Turkey Applique T-Shirts

One of my favorite blogs of all times is Balancing Everything. The author, Jessica, and I were pregnant with our girls at the same time. I have been reading her blog since then... over 5 years ago. She has a little blurb on her sidebar that includes three links to other blogs that have inspired her. I have found some amazing ideas from those links, this being one of them. Lindsay, from The Cottage Home, came up with this awesome turkey applique. I had to make some for my kids who are having a hard time letting go of Halloween and getting into Thanksgiving mode.



It was a last minute decision, so I had to do with what I had at home. I used t-shirts that the kids already had and were somehow ruined with stains or tears. The fabric for the appliques was from my scrap pile.

My daughter loves her "turkey shirt" and quickly found a skirt that matched to wear to school tomorrow.



Here is my son modeling his:

Love the combo of this green shirt with the scraps I had for the turkey... it screams fall!



A close-up of the turkey, I was really happy with how they turned out!

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Pumpkin Bread à la Starbucks

A few weeks ago I met a friend at Starbucks while the kids were at school. I couldn't believe it when I saw her pay for her breakfast with a $10 bill and only get coins as her change. She had ordered a coffee and a slice of pumpkin bread! While I'm a frequent visitor, I have never ordered food there and was oblivious to those prices. I shared my amazement with her and she said she LOVED their pumpkin bread and had never found an equivalent. I promised her I would look for a recipe, so you can imagine how excited I was when I read Mellisa's post about pumpkin break her blog Until Wednesday Calls. She mentions that her recipe is better than Starbucks', so I had to try it.



My husband LOVES pumpkin bread as well and said this was the best he had ever had. I made a large loaf and several mini ones. The mini ones disappeared as soon as they came out of the oven and the large one didn't last much longer. I've made it for my friend several times and she LOVES it, as does another friend who used to buy it at her children's school for $5/loaf. I shared Melissa's recipe with her and told her she could easily make a couple of loaves for under that price.



I have since made it at least once a week for us, if not more. I have been using organic pureed canned pumpkin until today. I decided to try my hand with the pumpkins we picked at the pumpkin patch. I cut them in half and placed them cut-side down on a baking sheet with an inch of water. I baked them at 350 for an hour. I then scooped out the flesh and pureed it, along with some of the water in the pan, with my immersion blender. One small pumpkin and two tiny ones yielded about 4 cups of pumpkin puree or enough for 4 loaves. My husband and kids said it was as good as usual, they couldn't tell the difference. I have a medium pumpkin left so I'll use that for the next batch.

If you want to make this delicious bread (do it!) you can get the recipe here. Enjoy!!!

P.S. And this is what I did with the seeds... Sweet and Spicy Pumpkin Seeds.

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Vanilla Sugar Cookies: Take One

Beautifully decorated sugar cookies are around all year long, however they seem to take center stage around the holidays. I have always wanted to try them but got a deeper urge once I realized I needed them for my daughter's birthday cake in December. So I present you my first try at sugar cookies decorated with royal icing!



The recipe I used for the cookies is from Bake at 350 and the only modification I made was substitute the almond extract with vanilla extract since I wasn't sure if the kids would like the first. Here is the recipe in case you want to check it out: Vanilla-Almond Sugar Cookies. The cookies tasted delicious but I have a lot to learn in terms of decorating them.

These were the first ones I decorated and as you can tell they are not great. My main problem here was the royal icing was too thick, I should have thinned it more. The outline was very hard to do as it almost wouldn't come out of the size 2 tip I used. When I went to do the flooding I thinned the icing but should have added even more water as you can see it ended up somewhat bumpy.

These were the next ones I decorated, and while they still need some work they look better than the initial ones. I need to work on making the edge a bit neater and matching the color better so that my mistakes aren't as noticeable. I love the polka-dots on these butterflies and couldn't have made them without this tutorial, also from Bake at 350.

Here I started to play with the polka dots, changing the sizes to see which I liked better. You can see here that I made the cookies pretty thick. For the purposes of the cake I'm making in December, they will need to be thinner. However this size is perfect for munching on!

More polka dots... as you can see I tried small ones and while I love how they look, they were much harder. Next time I try the little polka dots I'll do it at the beginning of the decorating session so that the tip of my squeeze bottle will be very clean and not clogged.

These last ones are what I need for the cake, and as you can see I played with different sizes of dots. The consensus is we like the small polka dots the best, now I just need to perfect my decorating technique to make them look a lot neater. However I'm excited to have Take One under my belt and I can't wait to try again!

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Upcoming CSN Stores Review

I am thrilled to announce that CSN stores has asked me to do a review for them!

CSN Stores has over 200 different stores to choose from and over 1 million items, including extra tall bar stools, cookware, and toys.

Please visit my review blog to find out more about this exciting opportunity. I am honored to be one of their Preferred Bloggers and can't wait to show you what I chose to review!

Sunburst Pony-O

Kaysi from Keeping it Simple kindly invited me to do a guest post over at her blog while she is on maternity leave. I chose to share a tutorial for this sunburst pony-o I made for my daughter to wear to ballet class.

While you are there also check out her Silhouette Heat Transfer Tutorial & Giveaway post, you could win a $50 package from Silhouette!



I'll be back later this week to share a new craft I'm trying out and loving! I hope you are having a great Tuesday!