"Hooo" dat?

I came into work early today, where the internet still reigns. On one hand it's nice to be disconnected, but on the other hand, it's a pain in the neck. It was fun today because there were a ton of new Pinstrosity submissions that I hadn't seen yet (having been offline for nearly a week now). I'd like to share one of those with you today. 

One thing I love about Pinstrosity is that I've been able to cyber-meet some really neat people. There are a few that I've started corresponding with here and there and it's been really fun to find these new friends. One of these ladies is Kendra. She's bold, talented, super-mom, and just plain fun. This past week we received a great email from her with her first Pinstrosity submission and I had to share it with you. You'll like this!

Kendra's Pinstrosity:

I have read every Pinstrosity post since way back when Jen from Epbot recommended it to us, and I always wanted to participate. But I don't have as much time for Pinterest browsing and crafting as I'd like, and when I do attempt something I'm a real stickler for doing the research, following the instructions, and using the proper supplies. So (dare I thought?) I couldn't ever end up with something worthy of Pinstrosity.

But, I did.

And I think I've even come up with a new category: The Thing in My Head Wasn't on Pinterest For a REASON.

Let me back up. My daughter wanted an owl party for her fourth birthday. No problem. Pinterest has tons of great ideas for that. I made a board, I got my supplies, I executed all the pins I decided on pretty successfully.

Especially great were the owl baby cupcakes . . . 

The Original Pin:

http://www.thelittlestylefile.com/2013/04/03/owl-party-ideas/

Mine:

My daughter loved the cupcakes, but she was worried about all those baby owls not having a mama. I couldn't find any mama owl cakes on Pinterest that looked like I could make them quickly and easily and with supplies I had on hand. So I decided to wing it. (dum, dum, DUM)

I had an idea in my head of what it would look like. But without being able to see someone else's completed work on Pinterest, it was all just a guess.

I wanted to make a chocolate peanut butter Rice Krispy Treat owl, with eyes made of powdered sugar donuts and Hershey's kisses. I thought it would give the same big eye look that the baby owls have.

But again, I didn't use Pinterest. I was flying blind here. And what I made is the stuff of nightmares. I give you the Rice Krispy Owl . . . OF DOOM:

So, obviously, since I didn't want my four year old to start wearing all black and listening to Marilyn Manson, I had to take those terrifying donuts off and start over. My second try used open-faced Oreos for the eyes, and a half Oreo on top of each eye that was meant to make the horns, but it ended up looking exactly like Groucho Marx. You'll have to take my word for it, I don't have a photo.

My third try still isn't my favorite thing ever, but it had a cute barn owl-quality to it, and my daughter liked it, so that's what we went with. 

But the moral of the story is, if you can't find what you're thinking of already on Pinterest, it MIGHT be because you're a creative genius, or it might just be because it isn't a very good idea.

The rest of the photos from the party, with all of my successful pins, are up at www.CatholicAllYear.com!

 Personally, I think the owls look great (especially that last one! Way to go Kendra!), but we are always our best and worst critic. Her post did remind me though of one of our first posts here on the blog...The Wise Owl Says "Just Go Buy a Cake":

The Original Pin

http://familyfun.go.com/recipes/cakes-cupcakes/theme-cupcakes/night-owls-cupcakes-984215/

That was the pin Em was going for...but when she went to make it her computer was being fussy and she couldn't get a picture up to look at. So, she went off of memory. 

The Pinstrosity

The Big Cake

The Little Cupcakes

Let me tell you...these were scrumptious. A little creepy looking, but since it was Halloween, that was perfectly fitting. And since they tasted so good, all was well anyway. Tasty is better than pretty when it comes to food!

Internet Still Out

I'm at work, so I'll make this short...my internet is still not working. We're hoping to get it up and running soon (now that the holiday and weekend are over). I'm hoping to be able to get to the library occasionally to use the internet until it's fixed, but until then...bear with me. Luckily Em's still here with working internet and you can get all of her great posts!

Minimalist Disney Onesies

My cousin's baby shower is today, so my sister and I spent yesterday getting her baby present all ready for both the shower and today's Show-and-Tell post (I'm hoping her and her mom are busy enough with the shower that they don't see this before hand...I'm gonna risk it). She's doing an all out Disney theme, so we thought it would be fun to try and follow along with that. I looked and looked and just wasn't sure what to do, so I started looking at Disney boards on Pinterest for inspiration and I found this awesome minimalist art set:

http://www.disneyeveryday.com/minimalist-disney-pixar-polyptych-poster-set/

I thought that was so cute and clever, so I started looking up other Disney minimalist posters and suddenly I had an idea: Disney minimalist art onesies. Cheap and fun and definitely doable. 

I started by looking up Disney minimalist art online and made myself a Secret Board on Pinterest (so that my cousin and her mom didn't see what I was pinning) for all the designs I liked. I had quite the collection, but there were some characters that I wanted that I couldn't find, and some designs that I wanted to tweak some. Once we had finally picked the 11 designs we wanted to do (because I bought 11 onesies in varying sizes), I sat down in front of the computer and drew them out on blank paper, first in pencil, then going over them with Sharpie. 

I used the Sharpie so that we could flip the paper over and still be able to see the design on the back. Why did I do this? Because we needed to be able to trace it onto Heat N' Bond (a double side fusible iron on...it lets you join two pieces of fabric together with the iron). When you trace a design onto Heat N' Bond you need to trace it on backwards so that when you iron the design onto your background fabric it is facing the right way. You can see what I mean below...I traced the Simba design on "backwards" so that when I cut out the design and turned it over it would be facing the right way. 

We tried to trace each piece of each design by color, so that all the grays were together, all the reds, all the oranges, and so forth. To keep them straight we just wrote the character name inside the traced design (since we had quite a few circles and needed to know which one went to which character). We then cut blocks around the designs (you DON'T want to cut on the lines yet, just give a good border around like you see below). After all the pieces of the designs were traced onto the paper side of the Heat N' Bond, we dug through my fabric scrap stash to find just the right colors and textures. 

Next up, it's ironing time! You need to place your fabric right side down and iron all the wrinkles out of it before you attach the Heat N' Bond. When you have your fabric prepped and ready, lay the Heat N' Bond plastic side down (paper side up), and iron it on (following the package directions). 

After we had all the pieces ironed on, we then cut them out on the lines. 

Here you see all our cut out design pieces. Some of them took a while with the details, but we finally got it.

Now it was finally time to attach them to the onesies. You want to lay your onesie out flat and smooth out the wrinkles so that the fabrics can stick together fully. 

Then from there just follow the Heat N' Bond directions (removing the paper layer before you try to iron on the design pieces) to attach your designs. 

Here are how all 11 of the onesies turned out and where I got the idea from for each:

The Lion King

Based on this poster I found:

http://neilelewis.blogspot.com/2012/09/minimalist-posters.html

Jack Skellington

 My cousin LOVES The Nightmare Before Christmas, so we had to do one of Jack Skellington. 

We looked at a few different Jack Skellington faces and finally just made our own. 

Up

 We based our design off the poster below, only we knew we wanted multi-colored balloons. We found a polka dot fabric to use as the base and then added 8 balloons over the top to add color and fullness. 

http://www.etsy.com/listing/112019296/up-minimalist-movie-print

Finding Nemo

 I loved the bubbles in the photo below. Just looking at ours, it doesn't scream Finding Nemo, but with the whole Disney set you get the idea.  

http://hiconsumption.com/2012/10/disney-pixar-minimalist-posters/

Toy Story

 For this one I looked up pictures of Buzz and Woody and we picked the main components to each of them to depict. Originally I didn't have the Sheriff star for Woody, but it made it pop a little better with it. 

Ratatouille

This was another one that we loved right away and didn't tweak because it was already perfect for the onesie:

http://www.awwwards.com/minimalist-posters-of-pixar-s-movies.html

Peter Pan

 For this one I combined the following two pictures:

http://www.worth1000.com/entries/671782/peter-pan

http://www.behance.net/gallery/Disney-Minimalist-Poster/5581699

Genie, from Aladdin

 This is another one I fell in love with from the beginning that I didn't tweak because it was already just what I wanted. 

http://www.splashnology.com/article/50-fresh-minimal-movie-posters/7918/

Mike Wazowski, from Monsters, Inc.

 This one is based off a number of different minimalist designs I saw and combined (there are a ton of Mike Wazowski Minimalist designs out there). 

Jack-Jack, from The Incredibles

I just realized that I ironed on his mask up-side-down. Oh well. It works I guess.
I got the design for Jack-Jack from this free downloadable wallpaper:

http://www.goodfon.com/wallpaper/397245.html

The Emporer's New Groove

 And then this one is based off of this poster:

http://www.behance.net/gallery/Minimalist-Movie-Poster/5137111

We're pretty excited with how they turned out. It ended up being pretty cheap for us as I already a good fabric stash and the Heat N' Bond. Doing DIY gifts is so much fun! It is way easier to personalize gifts that way and get just what you want. And, you always know that you are getting someone something unique.

I hope you all had a great 4th of July and that your weekend is awesome! 

Happy 4th of July!!

Marquette texted me this morning that the lightning storm last night knocked out their internet and asked me to get up a little update. That same storm had me up at 3ish this morning and then sleeping with my fingers in my ears. Boo for lightning, happy for the rain though!!!

We are both with family today, and at some point will probably be with each other celebrating our beautiful country's Independence Day!

We hope you all have a wonderful and safe 4th of July that is full of friends family and celebrating our nation's birthday!

http://www.middletowninsider.com/2013/02/american-flag-retirement-ceremony.html

And if you're a reader who isn't from around our neck of the woods (err...country, lol) we hope you have an awesome Thursday!!

Much love,

The Pinstrositeers



Shrinky-Knives

I may or may not have just crawled out of bed. I'd apologize for my laziness this morning, but I'm not really too sorry, lol. Everyone needs these days every now and then. We spent the day yesterday with my sister, Cameron's brother, and their kid (a set of sisters married a set of brothers...our family tree is interesting) down in Tucson, AZ and had a marvelous time. Why we chose July to go to Tucson, I have no idea. But despite the 113 degree weather, we had a blast. If you ever have the chance to go to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, take it! It's fantastic. Even for those of us desert rats who reside in the desert already, it's fantastic. Just one thing about it though...if you go during the summer hit it early in the morning or go for their evening hours. It was still totally worth it mid-summer-day though. Had we been smart, we would have done what my friend in the Phoenix valley did the other day and left at tray of cookie dough on the dash of the car and had hot, fresh baked cookies to eat when we got done (no joke, she did that and it worked). Or maybe we should have tried today's Pinstrosity in the car...it definitely got plenty hot in the car while we were at the museum. 

The Original Pin:

http://shellesplayschool.wordpress.com/2012/07/

Using the shinky-dink idea, Shelle decided to try using plastic cutlery to make art and ended up figuring out how to make plastic personalize bracelets from plastic knives. If you click on the link captioned in the above photo you can see more of her creations. 

Katrina one day was trying to figure out what to do with all the plastic knives she had kicking around, so she got on Pinterest and finally hit on Shelle's idea above. Seemed perfect! She said, "So my 12yr old daughter and I started markering up all these plastic knives...we took almost 2 hours.....and imagining who we would give them too, if we could sell them at a craft fair....and just thinking how much attention we were going to get for being SO STINKING CREATIVE!!!! We planned some colors on the knives, that would match some outfits we would have!!!!!! LOL "

The Pinstrosity

Rather than curling, their knives mostly just shrunk!  Katrina's daughter worked to salvage the situation by saving some of the now mini-knives to use as cheese or butter spreaders, but there were definitely no bracelets. 

It's hard to say just why there was no curling. First, the website does specify that you need #6 Polystyrene Plastic cutlery for this to work. Not just any plastic will do. Second, you need to make sure that your oven is fully preheated before you stick the knives in so they get a shock of heat immediately when you put them in. 

Since the knives didn't curl up on their own in the oven, one thing the original site suggests is to put on oven mitts and use metal tongs to carefully bend the knives as they are taken out of the oven one by one. Shelle's directions on this matter say, "When the bracelets look to be about the right size for the person who will be wearing them, the grown-up should take them out of the oven quickly using oven mitts.  Then, while they are still hot, the adult can shape the bracelets using the metal tongs.  The bracelets will probably be about the right shape already, but you will want to make sure the opening is big enough to slip a wrist through.  Also, if the edges did not curl in the oven, now is the time to curl them using the tongs." But, having played with melty plastic before, it is still easy to break the knives even as you pull them out of the oven, so be careful. Or on the other side, if the knife is really really melty, then you end up with melted plastic stuck to the tongs and the mitts (but you'd have to leave them in the oven for quite a while for that to happen).

So if you're in need of a some fun and cheap jewelry for you and your kids to sport at the 4th of July parades on Thursday, this may be a really fun craft to try out! Check out Shelle's patriotic bracelets made out of a spoon, a fork, and a knife:

http://shellesplayschool.wordpress.com/2012/07/

Give it a try and let us know how it goes! 

A Very Doctor Who Mix It Up Monday

Mix It Up Monday is all about things that are different from the norm, and I feel this e-mail we received was just that, but in a oh so delightful way!

Patty sent us her creation and it isn't a Pinstrosity or a Pin-Different, it is a definite Pin-Win and well I know we will have some readers that will really enjoy this!!

The Original

http://imgur.com/a/oP9gK

This Doctor Who inspired dress is really pretty (even if you aren't a big Doctor Who fan this is just elegant!).

Here is Patty's version, enjoy!!!

The Pin-Win

"So I don't know about you, but I <3 Doctor Who! I found this amazing TARDIS dress on Pinterest. This girl went all out from the sketch and I thought, I could do that!

So I set to work. I just wanted to make it so I could say I had one, but I also wanted to wear it in time for a reception that I was receiving in my honor (It's a long story). I tried to stay true to the original but I wanted to make it my own. I hit a lot of snags along the way: the windows were incredibly crooked, the bodice didn't fit, I bought an invisible zipper yet there was a regular one inside the package, the iron-on transfer burned my pillowcase, and I ended up having to remake the windows and the bodice all over again. 

The windows are still a little crooked, but I am very happy with it overall. I wore a key necklace to pay homage to how the Doctor opens his Time And Relative Dimension In Space"

Pretty Snazzy eh?! I think she did a GREAT job!! Thanks for sharing Patty!!

So to all our Doctor Who fans, what do we think? Fabulous huh?!

Have a great Monday!