Eat Make Grow #9

Welcome to this week's Eat Make Grow Blog Hop where you share what you have been eating with your family, growing in your garden or making with all your creative impulses. Eat Make Grow is a collective link party that is shared across three blogs and runs every Thursday-Tuesday. Whichever blog that you choose to link up your post, it will show up on all three sites! Eat Make Grow is a way to share with many people posts about your domestic doings, whether that’s growing veggies, hosting parties, sewing, mixing up cleaning supplies, or trying out a new recipe. We want to learn about it! Every week, we will feature the most popular link, and one chosen by the the host.

Your Hosts:

Marigold from Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky!
Miranda from Pocket Pause
Foy from Garden. Cook. Write. Repeat.

READ MORE! ----->

Survey Says!

If you have a free minute, I'd love it if you could answer a few questions in this little survey I whipped up. It's only four questions, and your answers would really help me out. I'd like to know about bit about how, what and for whom you create projects, and get your feedback on the kind of content I should be focusing on. Comments and suggestions are welcome, as well. Please leave a comment on this post (you can leave an Anonymous comment, if you like) if you have any thoughts on what you'd like to see, or not see, on Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky!

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Thanks you!

Lego Party Goodie Boxes!

Lego pops inspiration via Living Locurto | Lego juice boxes inpiration via My Many Colored Days

Huck's birthday was this weekend, and we celebrated at the Lego Store in Downtown Disney. Since we were only able to snag the 11:30am time slot for that day, I decided that it might be a good idea to feed all of the kids a little snack and have cake before the party. This would also allow everyone a little bit of breathing room to arrive a few minutes late, and we could make sure all of the kids got a potty break before going over to the store as a group.
Of course, even though the main part of the party was at the store, I still had to add a handmade touch to the party. I needed an easy way to pass out snacks and goodies, and decided that making each kid a goodie box was the way to go. I thought it would be easy to find some colorful boxes in just the right size, but it wasn't easy at all! I was only able to find what I was looking for in bulk. So if I wanted 100 boxes, I could have done that, but it was impossible to find just a few without spending several dollars per box! I finally found some small, white cardboard boxes at the Container Store for about $1 each, and I painted them fun colors using Martha Stewart glossy craft paints. I had planned on painting some Lego dots on the top of each box, but I ran out of time! They still came out cute.

READ MORE! ----->

Eat Make Grow #8

Welcome to this week's Eat Make Grow Blog Hop where you share what you have been eating with your family, growing in your garden or making with all your creative impulses. Eat Make Grow is a collective link party that is shared across three blogs and runs every Thursday-Tuesday. Whichever blog that you choose to link up your post, it will show up on all three sites! Eat Make Grow is a way to share with many people posts about your domestic doings, whether that’s growing veggies, hosting parties, sewing, mixing up cleaning supplies, or trying out a new recipe. We want to learn about it! Every week, we will feature the most popular link, and one chosen by the the host.

Your Hosts:

Marigold from Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky!
Miranda from Pocket Pause
Foy from Garden. Cook. Write. Repeat.

READ MORE! ----->

So Who Likes to Party?

I have really been enjoying my new bloggy endeavor into hosting a linky party! The Eat Make Grow Blog Hop started out as a plot with my friends Foy and Miranda to grow our readerships, but after doing this for a couple of months, I have found that it has way more benefits than just more blog exposure for me. I am blogging more, and discovering and re-discovering amazing blogs. My Pinterest boards are filling up with tons of ideas for fun crafts and yummy recipes, and my creative wheels are turning and turning! So a big, fat THANK YOU to everyone who has contributed to Eat Make Grow! I can't tell you how much you have inspired me!


Since we started Eat Make Grow, I have been playing with my blog design and sort of swept away the cobwebs and made it prettier and more useful. There's a bunch of new stuff in my sidebar, including ways for you to subscribe and for us to connect. I wanted to point out a few of those lovely things, since sometimes they get lost in the shuffle as you're hopping about from blog to blog. For example, did you know that you can subscribe to Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky!? It's true! You can:

READ MORE! ----->

The Lego Cake Pops Fiasco!

Huck's birthday is this weekend, and of course we are going to have it at the Lego Store in Downtown Disney. The store was recently remodeled and it is so super amazingandweloveitsomuchOMG! One of the cool things they added with the remodel is a private room on the second floor that has glass windows all around overlooking the store and all of the cool Lego sculptures inside. There are a bunch of Lego tables, and you can rent it out for small birthday parties. We were limited to inviting eight kids (ten total, including my two guys), so that was kind of tough to whittle down, and Huck and I had to do a lot of negotiating, but ultimately I am happy to have a smaller group so that I can focus on doing something fun and special for each kid.

READ MORE! ----->

Eat Make Grow Thursday #7

Welcome to this week's Eat Make Grow Blog Hop where you share what you have been eating with your family, growing in your garden or making with all your creative impulses. Eat Make Grow is a collective link party that is shared across three blogs and runs every Thursday-Tuesday. Whichever blog that you choose to link up your post, it will show up on all three sites! Eat Make Grow is a way to share with many people posts about your domestic doings, whether that’s growing veggies, hosting parties, sewing, mixing up cleaning supplies, or trying out a new recipe. We want to learn about it! Every week, we will feature the most popular link, and one chosen by the the host. This week, your host is Foy.

Your Hosts:

Foy from Garden. Cook. Write. Repeat.
Marigold from Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky!
Miranda from Pocket Pause

READ MORE! ----->

How to Clean a Silly Straw!

My kids love silly straws. Crazy straws? Whatever. The point is, my boys love them, but if you put them in anything but water, they get gross pretty quickly. Milk is the worst. Then, one day, I had a light bulb go off! Chenille stems would be perfect for shoving down in there and scrubbing out the yuckies! Of course! Back in the day we called them "pipe cleaners" after all because they were used to clean out smoking pipes. But now we call them the more p.c. "chenille stems" and their original purpose has been forgotten and instead we use them to make cute little bugs and fuzzy bracelets and such.
The point being: This works great! Shove it down as far as it will go down one end of the silly straw, then pull it out and go in from the other side. I can usually clean one loop from the top and one loop from the bottom. This works well for regular straws, too, not just the crazy kind.
Ta Daaaaa! No more gunky crazy straws!

Eat Make Grow Thursday #6

Welcome to this week's Eat Make Grow Blog Hop where you share what you have been eating with your family, growing in your garden or making with all your creative impulses. Eat Make Grow is a collective link party that is shared across three blogs and runs every Thursday-Tuesday. Whichever blog that you choose to link up your post, it will show up on all three sites! Eat Make Grow is a way to share with many people posts about your domestic doings, whether that’s growing veggies, hosting parties, sewing, mixing up cleaning supplies, or trying out a new recipe. We want to learn about it! Every week, we will feature the most popular link, and one chosen by the the host. This week, your host is Miranda.

Your Hosts:

Miranda from Pocket Pause
Foy from Garden. Cook. Write. Repeat.
Marigold from Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky!

READ MORE! ----->

Embroidery Sampler!

I love it when I stumble upon some old, unfinished crafty thing I did and then forgot about for years. I made this embroidery sampler after checking out a library book sometime in the early aughts. Maybe 2002 or so? Wow, was that a decade ago?? Indeed, it was! Anyway, this was stuffed into a box in my garage and I got very excited about it and wondered how in the heck I made all of those cool stitches.
And then, lo and behold, good ol'Etsy did a How-Tuesday showing how to do a few simple embroidery stitches. And guess who's all excited about embroidery again? I have a project I have to have done by Wednesday, so I'll share that later this week.

READ MORE! ----->