MineCraft Birthday Party

Hello there! This new year organization stuff is pretty awesome. I've set aside some time for me to blog during the week, and it's working! I'm actually sitting down and doing it. :o) Of course, school starts back up tomorrow and life goes back to it's usual busy-ness, so we'll see how well I can keep up with this schedule then. 

Anyway, I promised a little while ago that I would share some pictures from Michelle's 11th birthday party, so here it is. As the title says, it was a MineCraft theme, and for those of you who have no idea what that is, it is a computer/video game where you build things. I kind of see it as a mix of Legos and Survivor in one game. You're given basic materials and you have to use them to build stuff to protect yourself from the bad guys. It has distinct graphics in that it is pixelated. Everything is a block, or made up of blocks. 

I would love to give credit where credit is due for the many things I printed off for this party, but to be honest, there are so many resources on the web, and I pulled things from LOTS of different websites that I can't remember what I got from where. If you simply google, or go to Pinterest and look for MineCraft party, you will find a ton of ideas and resources. The hard part was narrowing down to things I thought would work for us. 

Here was our buffet.That's the cake in the middle.

The green background is just a disposable table cloth that we hung from the ceiling to the half wall of the stair well. This gave us a backdrop for the buffet. 

I think I ordered the grass stuff from Amazon. It was fun to play with. :o) The decorations in the middle of the table I got from Pixel Papercraft. It was super easy. You find the item you want, print it, cut it out, fold it up and glue it. Because most of the items are all cubes, they're pretty easy to assemble. Oh, and it's FREE. 

 Here's another shot of the buffet. It was pretty easy to find food items to match many of the items used in the game (chicken, melon, strawberries, apples, etc).

 Michelle made these to give to her friends in their goody bags. They represent different items or creatures in the game. My personal favorite was the cake on the bottom. :o)

Our son, Nick gave this cardboard Steve head to Michelle a while ago, and it was the perfect blind fold for our game of pin the tail on the Ender Dragon. We just made the girls put it on backwards. For those who don't know, Steve is the main character in the game.

No, I didn't remove all the coats and shoes to make the photos look nice. Oh well. This is real life at our house.

 This was another one of our games, although they didn't end up using the Steve head after this photo because they couldn't see a thing out of it. We cut a Creeper face out of a box and spray painted it green. My original idea was to make bean bags for the girls to toss into the holes, but never got around to making them. Michelle pulled out her nerf bow to use instead. I think it worked better than the beanbags would have.

So, this was the cake. It was kind of crazy to make. I ganached the square cake like I usually do before covering it in fondant, but this time I covered in in sheets of wafer paper that I printed from the Pixel Papercraft blog. I simply re-sized the images to fit  the cake, printed them and "glued" them to the ganache with piping gel. Next time I would definitely use more gel around the edges as it began to peel toward the end of the party. Everything on top, except the tree, was fondant covered in more printed wafer paper. The tree was rice crispy treat. It was quite fiddly to wrap the paper around the fondant, but probably a lot easier than hand painting or piecing little tiny squares of fondant. I even stuck a birthday candle in the dynamite for effect.

 The girls seemed to like it. :o)

Here's a shot of some of the characters before I put them on the cake. 

I have to share this last shot with you. This was the first problem Michelle had for math on the Monday after her party. We got a good laugh out of it. Michelle is still wondering where her gift is from Steve. :o)

Well, I better close this here. I've got a bit more work to do at my desk before heading off to bed. 

Till next time...

God's love and blessings!

2014 Year in Review (Part 2)

I'm back! Didn't want to leave you hanging in suspense for too long. ;o) I finished the last post with June, so I'll start off here with July 2014. That makes sense, now doesn't it?

In July, Michelle and I went to our first week of camp. Here we are on the first day. I guarantee we didn't look this chipper on the last day, but we sure had a lot of fun!

As with every other summer since we've been here, I spend a good part of it out picking berries on our property. We didn't have nearly as much as last year, but still enough to make some jam and syrup with. Yum!!

In August I finally got around to a project I'd been wanting to do for several years. Here's a sneak peak of the beginning of it. You'll have to check back in a couple of weeks to see the finished project. I LOVE how it came out.

August was also my handsome hubby's first official day as a teacher. I'm so very proud of him and all the hard work he's done to get here. Had to get a picture of them both on their first day of school.

September is Michelle's birthday, and this year we celebrated her 11th with a MineCraft party. I know I mentioned it in a previous post, but I will tell you all about it in another post. There's too much to share here.

September is the beginning of our fall here and I love to walk up the street to the neighbor's yard and get photos. Those trees remind me of a big quilt.

It was also the month we welcomed a new member into our family. This is Smokey, and if you are friends with me on Facebook you already know how silly this guy is and some of the antics he gets into. Maybe I'll have to do a post on that someday too. ;o)

October was spent enjoying the beautiful fall and working on school work. Yes, we ALL work on school around here.

This was the year for weddings for us. November we traveled down to Texas for our niece's wedding. Mike wasn't able to come, but our son and his bride came along. I'm so glad they did as I recruited Romni to help me with the cake. She was awesome, and Nick was the navigator for me as we transported it through the cities to the venue. His prayers and support definitely helped calm the nerves of this nervous cake decorator.

And now we get to December. This is always a busy month for everyone, but now that handsome hubby is a teacher, we get a week and a half of vacation time in there which is REALLY nice. Michelle even talked him into a sled run or two one afternoon with her.

This is my 6th year doing gingerbread houses for the kids at church. I had my assistant (Michelle) take photos while I worked on them this year so that I can type up a tutorial later, you know, in case you ever feel the need to make 20+ gingerbread houses.

We've enjoyed having Angel and Tyler home for a couple of weeks before they move off to Hawaii this month. Looks like we need to save some money up so we can go visit them next winter. ;o) We've enjoyed decorating cookies, going out to celebrate family birthdays, and making lefse together. Fun (and yummy!) We're sure going to miss them when they go. :o(

All my babies in one place=happy mama. :o)

I will close this here. I so enjoy being able to look back over the year and see the many blessings He has bestowed on us. So grateful for His watch care over us and His amazing provisions. We are truly blessed and never want to take that for granted.

Til next time...
God's love and blessings!

2014 Year in Review (Part 1)

 Happy New Year!! Wow, another 365 days gone by way too fast. For my friends and family who don't live close by and might be interested in what's going on around here, here's a little year-in-review post for you. I will split it up into 2 posts as I have too many photos to share in one. ;o)

January was cold...REALLY cold. We had a lot of ice in the house on windows and walls. This year we made sure we got the plastic up on the windows, but we will probably need to replace them in the future. I also got to take some fun engagement photos for my son and his bride.

Aren't they cute?

February came in with snow...LOTS of snow. This was the most we've seen in the 5 or so years we've been here.

Gotta make sure the gas man can get to the tank.

Yes, that's a Christmas tree and wreath still up. There's a horse and sleigh  decoration somewhere under the snow on the left. We lost it till April.

If you gotta shovel snow off the roof, you might as well make it fun.

We also had a lot of these around the house. When it's too cold to go out, you find something to keep yourself busy, and these kept her busy quite a bit. 

While March brings spring to most of the country, not for us, so our church makes the most of it and plans our annual snow soccer game then. Yep, we're that crazy. Well, I'm not exactly. I stood in the warm building and took these shots through the window. 

He came up to the window to show me his icicles. The fogginess of the photo is due to the steam coming off his body. :o)

April was Resurrection Sunday, and snowman building. Doesn't everyone build a snowman in the spring? 

 May was super busy. It started with a trip to Colorado to celebrate a wedding for my nephew. This picture of the bride getting ready should tell you how much fun this wedding was.

I will post more photos of this cake on my cake blog later this month.

 The following week we were back home and preparing for our own son's wedding. Here's a picture of the cake. The topper was the bride's grandmother's.

There was a little surprise on the back for the groom. 

They are such an awesome couple. It's so much fun having a daughter-in-love who likes to craft with me. ;o)

And just so you don't think we are in snow all year, here's a shot of my garden in June. See, we did finally get those Christmas decorations put away. :o) 

I will close this post here and finish up the year for you tomorrow. 

Till next time...

God's love and blessings!