A Classy Rosette Birthday Cake

My youngest sister turned 15 on New Year's Eve! I can't believe how old she is now!  Because her birthday is over Christmas break, I get to spend more time creating her cake!  Funny what incredible things you can come up with when you aren't dealing with 4th graders each and every day.  My sister requested a "blue velvet" cake.  She was very specific about the color.  And since they don't sell blue velvet cake mixes, I created my own using a vanilla cake mix!  

Blue Velvet Cake
1 box white or vanilla cake mix
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
3 eggs
1/3 cup oil
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp vanilla
Blue or teal food coloring (I used Wilton Icing Colors)

Mix all of the wet ingredients together first.  Then add in the cake mix and the cocoa powder.  Once the cake is mixed together, add the food coloring until you achieve the color you want.  I used mostly teal, some royal blue, and a small bit of violet, just to ensure the blue stayed blue.  Bake in 2 greased 8 inch circular pans for 27-32 minutes at 350 degrees. These were my bottom two layers.  I did a third layer to have a three tiered cake, but the top was just a regular vanilla layer.

Once I got the cake all put together, it was time for frosting.

Last year, I found this awesome video from IAmBaker that teaches how to do the rosettes on the cake.  It's a great tutorial, and it turns out so beautiful!

It's well worth the 4-minute watch!

I decided I wanted to make my colors ombre teal-ish.  I used the Wilton Icing Colors again to color the icing.  The actual icing of the cake didn't take hardly any time at all, and I had so much fun doing it! 

And here's my final product!  I added the Martinelli's, because, well, we were celebrating the new year!  It seems liked a perfect way to celebrate the beginning of 2014!  Now if you'll excuse me...I'm going to go eat some cake! :)

Snowman Fridge!

Well, it's been a while since I've blogged.  I guess that's what happens when 18 credits dominate your life and you live away from home...aka your crafting domain.  But this weekend I was home, and as a surprise to my mom, I decided to turn our fridge into a snowman!  I saw the cute idea on pinterest, and of course I wanted to duplicate it.  Can I just say that I'm really proud of myself for actually doing something I find on pinterest?  Seriously, pretty sure I'm lot craftier and cuter on pinterest than I am in real life :) 

I used my cricut to cut out the circles out of black cardstock.  The eyes are 5", the smile is 4" circles, and the buttons are 3" circles. For the nose I just took a leftover orange scrap and cut it into a triangle.  I ended up putting little magnets on the back of the paper, in case I wanted to do this next year (which, I probably will!)  It's nice too because I can easily rearrange the circles if I need to.  The scarf is old wrapping paper that we don't really use all that often...but it sure looks cute on this snowman!!  Because the wrapping paper was pretty thin, I did just tape that part on.  And now I have a super cute snowman on my fridge!

Thanks from Tigger

This was a fun sketch!  So I decided to dust off some more of my scrapbook tools and start to work again, doing challenges and whatnot.  Of course, one of my favorite challenge card sites is 365 Cards.  So here we have the sketch from Sunday, with a Tigger all cute, a fun ribbon bow, and a great rub-on!  

Another Card

for one of my amazing companions in Peru...I seem to talk about Peru a lot...at least everything I've been doing lately is for people in Peru.  I guess you can take the girl out of Peru, but you can't take Peru out of the girl (cliche, I know).  Anywho, this is for one of the sisters that I trained.  I love this card, because while we were together, hope and love were both attributes that we wanted to make better, and we worked to be better.  (I'll just have to translate it into Spanish on the inside, but she's a pretty smart girl.  I think she'll get it :)

Can I just say too, how much I love my Cricut and my design studio?  Well, I am.  I love it.  They make amazing little cards like this beautiful, at least for me.

Grad Announcements

So I get home from my 18-month mission in Peru, and my mom puts me to work on....my sister's graduation announcements!  Turns out she's graduating from high school this year...Crazy? Yes!!!

 Her picture that we're sticking in the announcements

(Who took the pictures, you ask?  Oh, I did!)

 The outside-Yay Cricut!

The inside.  

I can't believe that my little sister is graduating.  And next week, she'll be headed off to college to start work as a youth conference counselor.  I love this little girl so much, (even though she's technically taller than me.  Yikes!)  She really is one of my best friends ever and I am so happy that no matter what happens, she will always be my sister.  So even though I bug her and tease her, I still love her! 

Te extraño

So I'm still looking for some Spanish stamps (although I did run across a Spanish cricut cartridge-Ole, yeah it's got a few mistakes as far as grammar/accents go, but I still want it!!)  Sent this one to one of missionary sisters still in Perú.  La extraño bastante!!!

Sew What?

Yeah, I know.  Really original :)  One of the things that really impressed me about the Peruvian people was the amount of things they did with their hands.  In my first area, a town called Monsefú, we saw women of all ages making sombreros in their house.  Making them!  As in using straw or something similar (I'm not exactly sure what).  All I know is that it was pretty cool.  People would also sew a lot too, which was something I always wanted to be better at.  So I came home and asked my mom to help me sew a skirt.  Not that I needed the skirt, but it was a good way to learn how to sew.

So we headed over to Hobby Lobby when they had some of their patterns on sale for 99 cents, picked out a couple, got some fabric from JoAnns and went to work!

It's a wrap skirt, and it was fairly easy to make.  Mind you I probably most definitely would have messed it up if it weren't for my mom's help.  But hey!  That's what moms are for!  (Also like how my cat made it into this picture....hi Meeko!)  I did it in about 2 days-one day to cut out all of the pieces and then another day to sew them all together.  Now I know how to sew a little bit better!  Awesome!