I've had a bug...

...the crafty/creative bug! I'm pretty sure this is partly due to the fact that I joined Pinterest, a virtual bulletin board where people can share their own collections of ideas. Several of the people I follow have do-it-yourself boards, and the creative juices just got flowing in me!

A couple weeks ago I made a cake for our friend Noah's first birthday. His parents call him "monkey," and asked me to design it based on Noah's room decor. Here's a picture of the inspiration: and here is the cake: The cake was delicious, and it turned out just how I'd pictured it. I love it when that happens! Then last week I went to a baby shower and decided to give the honoree some homemade, embellished burp cloths (cloth diapers with fabric and ribbon attached). They turned out really well, so I made some for my friend Anne's baby Lucy! Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture of that project, so you'll just have to take my word for it that they were precious! On to the next craft...last night we had a preseason "tailgate" party (in quotes because we weren't actually using a tailgate...just a tailgate-style party) for our fellow Michigan football fans, so I decided to make some fun treats: football-shaped Oreo balls and Michigan football helmet cake balls! They were a big hit, and I was really happy with the way they turned out. Here's what the helmet looks like, for those of you who may not know the iconic winged helmet: and here are the cake balls and Oreo balls: This morning Bryan had to go out of town for a meeting, so I thought it would be fun to do a project with the kids. We peeled our broken crayons, broke the into small pieces, put them in a mini-muffin tin and melted them down to make rainbow crayon discs! I'd seen these several times over the years, but never tried it myself. It was a huge success! Peeling the paper off the crayons occupied us for about an hour, and Andrew loved that he was actually given permission to break something, ha! Both kids were so excited to watch the crayons melt in the oven, and thought it was the coolest thing when the rainbow crayons were done. They are indeed pretty cool! It's fun to be creative! I wonder what my next project will be?!