Color Book

As I mentioned earlier, my friend's daughter, Izzy, turned one this past weekend. Izzy is so sweet and just has the sweetest smile and cheery disposition, so I wanted to make her something special. The funny thing about all my friends having children is that I feel like I have about a hundred nieces and nephews! It's wonderful! Anyway, back to the task at hand. I looked around on different blogs and came up with my version of a color book. Here it is!







I used different fabrics and textures for the book to add some interest for Izzy. I used different fabrics and ribbon and sewed each onto pieces of felt while leaving the raw edges of the fabric showing. Then, I sewed the pages together to hide the back of the felt pages and connected them together with binder rings. The book is probably around 6x8 inches or something like that. Izzy seemed to like it when she opened it up, so that is a bonus! I hope you like it too!

Birthday Party Game

My friend at church has a daughter, Izzy, who turned one this past weekend (ps-I think that all my friends' babies should remain in the baby stage until I have them so my children will have playmates! ha!). She had a wonderful party with a monkey theme and Lindsay, my friend, asked me to make a pin the tail on the monkey game for the party. We looked at her invitations and all it showed was the monkey's head. So, instead of making up a body for the monkey and trying to make it look right, we decided to play "Pin the Flower on the Monkey". You can see the invitation in the picture above. I drew the monkey as close to the invitation as I could and then used a template to make all of the game flowers uniform in size and shape. I think it turned out pretty cute. Lindsay liked it too, which is all that really matters!

Check back later for my homemade gift to Miss Izzy.

My Sewing Project: A Car Mat!

I'm so excited to finally show you my fun sewing project from a few weeks ago! I have some sweet friends from college who recently adopted their first child from Ukraine. Their son is so adorable! I wanted to make him something special that he could use both now and in the future. I decided to try my hand at a toy car mat.


I saw some on various blogs, but they all just had one straight stretch of road. I wanted my car mat to have a little more action, so here is what I camp up with:


I'm not really sure why that picture is showing upside down. Anyway, you get the point. I found some cute car fabric at Joann Fabrics and got to work. This mat used a half yard of fabric for each piece. I cut the fabric on the factory fold, so you could potentially get two mats out of one half yard. I didn't even think to take pictures of the process because I don't use a pattern and make things up as I go along. Anyway, I used two pieces of fabric (inner and outer fabric), felt for the interfacing, and gray felt for the road. I drew a pattern of a road on a piece of paper and then cut it out of the gray felt. Then, I laid everything out and sewed it up! The mat has a velcro fastener to keep everything snug. I'm going to make another one soon for someone else who has ordered one, so I will be sure to take pictures again and write up a tutorial for you. I am still just beginning to sew, so if I can do it, anyone can do it!

Here are some more pictures of the finished product:

The cars in their homes...

And on the track!

The best part about it is the mat folds up so the cars can always stay with it! I think it would be great to use as a quiet toy to keep little ones occupied during meetings and other times where they don't need to be running around acting wild and crazy. I really hope that my friends' son likes his gift. Welcome home Artem!

Giveaway WINNER!!

I am so excited! A Feather Fancy made it to 25 followers and now I can give something away! The lucky winner chosen by random.org is:

SANDRA!

Sandra is one of my sweet friends who used to be the Children's Minister at my church, but then moved south to Georgia almost two years ago (I think). I'm so excited to find out that Sandra won because she is currently celebrating her one year blogiversary! She is giving away some fun items this week. Check out her blog, the girl named tennessee. Now she gets something in return! Sandra, I think I will surprise you with your homemade gift...I already have some fun ideas for you. Yay!

NCAA Tournament Party

I had to share this really cute idea with you! I work at a church office and this year we had a bracket challenge for the Men's NCAA Basketball Tournament. It was so fun and the winner was promised a fun prize! I wanted to have an awards ceremony after the tournament ended, but I couldn't figure out what prize I was going to give out. I thought about it for weeks and couldn't come up with anything creative at all. There were 10 people who participated in the challenge and before the final game, all of our brackets were busted but there were four ties among our group of participants. It all came down to the final score of the championship game. The winner got a bucket of popcorn (which was perfect for him since he eats popcorn in the office all the time), the person with the worst score got a Zero bar (thanks to a suggestion from a sweet friend), and we drew two names and gave away Nerf basketball hoops to the winners of the drawing. It was so fun!!

My favorite part of the "ceremony" was the treat portion of the afternoon. My mom had a fabulous idea to make red velvet cupcakes and color the batter according to the favorite teams of each participant. Here is the end result of our efforts:


Blue Velvet for UK:



Red Velvet for U of L:




A combo cupcake for Belmont:



There was also one unfortunate UNC fan in the crowd, but the North Carolina blue proved to be very hard to get. It ended up being green. I had to apologize in advance for that disaster. I don't think it phased him too much, though. He ate both of his cupcakes with no problem!

We topped the cupcakes off with homemade cream cheese icing and basketball themed toppings. I printed each person's team logo out on cardstock and taped it to a lollipop stick for one of the cupcakes and stuck a basketball-shaped Easter egg on top of the other one.

Here is one final picture of all the cupcakes:


As you can tell, the UK fans outnumbered everyone else (and all is right with the world). :)

We are planning to make this bracket challenge an annual event. Do you have an ideas for prizes? It may take me all year to come up with something!

What I'm Learning Wednesday: Silence

For God alone my soul waits in silence;
from him comes my salvation. Psalm 62:1

So, my last "What I'm Learning" post was about God screaming at me (click here if you want to read it). This post is about silence. Specifically, my silence. I was reading in, you guessed it, Psalms and this verse immediately made me think of my situation with waiting. Recently, I tend to ultimately do what God asks of me in this area, but argue with Him about it the entire time. I think that I know best and I constantly try to justify what I think I need to God to get Him to get on with it. I mean, God should listen to me, right? Because I am the one who is all-knowing and all-powerful!

This verse immediately convicted me of all the times I was "patient" with God while being highly impatient at the same time. That is the epitome of a prideful heart. God knows the desires of my heart and He can choose to honor those desires or not. It is not up to me. I think I know what is best for my life, but really, I don't. I have no idea. God has my very best interests in mind. He has my days laid out. This verse says it all. HE alone is what I need. HE alone is my salvation. All the other stuff doesn't matter. If He is there with me, rooting for me, nothing else compares!

Giveaway! It's Oh So Close!!

Don't forget! I only need four more followers before I can give something away! I will draw the name of one of my first 25 followers and make something especially for you! Spread the word to your friends if you like what you see on my blog.

BONUS: What I'm Learning SUNDAY: Screaming

As I mentioned earlier this week, the Lord has been screaming at me recently. If you know me, you know that the desire of my heart is to be a wife and a mother. You also will know that it has been a loooong time since I last dated anyone. The reason for the long break is because of something I heard God say to me. One day, a few years ago, I was praying about this subject and heard the Lord speak to my heart, saying "just wait". I can't really describe what it was like to hear those two words so clearly, but I definitely did. And I waited.

I waited for a long time. Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful that I did. Waiting probably saved me from some bad relationships and some bad choices on my part. However, I became impatient as I tend to do so easily. I wrote about this issue a few weeks ago in another entry on waiting (you can read it here).

A few weeks ago, I was pleading with the Lord over this area of my life. I seem to have become more and more impatient since I turned 30 in September. Being married has become more of an issue for me...I guess I feel like time is ticking away. That very next week, three people mentioned three different guys to me! I agreed to be set up with one of them. We met for dinner and had a great conversation. He was very nice, a perfect gentleman, and he loves the Lord. After I went home, though, and all day every day for the rest of the week, God dealt with me. I felt like I could hear the Lord just as clearly as I had heard Him before. Only this time, He was screaming at me "I TOLD YOU TO WAIT!" Again, I can't explain what it was like for me to hear this voice in my heart, but I clearly did. I felt like He was telling me that I was trying to rush Him. I tried to brush it off at first, but the screaming only got louder until it was all I could hear.

You see, I feel like there is a very specific calling from the Lord on my life. And there is a very special man that will match that calling. If you know me, you know my heart on this issue.

I know this may sound crazy to you...it sounds a little crazy to me too. But I truly believe that this is what the Lord was screaming to me for an entire week and a half. So, I have backed off on my constant yearning to find a husband (which is not my job anyway) and will wait for the Lord to bring him to me.

I hope you can understand my ramblings on this subject. Lots of things have been running through my head on this matter and I have tried my best to organize them for you. Have you ever heard God speak to you about any particular area in your life?

Wedding Cookies

The wedding cookies are finally finished! I had an order for 400 cookies in the shape of Mississippi for a wedding that took place this past weekend. Let me tell you, that is a LOT of cookies! I'm so pleased, though, with how they turned out. Here they are:


The lighting in this picture does not really give you an accurate picture of the coloring of the icing. The cookies were in the shape of Mississippi and outlined in Ole Miss colors (red and blue) because that is the groom's favorite team. The blue dot at the top of the cookie marks the groom's hometown. My mom had the idea to make a large cookie in order to write out the name of his hometown and the state name. I also added an Ole Miss logo to the large cookie to help identify the color palette.

I used a recipe from Bridget at Bake at 350 for lemon cut-out cookies and they tasted really good! I also used the lemon royal icing. You can find the recipe here.

Why cookies, you ask? The groom does not like cake and did not want a groom's cake. The bride found this Mississippi cookie cutter and then asked me to do the cookies instead. They were a big hit at the wedding reception, especially among the guests from Mississippi!

Chocolate Marshmallows!

This past Monday, the young women at my church got together for our monthly meeting. The theme for the month (so cute) was "Minute to Win It" and we all had to bring a food item that only took us a few minutes to make. I decided to make chocolate dipped marshmallows and they were soooo good! Here is what I did:

1. Take some sweetened coconut (you know, like the Baker's brand coconut that you get in the baking aisle...mine was Kroger brand because I liked the smaller flakes) and throw some on a baking pan. Make sure it is in a single layer. Put it in the oven and toast it. I don't really know what temperature you are supposed to toast coconut at, but I set the oven to 300 degrees, put it in there as it was preheating and it was pretty much done as soon as the oven got to the correct temperature. Just keep an eye on it and take it out when it turns light brown.

2. Pour some semi-sweet chocolate chips in a bowl and melt in the microwave. I think it took about 1 minute, 45 seconds on 60% power. Stir until smooth.

3. Get some jumbo marshmallows and insert some lollipop sticks in one end. Dip the marshmallows halfway in the chocolate and then immediately roll in the toasted coconut. Place on wax paper to set up.

This treat was a big hit at the meeting. The instructions make it seem like it takes a lot longer than it actually does. You should try it...I promise that you won't be disappointed. And, the best thing about this treat is that you can make as much or as little as you would like! Here is a picture of the final product:


If you decide to try this treat, leave me a comment and let me know how you liked them!