Decorative Serving Tray and Jane Austen

Wow, I'm already a post slacker on this blog - not good! I've been super busy making things for Munchkin's birthday party this Friday - can't wait to post them! I also spent some time making this little beauty of a bag:

I *love* it.
You can check it out in my shop if you're interested!

Now - on to the good stuff!

I decided the top of my entertainment center looked a little naked the other day, and put it at the top of my to do list. I saw this tutorial for a serving tray a long time ago and have been dying to try it ever since.

Don't you just love that design?? And she freehanded that! That is some crazy talent right there.

I happened to have a wooden serving tray lying around my house that I used instead of an old cabinet door, but I think the door idea is genius. You can also find some ugly old serving trays at any thrift store and give them a face lift. Now, here's where I need to apologize...I got so caught up in this project that I failed HUGELY to take any pictures of the process. :( You'll have to bear with my step-by-step tutorial sans pictures. I know - lame. Sorry.

First, I copied and pasted that picture on my computer, then cropped it so just the design was showing. Then I ran down to my local Staples and had them copy it off for me on a much larger scale, to fit my tray.

Now this next part is by far the most tedious - but the end result was so worth it! So pop in your favorite Jane Austen movie - mine's Sense and Sensibility - and you'll be done before hero and heroine reach the altar. I cut out the whole scroll-ey design to use as a stencil. I started off thinking I was going to use the freezer paper method, but then that seemed like one step too many.

Next, I made sure to give my little wooden tray a once-over and buff out any really rough patches with some sandpaper. You don't need to go nuts, just so it's smooth enough to where the paint won't look weird over the top of it. If you scare up a lot of dust doing this, make sure you use a tackcloth real quick to clean it up or it will show under your paint.

Now for the fun part. I just love spray paint, don't you?

I decided what I wanted my accent color to be (this is the black part in the picture above) and spray painted the main part of the tray light green. Let it dry completely - I painted mine late at night in the garage and let it dry overnight, but I think the can said 2 hours should do the trick. If you are smarter than me, you could do your paint, then come back inside and pop in your Jane Austen - that would really be perfect timing!

When dry, I adhered my stencil to the tray. I didn't have any spray adhesive handy, so I did this the hard way and used scrapbooking adhesive tabs that I trimmed down afterward with an exacto knife. I do not recommend this, it took forever, but sometimes you have to make do with what you've got. I just watched more Jane Austen. :) Make sure the stencil is adhered really well, or your paint is going to leak through and ruin the design.

When that's done, we get more spray paint - wahoo! This color will be the main color for your tray. I used a chocolate brown, and it took about 2 coats. Here again, make sure you leave plenty of time for drying.

Lastly, peel off your stencil and ooh and aah at how genius your handiwork looks!!

Arranged with this *fabulous* black birdcage my sister gave me, a little placard from a friend and a pair of candles & candlesticks that were $2 at a garage sale,

my entertainment center is looking fairly spectacular, really inexpensively.

-mary-

Scrumptious Cupcake Liners

Munchkin and I decided to make some cupcakes today.

I've been wanting to try out this template for a few weeks, and since Superhubs was working tonight, we took the opportunity. The secondary motive for making them was to have a test run for Munchkin's 2nd birthday party that's coming up in a couple of weeks. Ya - I test run my cupcake liners. I am that much of a control freak. I simply printed the template out on white paper, then traced it onto a particularly heinous-colored scrap of cardstock that I will never want to use for scrapbooking purposes. Kind of an avocado-lime color with just the slightest hint of vomit. Ew.

Betty (the Crocker, not the Slice) helped us out - I am so not one of those people who are dedicated enough to make cakes from scratch. They're still scrumptious out of the box, so why mess with a good thing, right? Plus it sends a dime my school's way, which totally justifies the $2.00 I spent on it in the first place.

Munchkin loves to help me cook stuff - every time I'm in the kitchen for longer than 1.5 minutes he scampers in shouting "help mama!" and dragging a kitchen chair behind him, whether I'm actually cooking or not.
Behold the first pictures of Munchkin on this blog - he was really helpful with the whole cake mixing thing. :)

looks like even Spiderman got a taste.

While our cupcakes cooked, we entertained ourselves by taking a couple of candids -

and then I started making our liners while he indulged in some Toy Story 2. I just traced my little template onto the patterned paper, cut it out like so

then curled it around on itself and taped the edges together. Voila.



However, after making a few out of the originally designated boy-patterned paper below, I realized that the single-sided print just wasn't gonna cut it - these babies need double-sided paper to get the full effect.

Not having any boy-patterned double-sided paper on hand (despite owning a stack of paper about a foot high - how does that work?), I decided to pull out some of my favorite patterned scraps and put them to good use - love it when I find good projects for scraps!
Aren't they lovely?

I made the mistake of frosting my first batch before placing them in the cupcake liners, which resulted in frosting muckage, on my fingers and the liners. So if you make these, frost after putting your cupcakes in (duh, Mary!)

Munchkin volunteered to sample some cupcake, to make sure they were still yummy post-oven. They were.

Finally, I popped them onto my $1 garage sale find cupcake displayer (what's the correct term for this gadget?) and admired.

Aaah - culinary art at its finest, I'm sure.

In the morning we'll take them over to Munchkin's church nursery leaders with a thank you card. They are amazing and really do the hardest job at church so we mamas can get our worshipping in every week, God bless 'em!

And let's face it - I don't need to eat 13 cupcakes on my own. :)

-mary-

Slicing my way to some new laundry bins!

I received the most amazing new gadget for my new blog! The wonderful people over at Making Memories sent me the greatest product! Their handheld, cordless digital design cutter, called the Slice! Let me repeat: handheld. cordless. It does all the work of cutting your designs out, doesn't require its own cabinet for storage and you can take it with you to your BFF's house for craft night! Yes, please!

*shown here with 12x12 cutting board

Isn't it beeeautiful? When people aren't looking I refer to it as Betty. Yep, for real. I even got their pink one (I have a thing for pink), which is a special edition breast cancer Slice. Pretty cool, eh? Betty also comes with a special edition breast cancer cartridge full of inspiring words and pretty pictures. Love it.

Of course, almost before I had the beautiful Betty upstairs I was unwrapping all of the packaging and trying to decide what to do first. I settled on these lovely bins for my laundry room, which I've been dying to make for a while now.

I'm what you call - um, cheap. I don't like spending lots of money on things that I feel like I could make, and cute organizing bins are no exception. Of course, every time I go to Target I gaze longingly at their beautiful bins and tubs, but I just can't bring myself to spend $15 each - especially when I need like 10 for all of my various rooms.

So I went to Walmart and found a pack of 10 of these Banker's Boxes in the stationary/office supplies aisles - about $14 for all 10

I painted the first box white with a coat of primer left over from a previous project, but then realized these bins would fit pretty tightly into my laundry room so you couldn't see the sides, anyway, for the most part, and I just plain got too impatient to wait for paint to dry, so I just moved on to the next step.

I took some of this liquid gold...

and applied a thin layer to the side of each box that I wanted the cute paper on. I cut my paper down to size and applied each page to a box. I turned the boxes over onto the paper side and weighted down the inside then, to prevent bubbles and waves in my paper from the Mod Podge. Then I waited very impatiently for about 15-20 minutes, and voila! Cuteness adorned my banker's boxes.

After applying a top coat of Mod Podge to each cute box side, I got to the fun part: using my Slice to cut out labels! I can't believe how super easy it was to use - you just select the size you want your image to be, press start, and Betty takes care of the rest. I zoned out on Oprah for a minute while I repeated this 4 times - making your car a "no phone zone". :)

After that it was a simple matter of gluing another cute paper on the inside of my labels, writing in what that particular bin was to be used for, and gluing each label to its respective bin.

So, SO easy - I did the whole project in less than the time it took Munchkin to take an afternoon nap. To celebrate my newly organized laundry nook - what else? I threw in a load of delicates and grinned hugely as I pulled stain removers and laundry soap out of their respective bins.

:)

Want your own Slice? Click here to find out how to try one out for 30 days, risk free, for $14.95, free shipping. Think of all the amazing things you can whip up in 30 days! Of course, I guarantee you you're going to want to keep it at the end of that glorious 30 days. You'll be glued at the hip. The slice not only cuts, it cuts fabric (embellishing clothing post coming up!), and it also embosses and draws!

I almost have to take a nap here, I'm so worked up and excited about this nifty little cutter. Heck, try it out just to make yourself some cute bins, you'll still save a bundle! And don't forget to tell the fine people at Making Memories that Chili Pop sent you over.

Tah-tah!
-mary-

Welcome!!

Whew, my first Chili Pop Designs blog post! How exciting! I'll keep it brief so I can get to the really good stuff in another post.

My name is Mary, I'm mom to a little almost-two-year-old guy known as Munchkin and wife to a guy I like to call SuperHubs. I just opened up an Etsy shop, which you can view here. I decided to finally branch out and give this blogging thing a try, since I've been drooling over everyone else's for years and trying my own stuff at home. This blog will be all about my creative attempts - successes and failures will be treated equally! Ok not exactly equally, but I won't be one of those I-only-post-the-perfect-stuff bloggers, that's for sure.

So enjoy my little journey through craftiness, leave a comment, follow the blog, and laugh heartily when something I make turns into total Goo (yep, capital G). Thanks for reading!

mary