It's a little early, but Valentine's Day is coming soon and love is in the air. So I thought I'd share a project I did a couple years ago, for our 7th wedding anniversary. The gift theme was wool. I used and old wool jacket to make a boy scout themed gift, badges and all.

I created the "badges" on fabric squares using a stamp set. I attached them with fabric glue - no sewing involved!

The special part was the "key" I added to the inside, explaining what he's done to earn each badge. In other words, all the symbols represented something special about him. I attached the key to cardboard and there you go. I'd like to think he liked it as much as I hoped he would. If nothing else, I thought it was original.

I was given a good size trunk like many of us probably have. I know I used to have one when I was younger. This one was blue with a gold frame and had stickers all over it. I scraped those off and gave it a coat of black.

I knew I wanted it to be like a pirate chest so I decided to do a treasure map with the X being the X in my son's name.
I just free handed all the painting and lettering. I figured it was fine if it looked really rough. I don't think pirates were known for their art skills.
My husband had bought these wooden cutouts and so I decided to work around them.

I'm kicking myself that I didn't get any pictures of the whole scene after it was done. Thankfully, I snapped this pic in the midst of decorating. I wish it was clearer, but I was sure I'd get more. Frankly, the party went so fast, between entertaining, pictures and videotaping, I didn't get everything like I would have liked.

You can see we did a spider above the light with streamer legs. There are red polka dot "ladybug" and yellow striped "bee" balloons up in the corners.






You can't have a picnic without a picnic basket. Well, all I had was a sewing basket with sewing decor around the edges. So, I bought some clearance watermelon ribbon and stuck it on with some tape. Nobody was the wiser.

So, for my son's 3rd birthday, the whole theme came from my wanting to do the grill cupcakes (shown below) from Family Fun magazine. I thought grill- picnic, picnic-bugs. There you go, now we have a boy theme. Next step was invites. I didn't like any invites I was seeing so I did my own from scratch. Here's what the front looked like folded:

As I mentioned food inspired, but also became a big centerpiece for, the party. We did hot dogs on a roaster, lemonade, "bug juice" from a cooler, ladybug Hors D'oeuvres, everything you'd want for a picnic; but the deserts were the real crowd pleaser.

We changed the frosting a bit on the grill cupcakes, using red, instead of brown for a more fiery touch.


We also did cheeseburger cupcakes that turned out even better than expected. I mean these looked and tasted awesome! Kudos to my husband for doing these.


My mother-in-law did a spider cake along with some bee and bug cookies:


The table was complete with baskets and silverware covered with flyswatter papers. I made these myself on my husband's suggestion. What would I do without him?


I'll show decorations, party games and gifts in my next post.

I've been wanting to do a mosaic for my outside step for awhile and finally did it. I ended up using some 1" tiles that I had on hand, but would have liked to have used bigger ones, looking back. Other than that, I think it turned out pretty well for a first time.


I didn't use a pattern, but when I was looking for patterns, I did find this site I liked: Mosaic Patterns Online - free patterns each month