Plain Diaper Cakes are for Sissies

My good friend, Mrs. B, is having her first baby in March and Mr. B and I decided to throw her a surprise baby shower last weekend.  As soon as she told me she was pregnant I started looking for fun baby craft projects and stumbled on this little gem.  

I was just kidding about that plain diaper cakes are for sissies thing.  Seriously though, anyone can give a diaper cake.  But a diaper tricycle?!  Yes, please!  By the way, people are selling these for a small fortune on Etsy if you're not feeling crafty.  I might need to get in on that, as a matter of fact.

Mrs. B is actually going to use cloth diapers, but I knew there was simply no way I was going to get that many cloth diapers made in time.  When we were painting her nursery a few weeks ago, I casually asked her if she would like to have a stash of disposables for emergencies and to keep in the car, etc.  

Heh, heh.  I'm so sneaky.

(Please excuse the weird focus on the pictures.  MacGyver is a much better photographer than I am.)  You'll need about 55-60 diapers, two bibs, two receiving blankets, a pair of socks, an angel food cake pan, rubber bands, ribbon, some safety pins, and a bottle that for our purposes you're going to pretend is also in the picture.  

Eh hem.  

You're going to make one large wheel and two smaller wheels.  For the larger wheel I used about 30 diapers.  You can adjust it to your liking.  You'll want enough to make it nice and sturdy.  Start by staggering the diapers about 3/4" apart and wrapping them around the center of your poor battered angel food cake pan that your mom gave you when you got your first place in college.  Keep adding diapers in the same direction until they start meeting the first diaper.  Then start pinching the diapers toward the middle and twisting as you add more.  When you've added all the diapers you'll have a nice pinwheel in the pan and you can adjust them until they are evenly spaced and looking pretty.

Gently press the bottom of the pan up from the bottom to expose the outside of your wheel.  This takes a little dexterity, but while you have the wheel lifted up, wrap a rubber band around the outside to hold it all together.

Then pop that bad boy out of the pan!  You'll probably want to adjust the diapers again after this as they can shift a little when you're putting on the rubber band.  Rinse and repeat two more times for the smaller wheels.  I used about 20 diapers per small wheel, but you can make them however you like.

When you've got all three wheels ready (how cute are these?!), carefully widen the centers of the wheels so there are holes an inch or so in diameter.

Wrap the ribbon around the rubber bands to cover them up and secure with a safety pin.  I picked diaper pins since I new Mrs. B will be doing the cloth diaper thing most of the time.

Take one of the receiving blankets that you had to go back to the store and buy after you accidentally cut right through the middle of the ones you were making for Baby B and threw a fish flopping fit involving naughty words that are not suitable for baby ears.

Eh hem.  Don't be like me.

Roll up the blanket into a tight roll.  I didn't take a picture of this (I was still mad about the first blankets I ruined), but if you fold the blanket in half and then roll it up, it's a lot easier and stays rolled tighter.  Either way, you want a long, rolled blanket.

Rinse and repeat with the second blanket.  

Thread one blanket through the center of the larger wheel...

...and pull the ends around and snake them through each of the back wheels to join in the middle.

Secure it with a safety pin.  Don't worry about making this part pretty - just slide it inside one wheel and you'll never see it.

Make sure the treads are facing the same direction on the back wheels or it will look weird.  You don't want weird looking tires, now do you?  I didn't think so.

Take the other blanket and feed it through the center of front wheel until the ends are even.

Lay one of the bibs across the front wheel and secure it under the ribbon you used to cover the rubber band.

I saw this bib on etsy and didn't have time to order one.  I used t-shirt transfer paper that you print on and iron onto fabric.  I have no idea how well this will work as a bib, but it's cute.

Do the same thing with the other bib across the back tires, and secure the ends inside the front wheel center.  This will become the seat.

For the visual learners...

Remember that baby bottle we were pretending was in the first photo?  Lay it on top of the front wheel with the bottom facing the front of the tricycle.  Pull the ends of the second blanket up like bunny ears around the bottle and secure tightly with a rubber band.

Wrap ribbon around the rubber band to cover it up, and put the socks on over the ends of the blanket for handle bars.  This tricycle is for a boy, but pink tassels would be fun on a girl tricycle!  Not that there is anything wrong with boys liking pink, I just haven't had a chance to ask Baby B if he likes pink and I don't like to assume.

Though as an aside, I picked green and yellow for the colors because I like them, and blue seemed a little cliche.  Halfway through making this I realized Mr. B went to OSU - long time rival to my alma mater, U of O - whose colors are green and yellow.  This made me chuckle.

(Read the subliminal messages, Baby B!  Come to the dark side!  We have candy!)

And you're done!

This took about 2 hours to put together start to finish, but I imagine it could be done in less.  It was a big hit at the shower!

Happy crafting!

10 Little Penguins Waddling Around

I think I've mentioned on here before that at work we love us a good potluck.  As I've gotten older and slightly less antisocial I have come to enjoy these little gatherings.  I love finding unique and creative foods to bring to potlucks.  It's like crafting with food!  I saw these a few months ago on The Pioneer Woman's Tasty Kitchen and have been waiting for a potluck to make these bad boys.  They're actually really easy!

A few things about these photos before we begin.  First, please excuse the circa 1972 orange tinge to all of them.  MacGyver is a bit of a florescent bulb fanatic.   Which is great for our electric bill and energy saving and all that.  Not so much for taking pictures though.  

Second, please ignore the blue (I swear, it's blue) jar full of feathers sitting in the box on the dining room chair full of wedding decorations.  Yes, I said it.  I still have wedding decorations lying about.  Boxes of them, in fact.  Anyone know of a nice farm where they can go live out their lives running free in a field?  If I find such a place, I'll have wedding decor free photos.  That are still orange.  

I love these pie plates!!  I got one for Christmas one year from my Mom, and the other at my bridal shower from my Aunt.  LOVE THEM.  In the picture I have two jars of colossal olives and two jars of medium sized olives, but I ended up only needing one jar of the smaller olives.

Olives olives olives olives.

Also, I forgot to put toothpicks in the picture.  Just pretend they're there.  If you would kindly pretend as well that I didn't forget to take a picture of everything before I started opening packages and that the cream cheese is still sealed and pretty?  Thank you.

Cut slices off the fat end of the carrots.  Try to make them even and level because these are going to be your little penguin feet.  I peeled the carrots mostly for aesthetics.  Because let's be honest, who wants to eat a penguin that looks like it has athlete's foot?  Did I just ruin these for you?  Pretend I didn't just say that.

Now cut a small sliver out of each of the little carrot discs.  These will be the noses.

Cut the tip off one corner of a Ziploc and plop the cheese on in.  I let the cream cheese soften on the counter for about an hour before I started, but that really wasn't long enough.  I blew out two Ziplocs before it was finally soft enough to pipe out easily.  Trust me on this one - cream cheese blowouts are messy.

Cut a small slit down one side of a colossal olive and pipe some cheese into the cavity.  You'll want enough in there so it fills the hole and squeezes out the front a little.  Then smooth that with your finger or a damp paper towel.  You've just made the penguin body!

This is actually not a good photo, and not just because it's orange.  I did this for the first few and then realized it's better to stick the toothpick into the body from the top down, and then poke it into the carrot.  This way you don't get cream cheese all along the length of the toothpick.  Live and learn.

Remember those slivers we cut out of the carrots?  Poke one of those into the hole of a small olive, and then slide it onto the toothpick, lining it up with the body.

How adorable are these?!  Except maybe Cyclops there in the middle.  He looks a little shifty.

I saw another site where she tied strips of green onion on for scarves.  All together now...squeee!!!!!!

What do you call a gathering of penguins?  A gaggle?  A herd?  A flock?  A colony?  Oh!  I think that's it!  A COLONY of penguins.  With onion breath.

Whaaaaaaat???

MacGyvery made me take down the other post I wrote a few days ago.  I'll repost it soon, but in the mean time, I give you this:

These little minions from the movie Despicable Me are hilarious.  I saw a clip from an interview with Steve Carrell about this movie in which he said that the moral of the story is that everyone needs 10,000 minions in their lives.  I couldn't agree more.  

MacGyver bought a welder a few months back, and has been playing around with some scrap metal.  He made the cake topper for our wedding, in fact.  We had an dual tank old air compressor that died sitting around in the basement so he took it apart and was trying to figure out what to do with it.  I immediately thought of the minions.  

My little brother loves this movie and we thought it would be fun to make him a metal minion.

(uhh...please excuse the hoard in the background)

I just want to say for the record that I watched MacGyver bend a strip of steel around a piece of pvc pipe to make the goggle.  With his bare hands.

We put the minion in front of the fire to try to get the paint to dry a little faster.  Linus was unimpressed.

MacGyver did all the welding and painted him yellow.

I used Testors model paints to paint the rest.  He turned out pretty cute if I may say so myself!

Turbo liked him.  I have no idea what he's going to do with a giant metal minion, but that's not really my problem.  Also important to note: you can put a giant metal cylinder into your carry on luggage and fly across the country (to Washington D.C.) and the TSA will not question you.  

But leave the nail clippers at home.  

It's not OCD. I promise.

I like rules.  I need order in my life.  I always open the same applications and programs in the same order on my computer at work.  I pay bills in the same order every month.  I have a routine for paperwork.  I don't speed (well, most of the time).  And if a sign says, "Do not proceed beyond this point", even though everybody does, and that's where the cool stuff is, I stay behind, holding the hats and coats for all the rule breakers.

It's not my fault, I came this way.  My mom still talks about how I'd come home from Kindergarten in tears because Erik Hildebrandt got in trouble and was sent to the principal's office.  The problem had nothing to do with me, I was just upset that someone broke the rules and got int trouble.

**For those of you who were worried, Erik is now a very successful businessman working for a very big airline and doing spectacularly for himself.  I'm not going to lie, I'm a bit jealous. 


Like I was saying, I need order in my life.

When I started looking at all of the things I needed to do for this wedding, I was getting overwhelmed about how I was going organize it all.  Then, one day at work I was organizing a chart, and it came to me: I needed a chart for my wedding!

If you think about it, the concept is fitting.  A psychiatric chart for this crazy wedding!

I tend to collect things from garage sales (read: Future Hoarders of America meeting at my house every second Tuesday).  One of the things I found in my craft room was a pile of old medical chart folders.  I think I planned to organize patterns into them or something.  But they worked splendidly for my Wedding Folder.

Special friends.  Heh.

I separated out each of the major categories, and inserted loose leaf sheets into each section.  You guys, I have a confession to make.  I really, really like school supplies.  I especially like the way "loose leaf paper" sounds.  When I was in school, and I would see that on the supply list I would get so excited!  Making this folder was a little slice of School Supply Heaven.

Now that I'm a few weeks into this, I've been able to add printouts, and brochures that I have collected to the folder, and it's all right there!  Now, when I meet my friends at the craft store, and they ask me what I have in mind for centerpieces, I can whip out my trusty binder and say, "Look!  Here!  See!  Worship!"

And then they laugh at me.

But that's okay.

I'm secure enough in my School Supply Super Dorkdom that this doesn't offend me.  Nay, I embrace it!  After I found that fantastic image of my doppleganger, I printed him and taped him to the front of the binder.

He's my order enforcer.  Don't mess with the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, man!

Wishing you a weekend of order and rule following,

-AB

Coming soon to a blog near you!

I was raised crafting and sewing, so it's a big part of my life.  I have a little side business that justifies spending money on fabric and paper and other craft supplies.  I will post tutorials as I complete them for anyone who is interested in doing the same thing.  Stay tuned!