Canada Day Party

Happy Canada Day!
Welcome to our party. Come right on back and enjoy yourself.

Please help yourself to some yummy food. We have beautiful cupcakes made by my sister at Cake Du Jour. Some yummy salsa I made here and of course a nice fruit tray with fresh fruit and a fruit punch to keep you cool today (and yes, the food is all covered to keep out bugs).

Have a nice swim and it will be dinner soon! On the menu: hamburgers and hotdogs, herbed pizza bread, roast beef salad, spinach salad, sunshine salad, and macaroni salad. 

What a fun day! Don't forget to sign up for the Ladder Ball Tournament. 

. . . 

We had a great Canada Day. The weather was perfect and the food was great. Mr. Firefly and I even got to see fireworks on our drive home, trying to beat the traffic into the big city. I hope you enjoyed your day too.

Happy Partying,

PS: Here's where we link up.

Glass Etching

Remember the bottles filled with candy at the Peep Anniversary Party? Here's how I made them.

But first, some quotes to start off the day.

 I think you know where this is going. I love glass etching. I think it is amazing and beautiful. So I went to Michael's to find what I needed. I found this.

Maybe I should have read it better, but the price was right and I was in a hurry. So off I went. The directions seemed different than what I was used to. I was amazed that it didn't say it was harmful to your skin or that you should wear gloves.
I used some old frappuccino bottles.

I love these drinks and the bottles look very cute too. Here's a little tip for getting off sticky labels. Fill up a sink to cover the bottle and pour in a good amount of fabric softener. Allow to soak for a bit and then, when you come back, the label will be much easier to take off. You'll also be able to get the sticky glue off the bottle.
Now I set to work on the "etching." It took a couple of coats to even show up and you have to wait about an hour in between each coat. It took a little while. This is the end result.

The lines are crooked. I didn't have any painting tape, so I used packing tape. That was a big mistake. It was impossible to get it straight and perfect. I don't really care for how it looks, but it did the trick for our Peep Party.

I am now on the hunt for real etching supplies. Hopefully I can find something good and Mr. Firefly will let me etch our drinking glasses. I have so many ideas!
Because this project didn't turn out I thought I'd share with you some pictures that made me happy after the fiasco.

Merlin loves to help me out. Here he is helping me testing the lighting in the light box. Sometimes I take a while and he just falls asleep. I don't mind because he's just so cute!

Happy Crafting,
Kristin

PS: I linked up here.

Peep Anniversary Party: Part 2

As promised here is the rest of our peep party. Feel free to turn on Shaggy's Angel again to set the mood. It really is a fun song. We listened to it a couple of times throughout the day.

Here's a nice look at our table. If you missed yesterday's post you can find it here. There I showed you our peep garland, the beautiful cake, our lovely cookies, and the candy jars.

Of course, no peep party is complete with a lot of peeps. Who knew they were so photogenic.

Now for a part that I've very proud of; the egg candles. This wasn't an Easter party, but the eggs went with our colour scheme and the discount candy we had on the table.

These were so much fun to make. Even Mr. Firefly had to come and take part. I used eggs that I was already using for baking. I carefully tapped on the top of the eggs and just took off a little to get the egg out. Then I rinsed them out so there would be no egg left in the shells.
I didn't have any vinegar so I used lemon juice, water, and food colouring. I really thought it was neat how the purple turned out a little specked because I mixed red and blue.

I found some old candles, took out their wicks, and melted them down. The wicks were the perfect height to fit in the egg shells.

I poured in the wax and I had egg shell candles. If I were to do it again I would buy my own wicks. They sort of toppled over when I poured in the wax and weren't centered anymore. When we lit them the shells started to burn and smell like rotten egg. But they were very pretty unlit.

Last week I had mentioned that I made some hair bows for my niece. These were in a basket with some bunnies I made from here. She loves to have stuff off the grown-up table, so this way she could have something from the table.

I hope you loved our peep party! I had a lot of fun planning for it and the party was a success. Of course it helped that my niece started walking! We had a lot of fun trying to get her to walk to each of us.

Next weekend we are celebrating our grandparents' 12.5th wedding anniversary. In Dutch tradition this is a big anniversary because it is half of 25. It is so inspiring to have so many people in my life with strong marriages. I love to be able to celebrate with my family.

Happy Crafting,
Kristin

Just wanted to let you know that we will be participating in a Trading Blogs Party! There is still time to sign up so head over to Serendipity and Spice.

PS: I linked up here

Peep Anniversary Party: Part 1

Hello! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. I certainly did! On Sunday my family got together to celebrate my parents' 26 wedding anniversary. My sisters and I really wanted to make it a wonderful day for our parents so we set to work. After seeing so many great Easter parties on all of your blogs I knew I had to make this a peep party. At the risk of sounding super cheesy,  go to Youtube and turn on Angel by Shaggy. This was the theme song for the anniversary party. Yes, it's lame, but this song came on the radio as I was planning this and it was beyond perfect.

The first thing that had to be made was the peep garland. You'll remember this picture from the sneek peek on Friday.

That turned into this!

It fit perfectly in my parents' dinning room. I found the idea from Two Sasters. Check out their peep garland here. What I liked about their garland was that it was no sew. You saw last week how my sewing turned out. So I just cut out the peeps from felt and used my handy-dandy glue gun to stick them to the ribbon. I must find a better way to hang things like this because it fell down twice! Any ideas there?

One of my favourite parts of the party was that we brought out my mom's fine china. We have probably used it only a couple of time so it was nice to have it out again. Isn't it beautiful? They got it for their engagement, so it was fitting to use it for their anniversary party. 

A while ago I made some etched jars and this was the perfect opportunity to use them. I'll share how I made them later this week.

The next thing to think about was food. With my oldest sister being in the cake business we had an automatic centre piece for our table. She made a wonderful Coconut Cream Pie cake and decorated it with (what else?) PEEPS. I love the rustic look of the cake with the coconut on the outside. It makes the peeps less cheesy and much more classy.

Please check out her website for more cakes at cakedujour.webs.com
Her cakes are wonderfully decorated and oh! so delicious.

As always, we had way too much food. I baked some Raspberry Coconut Macaroons. You can find the recipe here. And Courtney brought her Speculaas Cookies. Find her recipe here.

There are many more elements of this party that I'd like to share with you. So stay tuned for tomorrow as we look at more fun party ideas.

Happy Crafting,
Kristin

PS: I linked up here...