Make a Moon!

The prettiest luna in the universe 

My daughter loves the moon. LOVES! So here is the easiest project in the galaxy. Color on a paper plate and tape it to the ceiling over your little one's bed. 

This moon has been hanging over T's bed for almost 2 months and she still loves it! She is especially happy with this moon because it never disappears like the fickle moon in the night sky. 

I Y paper plates.  

Under the Sea Birthday Party

Our under the sea themed birthday party was a huge success! And I am so in love with the under the sea decorations that our apartment is going to look like a fish bowl for the foreseeable future. I should probably start renting it out as an event space, think our snotty neighbors would be mad?

If you have an under the sea party coming up I hope the following photos and quick tutorials can help you steal some of these great ideas! 

Decorations

• I searched google images for under the sea cartoon creatures and then using photoshop colored and sized them to my needs.The most tedious part was cutting each fish out and affixing it to the wall.
• I made the Happy birthday sign using photoshop as well. I found a photo of water that I liked that had lots of bubbles and was high resolution and then I recolored it and imported into letter outlines I had created. I cut these out for a long time too!
• The fishes that are hanging from the ceiling are hand-me-downs from my sister's bat mitzvah... she is now 25! 
• Streamers galore! I used green colored streamers for the seaweed and 3 different color blues for the water hanging from the ceiling.   
• DO twist the green streamers while making the seaweed
• DON'T even try to make the blue streamers even, water isn't even and it is not worth your time!
• DO have someone handing you pieces of pre-cut tape, it will move things along!

I started putting up decorations a week before the party but saved the ceiling for last. When T woke up on Sunday morning I took to see the completed living room. She looked up and then at me with wide eyes and said - WOOOOWWWW!! Totally worth the neck cramps!

Food

I am only going to tell you about the dessert table, because my lunch food was not themed...

Oysters with pearls

• Buy your favorite stuffed white sandwich cookie. Ours are some no-name store brand and I chose them because I liked the shape
• Split the cookie in half and remove the cream and set it aside
• Make/buy frosting. I bought strawberry because it was the perfect pink, it ended up tasting like fluoride from the dentist office, but people ate them up anyway
• Pipe frosting onto one half of the cookie
• Shape the cookie cream into a tiny ball and place on top of the pink frosting
• Add the top half of cookie and you have an oyster!

 Sea creature cupcakes

• Make a vanilla cake mix and fill blue cupcake liners 1/3 the way full. 
• Add some blue food coloring to the remaining batter and swirl 1 tbsp of blue cake mix into each cupcake so when you bite in, you get a blue surprise
• Buy or make vanilla/white frosting and tint it a light blue 
• Fill a zip lock bag with the frosting and cut one of the corners off. This make a very easy piping bag that you don't need to clean!
• Frost the cupcakes
• Add crushed graham cracker crumbs to make the sand
• Buy chocolate melts and an aqua themed mold and make some fun shapes to add to the cupcakes

 Whale Birthday Cake 

• Bake your kid's favorite flavor cake - for T that means chocolate! Use 2 - 9" round pans and then layer the cakes filling the gap with blue frosting!
• Make sure that some of the blue frosting goops out of the middle
• Tint white frosting to make it a light blue
• Frost the outside of the cake with the light blue frosting, you will notice the darker blue that came out of the sides of the cake mixing to create the water look. Add extra darker blue frosting in little dots and incorporate to give the look of water
• Use a stencil or free hand the whale 

Water Melon Shark

My dad made this and it came out awesome! 

• Watch this youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTh64oFeyos for more info on how to make a shark

Arts and Crafts: Octopi and Jellyfish 

Toilet Paper Roll Octopus and Paper Bag Jelly Fish

• Set out protective floor coverings 
• Let the kids paint toilet paper rolls and paper bags - use washable paint! 
• Add googly eyes
• After the paint dries cut eight legs into the toilet paper roll and bunch of tentacles for the jellyfish

Our new Octopi friends

A Jellyfish Selfie

Having fun making a mess!

Thank you Aunt Davita! This prep takes a team and I could not do this without you.  

Thank you Nana and Auntie Jordana for starting T's obsession with Baby Beluga in the Deep Blue Sea which lead to her fascination with aquatic creatures and ultimately this perfect party. 

Snow Day Snowmen

It is snowing, again. Ugh. It was nice the first time and even the second time, but now it is just getting old. Maybe I would be more thrilled if I didn't have work, but commuting in this weather is the worst. 

Last time we had a lot of snow I left work early and did arts and crafts with T. I found some tissue paper laying around and cut it up into little squares. We crumpled some of the tissue paper up and left some paper flat and got busy gluing our snowmen into existence.  I actually made big circles of glue and let T add the squares and then we layered the glue to make the snowmen look fuller. You can use any background, or glue together paper for a larger canvas like we did. Then it is time to add some personality. You can cut up some colored paper into hats, faces, brooms etc. The blue adornments on our project are actually crafted out of the blue wall-safe painting tape because it was laying out :) This project was super easy and kept us busy for a very long time!! 

Duck Tape Design

If you enlarge this photo you can see the duck tape ridges.

T has lots and lots of books. Even though we have really cute shelving in the living room and two classic shelves in T’s bedroom there always seem to be books spread about. My parents were visiting recently and my mom told me I should put some of the scattered books in a box because our tiny apartment looks messy when anything is out of place. I found a sturdy old shoe box , filled it up some books and set it on a shelf that T could reach. After a week of staring at the ugly shoe box I decided it had to be covered up with something. Duck Tape to the rescue! This project was super easy and made the shoebox totally displayable. Check out all the patterns you can choose from at http://www.duckbrand.com/products/duck-tape/printed-duck-tape. I picked this pattern up 40% of at Michael's and still have enough tape left to cover up a few more boxes! 

Happy Birthday T! Memories of last year's Cake Smash

Last night I decided to look up when T’s Hebrew birthday falls this year, and I’m sure glad I did because it is today. Happy Hebrew Birthday to my sweet, smart, cunning and hysterical big girl, T!

When T woke up this morning I sang her the Hebrew version on Happy Birthday, Yom Huledet Sameach, and then she immediately asked me for cake. Woops, I guess she already associates cake with her birthday. The association is also probably my fault because last year as soon as T’s birthday rolled around I made her a cake smash! Cake smashes have become increasingly popular and are taking Facebook by storm. Most people hire professional photographers to buy the cake, set up and area, take the photos and clean up the mess- but we did it ourselves. It is a good thing that my husband is used to my crazy by now. He was a really good sport and a big help during the cake smash festivities. If you work together with a partner and own a decent camera – you too can pull off your own cake smash!

A few days before the smash I bought fabric from a store near work for $10. The fabric worked as a perfect background and also helped contain some of the mess.  The night before the festivities began I baked a cake – heavy on the frosting. Next time I do this I will use a whipped cream frosting so there is even more mess!

I set the fabric up by taping it to the wall and floor and set the cake up in the middle. I was slightly insane and even ironed the fabric a little. This was the first and last time I’ve used my iron in the 6+ years I’ve been married. I don’t have professional lighting so I gathered all the lamps in my apartment and set them up along the fabric. I then brought T out to start the smash party!

It didn’t go exactly according the plan. T had never had cake before that day and wasn’t really sure what to make of her surroundings. She ended up poking the cake for a good 10 minutes before Daddy showed her how to dig in. As soon as T shoved her arm into the cake and tasted it she was hooked. The following Sunday at her birthday party she lunged at her birthday cake because she thought she was supposed to smash that one too!  Woops. She is now sweets obsessed, hence this morning’s cake request and last night’s begging for a chocolate milk bottle before bedtime (Don’t worry, I said no- and didn’t cave). I snapped a million photos and some video and we all had the best time. And of course, the mess did not stay contained as hoped. T likes to shake and clap and she loved watching the cake fly everywhere.

I then used photoshop to create a cake smash template to use for a canvas print. It is 20”X20”. This was probably the hardest part of the entire project and I am happily sharing it with you now, it is at the end of the post. If you want me to send you the original PNG or photoshop doc of the template, I will but you will have to start following my blog and leave a comment with your email address and which version you would like. If you know anything about photoshop you should be able to use it. Just crop your photos to fit in the openings and you are done! I also like the idea of including a box or three of text, which is what I did.

If you are a photoshop novice here is a quick tutorial. Load the template into photoshop. I think blogspot will convert this one out of its original PNG format so you then need to use the magic wand tool to remove the white boxes. The image will also download at a much smaller resolution. You will want to click on Image then Image Size and reset your resolution to at least 250/300 before you start adding your photos.You should then use the paint bucket tool to recolor the template to match your photos. I find the best way to get a color you like it to use the eyedropper tool to pick up a color from an actual photo. You will then need to load each individual cake smash photo into the program and crop it to size. Copy and paste each cropped photo into the template over the holes. Lastly move the template to the top of the layers list so it hides all the mess and makes the design look stream lined. Let me know if you can’t follow the above directions and I’ll try to help you out! 

I still think a cake smash is the perfect way to celebrate your little love’s first birthday and introduce them to a world of sweets. Now that T is 2 we will be celebrating with lots of messy projects and yummy treats at her upcoming Bday party!

 

Click on the template to open it in the larger screen and then save the image from there.

Homemade clumpable sand

This is sand is totally awesome and you can really build a castle with it!

I am in the midst of planning T’s 2^nd birthday party, and I love planning parties even more than going to one. T is obsessed with the Raffi song Baby Beluga so this year’s theme is “under the sea.”  I always like to have a kid activity so this year I was going to make a sand table for the kids to play with, it was going to include cute shovels and sea creatures. It was going to be very entertaining and it was going to be very cute and it was going to take place on a giant plastic table cloth so I could just toss the mess. Was is the key word, the following project is a BLAST but I will never ever be trying it indoors again. I suggest you pin this and save it for the warm weather when you can mix up a batch of sand and bring it to the park, and then after hours of fun you get to leave the mess behind. That is what I am going to do this spring. In the mean time I will be coming up with a much cleaner b-day project!

You can make as much sand as you would like. Last night I only made 2 cups of sand and that tiny amount kept T busy for a long time!

--1/4 cup baby oil for every 2 cups of whole wheat flour--
You can use canola, but it won’t smell as good and you can use regular flour, but I won't look like sand.

Mix the oil into the flour slowly while you mix/ crumple with your hands until you are satisfied with the consistency. You want it to clump but still fall apart...  and then vvvwaala, instant clumpable sand!  

Glitter is optional- it will look pretty awesome, but is just more mess for later.

At first T played beautifully with the sand and kept it nice and contained on the table cloth. At this point I was thinking- the kids at the party are going to LOVE this!

Once the foot action started up I got slightly concerned and got T undressed so her clothing wouldn't get gross.

I left the room for 1 minute, I swear, just 1!

T loved how the sand felt so decided to style her hair with it, I was literally washing clumps of dough from her hair in the tub! 

Create your own coloring book pages

My daughter loves to color, well actually she loves to scribble. She displays her artistry in coloring books, on blank paper, with special crayons in the bathtub, or on our rug (which would be a real issue if I actually liked the one we have.) So, I thought I'd make her special coloring book pages featuring her favorite person in the world, her! She was not as thrilled as I expected, but her Aunt DeeDee LOVED the idea and colored the pages to perfection.

Finished Coloring Book Page

And this is how I did it...

  

Step 1. Pick out a picture and open it in Photoshop

Step 2. Duplicate the original layer - 

right click the background layer and click on the duplicate layer option

Step 3. Desaturate the photo

Image - Adjustments - Desaturate

The image will be converted to black and white

Step 4. Duplicate the desaturated layer 

Step 5. Invert the new layer

Image - Adjustments - Invert

Your image will now look Craaaazy

Step 6. Add a color dodge to your Craaaazy layer

Layers- scroll to color dodge

Your Image will now vanish - Ta Dah! Don't be scared, though, we'll get it back

Step 7. Add a Filter: Gaussian Blur

Filter - Blur - Gaussian Blur

Your image is really starting to look like a coloring book page!

Step 8. Pick your favorite coloring book filter level

Using the Gaussian Filter Tool pick the best look for your page, here I chose 28 

Step 9. Flatten Your Image
Or you can call it a day here and just print your coloring book page

If you are a perfectionist - Flatten the Image

Step 10. If you are anal and the little dots bother you, use the eraser tool to clean up the image

All done and Colored in by Aunt DeeDee

And just for comparison: This is Baby T's artwork. 

Maybe she'll appreciate this more when she is older!