Kitchen Makeover: Before

A little preface . . . lately I have been feeling sort of all "Oh, woe is me!" about my house. We bought our house over five years ago. I guess in the back of my mind I thought we would be moving on to bigger and better things by now. Don't get me wrong. I am incredibly grateful to be a home owner. I love the fact that we can do whatever we want to this house. That we are not making someone else richer by paying their mortgage for them. Yet, in the back of my mind I always figured we would be living somewhere else by now.

My house is not small - but two kids and a dog later - we are slowly but surely outgrowing our house. The other issue is it is a manufactured home. That is not bad in and of itself, but they do tend to depreciate in value. And with the housing market being in the toilet, I have a feeling we are going to be here MUCH longer than we first anticipated.

So, I am trying to adopt a much happier, healthier attitude about the whole thing. I might as well love where I am living right now at this moment, right? So, I am going to start making some home improvements. Let's start with the kitchen!

Here is the kitchen in all it's glory right now. No I did not really even pick up. I want you all to see it how it normally looks. (Even the kitty trying to climb the cabinet is a daily occurrence around here.)

Here are a few more views of how our kitchen looks now:

Okay, and here is the hideous "wallpaper" (and I use that term lightly) that I have been staring at for five years. I know, I know - why the heck didn't we fix this before, right?

Here is what we have to do to be able to paint: This is one of the few rooms in our house that was never taped and textured. I think the texturing is beyond my ability, but the taping I can handle. For those of you who have never been in a manufactured home, they usually have these pre-wallpapered/patterned panels that are used in place of regular drywall. They then cover up the seams with small flat strips of painted wood. So far we have managed to pull all those down to be left with this:

and unfinished corners:

Basically we have to cover those ugly seams up with joint tape and joint compound to make them smooth before we can prime and paint. I will be posting some pictures of our progress hopefully in the next week.

Thomas the Train Cake

This is the Thomas the Train cake I made for my son's second birthday party. 

I pieced the cake together from several 13 x 9 cakes. I used a star tip to decorate the main part of the cake, using one of my son's toys as a template. The face is made out of marshmallow fondant. 

Transformer Cake

Below is a picture of the Transformer cake I made for my son's fourth birthday party. 

I started with a standard 13 x 9 sheet cake. I used Wilton's icing colors to color the buttercream frosting that I made. To create the 'Autobot' and 'Decepticon' logos, here are the steps I took. 

ONE:  Find the images you want to use and print them out on plain paper (my images came from Google Images)

TWO: Make and color your buttercream icing (I use Wilton's buttercream icing recipe)

THREE: Take an upside down cookie sheet and tape your images to it. Then, tape down waxed paper over the images (parchment paper would work here as well)

FOUR: Use a small round icing tip to trace the designs and fill them in on the waxed paper using the images as a guide

FIVE: Put the sheet pan into the freezer 

SIX: After the design is frozen and your cake is iced, carefully lay the wax paper (icing side down) onto the iced cake. Carefully peel back the wax paper to transfer your design to your cake

(Thank you to my friend, Evelyn, for her teaching me how to do this)

For some reason I tried this same technique to do the 'Thomas' lettering, but it would not transfer properly to the foil, so I had to free hand it!

Linked up here:

Blog Makeover

I have been working hard the past week or two to completely "redo" my blog.

So without further ado, here are the changes I have made:

A brand new name!!   

Laura's Crafty Life

I am trying to enter into the world of craft blogging and so I thought this seemed appropriate.

A brand new look. 
         
Thank you to shabbyblogs.com for all the awesome free designs they offer on their site. They have great tutorials that are super easy to follow and wonderful designs. And I am still not entirely sure how they do it, but it is all FREE! And what gal doesn't love free, super cute stuff?

Finally linked up to my Etsy page. 
          
Also, super easy. I will be adding a tutorial on how to do this later. 


Thanks for checking out my blog. I don't think it is 'finished' quite yet - it is definitely still a work in progress, but I am getting there. The pressure is on to not just blog about life, but also about all my crafty adventures. I just have to figure out how to find the time to craft with two small kiddos running the house! 

**UPDATE**

After looking at a TON of other blogs and web designs - I was inspired to make my own header. I used Adobe Photoshop and some scrapbook papers I had laying around to do it. I used the tutorial from the blog, kevinandamanda.com on how to make a custom background with Photoshop to do it. I just tailored it to make a header. I think it turned out pretty cute!

Terra Cotta Christmas Candy Dishes

I am finally posting pictures of how my terra cotta candy dishes turned out. Both of these were Christmas gifts.

The first one, shown below, is a hershey's kisses theme. I used paper with the words 'Merry Kisses' printed on it. I covered all of the red paint with red glitter as well.

Here are the details:

The second dish I made, using poinsetta stickers. Again, I covered all the paint with glitter as well.

Details:

For intstructions for this craft, click here!