Happy tax season!

Not...

Anyway, the ides of April bring on a number of things that aren't related to forking over money. Warm weather, longer days, spring projects... the list goes on.

With spring cleaning in mind, I declared that my lamp shades are a hideous shade of cream that shows dust, cat hair, and any other flaw you can imagine. The before:

A few layers of Mod Podge, a 75 cent yard of scrap fabric and an X-Acto knife later:

With Easter passing, my lovely egg wreath is no longer relevant.

I couldn't bring myself to take the eggs and yarn off of the form to make a new one, so I just bought another form and wrapped it in some tan yarn I already had. A few shells and some items from the 97 cent aisle at Walmart, and you have this:

I'm in love with it. It makes me want to put up an umbrella and sit in a cushy chair with a margarita. (I hand painted the little margarita glasses, btw.) Side note, only 384 days until this is actually my last initial. Every day is more exciting than the one before.

Speaking of cushy chair, my soon to be in-laws have a great little teak bistro set in their backyard. My MiL asked me to look at the table and see if I could come up with a way to maybe remove the wood and replace it with a concrete slab, and mosaic the top. I looked at the table and chairs and much to my surprise, the wood was still mostly salvageable. I took the table top off of the legs, took the wood out of the frame, and sanded the pieces down to clean and smooth them. After staining the pieces a pretty redwood, they look like new. I'm mad at myself for not taking a before picture, but once the pieces are back on the hardware, there will be plenty of afters...

Last thing. I made a journey to our local antique shop this week and found this gem for $10. I cannot wait to finish it. The top panels still have the glass intact, but the bottom is sans glass. To me, it screams cork board. I'll post the after hopefully by this weekend.

I must've lost my rear end from working it off this weekend... :)

Lordy, lordy, looks who's 4...well, that's it.

Well, the day has come and gone. My smart, beautiful, hilarious little girl turned 4 last week. It was difficult to determine who was more excited about it, her or me. She loves being 4 like all of her friends and learning to ride her big girl bike. I love that with every passing day, she learns more and becomes this fabulously independent lady. She writes all of her letters, is learning to sound out words, and can kick all of our butts at Go Fish. *sigh*

So anyway, I know everyone is wondering what kind of cake she had. Well, for our family birthday party this year, I decided to skip making an actual cake. In previous years, we've always wound up with an abundance of extra cake that none of us want to eat after day two. This year, I tried the newly popular Mason Jar Cupcakes. There are a plethora of tutorials, and in citing just one, I'm doing a disservice to the 20 others that are out there, so I'm not citing anything. It's not plagarism; no one has a copyright over a cupcake recipe.

I went to Publix and got a 12 pack of jars for about $8.

(The lids were drying at the time of the picture. You'll see what I mean in a minute.)

All it took was 1 box of white cake mix, about 2 tbsp of cornstarch, and a box of food coloring.

I mixed the cake mix according to the box instructions, then mixed in the cornstarch to thicken the mixture for layering. You can opt not to do this if you want funky tie-dye looking layers, but my OCD wouldn't allow this.

Separate the mixture into sandwich bags; the number varies based on the number of colors you're using. I used four. Add about 4-5 drops of food coloring into each bag, let out the excess air and seal. Use the countertop to knead, blending the coloring into the mix.

Move the batter away from one corner and cut it to allow for piping. Be aware of your size; a larger cut will cause the batter to pipe out quickly.

Layer each of your colors into your mason jars (note: these do not need to be greased prior to using). The easiest method I found was to use up each color at once, meaning I put blue in all of my jars, then green, then yellow, then red.

Fill a 9x13" pan with about 1/2" of water and place your jars in the pan. Typically you would bake according to the box directions, but because my oven runs so hot and I was paranoid about burning them, I baked mine at 350 for 30 minutes. They came out perfectly moist and fluffy.

For icing, I decided to keep with my sandwich bag theme and fill a bag with icing and pipe it into the cupcakes. Kristen helped put the sprinkles on top. :)

Here's my finished version, complete with the decorated tops I made. You can find my tutorial on that here.