Sweet Steampunk 16 Party

The first time Keylie made an apperance on my blog, she looked like this:

(she's the bigger one!)

I can't believe she's 16!

For her birthday, my SIL Erin and I threw her a steampunk party!  Thank goodness for Pinterest!  I knew of steampunk (thank you anime and Back to the Future 3), but I had never gotten into it.  We were totally overwhelmed at first.

This was one of my projects:

For the full effect:

I got the ides from several different places, but mainly ruffled streamers from Cupcakes & Cutlery.

Between the two of us we come up with some pretty awesome stuff!  Our Aunt T and cousin Katie seriously helped us pull it all together in the hours leading up to the party.

Here's some more pictures:

I made her a surprise birthday cake, she was trying to be all cutesy... until she saw the inside!

 

 

Close up with my cake pops in the background:

To be continued...

(there is just too many things I want to mention)

ps. I was hoping to be able to pin from the pictures here, but I guess I need to figure that out better.  I got it so I can pin from flickr, but they won't pin while on the blog... (still working on it...)

a post In where I catch up

Let's be honest here.  It's been over a year since my last post.  Well over a year.  Does anybody even read blogs anymore?

I'm finding myself wanting/needing to share some things.  So here I am.  I debated starting all over, new blog, new focus, new everything.  Well, I can't decide on a name.  My most creative idea was "aimee's wonderful crazy" and the one I was going to go with was "a-chan knits & stuff".  Not real original.  Dropping the knit for my name?  Hmmm, that's still my main craft these days.  But I've been doing so much more!  From baking to wreaths to party planning and sewing, oh my!

I suppose we can get reacquainted now.  Sabrina is 5 and just started kindergarten.  I don't know how that happened.  But she adores school. 



Elias is turning 2 on Halloween!  My baby is not a baby anymore!



Coming soon (if I don't forget...):

Keylie's sweet steampunk 16 party
Some knitting projects
My birthday camping trip to Crater Lake that I forced my family to take with me.
50 books in 1 year updates (last year's complete list and this year's read so far list)
Some of my wreath projects

Stay tuned!

Perler bead bowl

Perler bead bowl, originally uploaded by a-chan.

I found this project on Pinterest, where else? It's pretty self explanitory, but the directions were in Dutch so I googled "perler bead bowl" and got a bunch of hits.  The one I kind of followed was this one.  This was easy enough for Sabrina to help me with, but I still had to help get the beads in a single layer.

Some tips I found around the net:

The oven temp does not have be be exactly at 400F.  I did a different batch at 300F and it worked just the same.

Use a butter knife or plastic scraper to get the beads out of the bowl. 

Use any dish that can go in the oven for different shapes and sizes.  I used a small IKEA baking dish for mine, Sabrina used a Pampered Chef small glass measuring bowl.  My second one was a cheap silicone dish in the shape of a heart.     

50 books in 1 year, 6 month update

Well, the year is about half over and I'm over half way there!  Yes, some are easy books, but some are long books, too!  And a lot are ones I've never read before.  I'm loving my Kindle Fire, it makes reading during my pumping breaks super easy.  Plus, if I finish a book while I'm at work or on the train, I always have a back-up loaded just in case.



Every couple of years I go through a Ray Bradbury stage.  I'm thinking of doing it again this year in honor of his death; maybe in October.  I was going to do the same for Arthur C. Clark but I got distrackted with other things (he has been dead for several years). 

I just started Clash of Kings, I hope it doesn't take me the rest of the month to read.  But at least I'm in a good spot in my list.

January
1   Farmer Boy - Laura Ingalls Wilder
2   Little Men - Louisa May Alcott

February
3   Jo's Boys - Louisa May Alcott
4   Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austin
5   A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula Le Guin
6   Northanger Abbey - Jane Austin
7   Tales from Planet Earth - Arthur C. Clark
 
March
8   City of Masks - Mary Hoffman
9   Messenger - Lois Lowry
10 A Larger Universe - Gillaspy, James
11 The Black Pearl - Scott O'Dell
12 A Spell for Chameleon - Piers Anthony
 
April
13 City of Stars - Mary Hoffman
14 Game of Thrones - George R. R. Martin
15 Island of the Blue Dolphin - Scott O'Dell
16 Mr. Popper's Penguins -
 
May
17 Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
18 The Borrowers - Mary Norton
19 The Borrowers Afield - Mary Norton
20 City of Flowers - Mary Hoffman
21 The Borrowers Afloat - Mary Norton
22 The Borrowers Aloft - Mary Norton
23 Before I Fall -
24 The Borrowers Avenged - Mary Norton
25 City of Secrets - Mary Hoffman
 
June
26 City of Ships - Mary Hoffman
27 Things Fall Apart -
28 The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich

Currently reading: Clash of Kings - George R. R. Martin
Queue: City of Swords - Mary Hoffman (released Aug?)

Old meme

I found this old meme in my "draft" and thought I would publish it.  I've updated it, I've read a few more of the books in the 3 years since I originally did it.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) put ? on the ones you've never heard of.
5) Tally your total at the bottom.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane AustenX
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte BronteX
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X (a lot of it, not front to back, though)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell *
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman *
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens *
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X+
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ?
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X+
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ?
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X+
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ?
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen *
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen *
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X+
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ?
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving ?
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ?
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ?
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood ?
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert *
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen *
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ?
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ?
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley *
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon ?
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ?
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie *
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker *
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X+
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ?
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ?
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ?
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ?
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flauber
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ?
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ?
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ?
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ?
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X+
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Total read: 27
Total loved: 12
Total planning to read: 11
Total never heard of: 13