KR Boo Lane” – not sure, but I probably downloaded it from www.dafont.com – I LOVE their free fonts!}

Have a great Tuesday!

{Yippee- I’m off to art class now…} G

Customised Wine label artwork

I have been bad with blogging of late. I can give many reasons, but few excuses LOL! Basically I’ve just been plain busy!

I recently received a subscription email from the CSI Project.

(One of many crafty places I subscribe to). Their latest challenge is to create something inspired by Ballard Designs. Now we don’t have Ballard Designs in South Africa, but if we did, I’d be there in a heartbeat!

I loved the cute wine cellar plaque here:

I just thought it was so sweet and love that it’s personalised. So I decided to create something similar for the challenge.

Here’s mine:

 

 

{sorry – not the greatest pics, but I didn’t want to use a flash and the lighting in the room was not too good}

 

And how I created it :

I had saved this cute vintage wine label from The Graphics Fairy ages ago and now got to use it! I edited it a little by taking out the original vineyard’s name.

I added “Hurly Vineyards” in uppercase Times New Roman Font to replace the winemaker’s name.

I then added a ‘rub-on’ action from Atomic Cupcake to the whole lot to age it even more.

I added part of an aged book background (please forgive me I can’t remember where I got it from).

I printed the artwork out on cardstock using the ‘borderless' printing option onto a sheet of cream-coloured A4 paper and voila (vwah-la!)!

I popped it into a dark wooden frame and it is now in it’s new home in our wine cellar/ movie room. Love it!

And I think this will make such a cute gift! ….mmmmm

(** Note to self : Christmas is just around the corner!)