Cake Decorating Class - Course 2 (Flowers & Cake Design)

I am writing this post while I am watching The Cake Boss on Netflix. ;)

(click here for my post on course 1)

The second course starts with making flowers out of fondant. This was my first time working with it and it was pretty fun. I didn't have the easiest of time making the pansy with the fondant but it wasn't horrible. All in all I enjoyed learning about fondant and I am looking forward to working with it again in course 3.

Notice that there is a petal missing on the top right button flower.  Katie just had to taste it, lol. 

Week 2: I learned to make Royal Icing which is a very temperamental icing to work with. It dries out super fast so you have to always keep it covered. I now refer to it as royal pain in the butt icing. It is also very hard to get the constancy just right. The cool thing about this icing is that it hardens completely so you can make some pretty awesome flowers with it. Once the icing hardens you can store those flowers and use them later but they are still edible. They melt once you put them in your mouth. Here are the flowers I made.

The rose, an apple blossom, primrose and the rosebud

(I couldn't get the pictures to turn right, ugh)

My own flower design...kinda like a sunflower

Week 3: The daffodil, violet and lily

these are my favorite flowers so far

I love how these lilies turned out but I made them the day of my final class so I couldn't use them on my cake.

Week 4: I was taught the reverse shell and basketweave techniques. This was also my final class for this course which meant making and decorating a cake with all the flowers I had made. I had no idea what I wanted the design to be when I first started. In the end I am pretty happy with how it turned out. I call it a basket of flowers...very creative I know.

The Nursery

The nicest room (our favorite) in our house is the nursery. I always had a picture in my mind of what I wanted my baby's room to look like and I love that it turned out even better then I imagined. Here is how it all came together.

Side note: This has been Katie's room but we are moving her into a big girl room. When our next baby comes we will personalize the nursery just for them. It is great that we have a room that will be work for a boy or a girl.

A couple years before Katie was born I found a crib bedding set at Target that I loved...so I bought it. (Since I was a little girl I have been buying things for my future children.) I am a practical girl so I wanted to decorate the nursery in neutral colors and a gender neutral theme. Greens and animals was what I had in mind so what I found at Target was perfect! Don't you agree?

When we found out that "K" (Katie's birth mum) had chosen us, we went to work on preparing the nursery. I told my friend Heather what I envisioned and she helped me make it happen. She is an awesome painter! I had always wanted stripes in the nursery so I was so excited that the bedding had stripes too. It also has a light border of polka dots and I had the perfect spot in the room to bring them out. We hired another friend's daughter to paint a giraffe on an accent wall. Ken wanted to add something to the room as well so with the help of yet another friend they added a chair rail. Next we bought the perfect furniture. Well at least we think it is perfect.

The stripes are different shades of green, the chair rail was painted white and the bottom is a pale yellow.

The polka dots are light and dark brown. 

The giraffe is an exact copy from the bedding. I was amazed at how accurate and how fast she painted it. 

The next project was the toy box. It started off as a light wood color. I loved the red accents on the bedding and wanted to bring it out more so I decided red would be the main color of the toy box. On the top of the box I decoupaged baby pictures that I had been tearing out of magazines since I was a teenager. (Can you tell that I have always wanted to be a mother and was preparing to be one, lol.) I finished the box with vinyl lettering. 

The chair was a garage sale find! How perfect!

Katie has since ripped some of the photos off so I need to redo the top.

When we were down in Utah awaiting Katie's birth I had the pleasure of staying with my best friend. She is very crafty! Thankfully she was willing to share her talents with me and helped me make the curtains. (This is the first set of curtains that I ever made.) We made the red part of the curtains together and they turned out great. There was only one problem, I had the measurements wrong. The curtains ended up being a few inches too short. I ended up adding the light brown polka dot fabric to the bottom and liked it even better than the plain red curtains. Yeah for mistakes!

While we were in Utah we also picked up a beautiful picture of Christ with a child. This picture spoke to us. We knew it would be great in the nursery. 

Here are the rest of the accessories and how it all came together. 

Katie's birth aunt made the adorable diaper box. We love it!

With our next baby we will take down the "BABY" and put their name up there.

We can't wait until a new little one moves in!

Father's Day

On Saturday night we went to our local rodeo. It was a great night, full of fun, cotton candy, great rides and some scary ones too. Every time I stopped recording, the very next ride was super scary. And I do mean SUPER SCARY. One guy got his hand stuck in the rope after he got bucked off a horse. He was dragged the length of the arena with the bull fighters doing their best to get him free. It was intense but what was more intense and scary was when the same thing happened but this time the animal was a bull. The poor rider was getting tossed around like a rag doll and the bull fighters where getting hit hard from the bull too. It is truly amazing that no one was seriously injured. Other then those two scares it was a safe and fun night to witness. Katie really got into the barrel racing. It was so cute to see her hooping and hollering. We sure do love the rodeo!

On Sunday we had a pretty low key Father's Day. Ken's favorite part of the day was cuddling with Katie before she went to bed. In fact, he was enjoying it so much that when I told Katie 2 more minutes then bed time. Ken said, "5 more minutes please." They have a special bond for sure!

Here are some more fun pictures of the two of them:

I am very grateful for the wonderful Daddy Ken is to Katie. I am also very blessed to have a wonderful Dad of my own! Dad, I love you so much and are very grateful that you are my Daddy!

I have been blessed with such amazing men in my life!

Family Flash Cards

Since we don't live close to our family we wanted Katie to have pictures of them that she could play with. We really like how they turned out and Katie loves to play with them. When she is a little older we will make a duplicate set to make a memory game out of them. Thanks Jules for the idea!

The front and back of the cards:

This is what I have made up so far. (This is a public blog so I blacked out the last names for their privacy. Also I blacked out the picture of Katie's birth father and his family because we aren't sure if he has told anyone about Katie.)

This video is of the second time Katie was playing with the cards. We love that even though we don't live close to our family she knows who everyone is.

Grossology

Our friends invited us to the Fort Worth Children's Museum to check out their new exhibit. Katie was very unsure of it at first but then was having fun.

She was very nervous about what was around the corner. It stopped her dead in her tracks and didn't move for a couple of minutes.

This is what was freaking her out. This guy moves around and talks. Once I convinced her it safe and that the guy was talking about boogers and showed her it was even coming out of his nose she was ok to move a little closer. For weeks after this visit she still talked about the booger coming out of his nose. 

She was trying sooooo hard to pull this up.