The Crafty Red Rabbit

After a slew of diaper cakes and baby showers, it was back to the burn. Wood-burning that is. Christmas was coming up and I had run across a couple of birdhouses (well, three of them, but the third one wasn't for a Christmas present). But I instantly knew what I wanted to do with them. The first was for RJ's grandparents. They used to live here in Florida, but have since moved to the mountains of North Carolina. When I saw the little lighthouse shape, I thought it would be a great idea to burn it with Floridian waterbirds and plants, to give them back a bit of their old home. Because the lighthouse was so small and had edged sides rather than being a smooth cylinder all the way around, I had to break up the images so that they could each fit on a panel. This left me with tall and skinny spaces, so I decided to go with stately, slender egrets, water reeds, and cattails.  These on their own, weren't enough, so I took some artistic liberty and added some curvy l...

Another diaper cake, but for a welcome change of pace it wasn't a variation on gray like a number of the last few seemed to have been. This one was for RJ's cousin and his wife and they had picked out an adorable woodland theme for their nursery. So I was excited to be working with nature and greenery again. So much so, I probably went a bit overboard on the green. I mean, I know I went overboard on the green. But anyways... I started with an adorable teething fox from the registry for the topper and decided on another 4-tier cake. Wanting to work with woodsy materials and natural fibers, I then got some dark green mesh ribbon and ribbon that looked like brown canvas with green edging and a strip of green and white polka dots along the middle. I couldn't decide between the two, so I went with both, alternating the two ribbons among the 4 layers. I knew I had some small pine cones left over from some other project, as well as some moss and twigs. So for som...

With my fondness for Disney, you would think that I would have done a lot more Disney-themed diaper cakes over the years. But this is actually the first. Well, technically the second, if you count the Star Wars one, which I suppose you could since Disney now owns Star Wars. And coincidentally enough, this cake was made for the same couple that the Star Wars cake was. That couple is my coworker Christopher and his wife, Sarah. Besides being a fan of Star Wars, Christopher is my go-to for discussing Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and pretty much anything  science fiction/fantasy-related movies, television, or books. So when he announced that Sarah was pregnant again, (which he did by producing a Star Wars themed-video for YouTube) I was super excited to do another cake for them, and I knew that it would be a fun one. The baby shower we were throwing for them this time was falling in the month of October, and eventually fell on Halloween. Which turned out perfect because his al...

For Halloween last year I decided it was time to finally deck out my cubicle at work as Wonderland. The year before I had turned it into the Hufflepuff Common Room from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. And I've had Wonderland related things here and there over the years. But I've never actually tried to make the entire cubicle Wonderland-themed. With it's eye-catching color and Mary Blair's wonderful use of patterns within whimsical shapes, I wanted to go with the Disney animated version of Wonderland. And I designated different sections of my cubicle as different scenes from the movie. I hand drew everything except Alice, which I cut from an old children's book because she happened to be the right size to fit the space I wanted to put her in, but nothing else I had on hand was quite large enough, so I had to make everything else myself from scrapbook paper, construction paper, and sharpies. From my last post about Caiden's baby shower, I had a lot of o...

When my mom and I decided to throw a baby shower for my sister-in-law, per usual, we got a little too ambitious with the planning. The theme for the shower matched the nursery theme, which was: elephants, clouds, and the colors blue and gray. Our to-do list included quite a bit of handmade crafts, of course, and a menu that we were also hand-making and/or assembling ourselves. Why do I mention that we were too ambitious? Because I look back now that I'm catching up on posts, and even after all these months, I'm disappointed. I could make excuses. The timing wasn't ideal. There were are lot of upcoming events: Halloween, two other baby showers, and a wedding... all of which I already had other plans and/or craft projects in progress for. We'd also had some scheduling and re-scheduling issues. So unfortunately, there were a lot of things I didn't get to do. Even things I had started and didn't finish in time. In the end, while Shayla and the guests enjoyed them...