Pumpkin Patch Time!

It's PUMPKIN TIME!

You know what that means!?  Picture overload!  We always have so much fun picking out pumpkins at  La Familia pumpkin patch that I can't contain myself with the camera.  I love this patch because it's a simple and beautiful working farm.   It was quite brisk this year and I LOVED it.  We picked out our favorite pumpkins, got lost in the corn maze, pet a donkey, and found what the kids call a manbug (a green ladybug).  Too much fun! 

PUMPKINTIME!

this picture of Sage cracked me up!

They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky.  They're altogether ooky:  The Adams Family!

These pictures freak me out a little because they make me realize that Bailey is growing up!

Sage's impression of an adorable jack-o-lantern

Denver was a leeeetle bit excited!

We always enjoy pumpkin patch time with Grandma & Grandpa Adams

Love the girl's faces, but Denver actually looks scared.

My kids are such HAMS!

Painting on Cookies: A Fabulous Tutorial!

I always enjoy watching tutorials.  It's amazing how much clearer things become when you actually get to watch a process in action!  I got a couple of requests to make a video tutorial and decided I better figure out how to do that.  I made a quick video two days ago with my 8 year old recording and though it was informative, Mr. John didn't think it very entertaining.  I agreed with him and we did a little brainstorming and came up with the tutorial you see below.

If you don't like cheese:  LOOK AWAY!  Better yet RUN.  FAST.
If you do like cheese:  This is as cheesetastic a tutorial as I could create, so enjoy!

Munching and Lunching with Sue of Munchkin Munchies

It's getting more and more common to hear of people meeting online and falling in love.  Well, I can say it's happened to me.  As soon as I took one look at the blog Munchkin Munchies by Sue it was love at first sight!  I loved all her baking projects, the pictures are beautiful, and she is so stuffed with creative ideas I was inspired every time I stalked read her blog.  We exchanged comments on each other's  blogs and appreciated each other's work and soon discovered we lived about an hour away from each other!

On Friday I got to meet my virtual blogging friend in the flesh.  We met up at JoAnn's and did a little shopping for cookie cutters and candy melts while we chatted and got to know each other.  Let me just say she is the sweetest  and easiest human to talk to on the planet and just beautiful.  It's hard to believe she's a grandma x 8!!! 

After gathering our new crafting treasures we headed over to lunch at Applebee's, but before I got out of the car Sue came bearing gifts and said, "I made you some cookies," and handed me these adorable, googly-eyed spiders all festively wrapped.  So cute!  She shows how she made them and variations in this spider cookie post.

 Well, great minds think alike, because I made her some cookies too!  I made these to match the artwork on her blog header and she adored them. 

Our leisurely lunch was fabulous as was the conversation.  We finished it off by sharing a maple butter blondie a la mode that was to die for and she even let me have the last bite :D  It was an incredibly fun experience to meet someone that I so admire and find out they are even more awesome than I imagined.  Thank you so much Sue!

Star Wars Cookies

 My brother asked me to make Star Wars cookies for a co-worker's birthday and I was so excited.  The only problem was there was too much good stuff to make cookies of, so I went to the biggest Star Wars nerds superfans that I knew and asked what they most wanted to see in cookie form.  
Things that made the list but not the cookie sheet were:

Princess Leia (in slave girl outfit of course!)

tie fighter

Ton-Ton (the critter Han cuts open for Luke to sleep inside)

Rancor eating pig dude

Jabba the Hutt

Those cookies ended up on the cutting room floor either because they would be too unappetizing (can you imagine eating that slimy, sluggy Jabba?  gross!  or they didn't make it because I really wanted to make sure I made a wookie cookie.  I was tempted to make a Leia cookie to see if I could, but this is a family-friendly place and that is just a little too much cleavage and chains for a PG rated blog.  

Thank you Mr. John and Gabe for being such big nerds fans and knowing all the names of every single character, how to spell it, and why they should be a cookie.  Hopefully the birthday boy agrees. 

May the force be with you!

P.S. FAQ: Yes, these are hand-painted cookies (with food coloring and a paintbrush)

It's Beginning to look a lot like Halloween!

It's October!  The sneakiest of all the months.  October is like a surprise party every year.   I'm going along, finally used to the back-to-school, lunch-packing, early-rising schedule of September, and then... SURPRISE!   It's OCTOBER!   I know it's an annual thing, but somehow October 1st always jumps out.  It's also my Mom's birthday, so that can be a bad thing.  I'm glad my family decided to celebrate together yesterday instead of Saturday.  That gave me a day to realize it was October and figure things out.

All the local family came over to our house and had a dinner of glazed pork tenderloin, mashed potatoes, green salad (courtesy of my little bro and wife), and homemade french bread (courtesy of big sister yum!) and a pumpkin torte. It was so fun to get family together and the eating part is always fun.  Happy birthday Mom!

So, now that I've wrapped my head around October, I made a little something today and thought I'd do a simple tutorial of this super quick project to show you how I made my first Halloween craft of 2011. 

1.  I took the cardboard back out of my frame (from IKEA) and I mod podged pages from a discarded book right onto it and sealed it with another layer of mod podge.
2.  I sketched out a witchy silhouette onto the dried, mod-podged pages with a sharpie.  (You could also just print out a black sillhouette onto a piece of cardstock and cut it out and mod-podge it onto your cardboard).
3.  I squirted a puddle of black paint right onto the cardboard.  Do yourself a favor and use the Americana brand.  I've used other kinds and it is sooooo frustrating to have to paint multiple coats to get good, solid, color coverage.
4.  Work the black paint right up to the sharpie line and fill it all in.
5.  I did a second sillhouette of a dracula-type counterpart for her to gaze at.

It's starting to look creepy in here! 
I have so many more ideas buzzing around this brain of mine for Halloween!  I just hope I have enough time to get them all done.