Happy New Year!

Happy New Year's Eve to all of you!  What will you be doing?  Getting engaged, perhaps?  Approximately 20% of all engagements happen over the holidays in December, according to a study by Conde Nast Bridal Group!  That's probably why we get so busy in January.  ;-)  I'm enjoying my last day of unofficial low-season vacation, because we here at Tradewind Tiaras always see a huge jump in activity on January 1st.  Something about all the new engagements and the rest of the brides realizing that they've just taken a three month holiday break from wedding planning!   To the bride who put in her order on Christmas Eve--smart girl, getting ahead of the crowd!  You might not need your veil until March, but it will be mailed out on Monday!

We're having a casual, family-friendly gathering to celebrate the new year.  We're inviting over a few families, firing up the wood-fired pizza oven I built in the backyard for some delicious food...

...playing fun German-style Board games like Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico, and I'm sure we'll pull out the Wii...

..and of course, wear silly hats and make lots of noise come midnight.

 Leftover Christmas crackers are excellent for those who don't bring their own silly hats.

It's too late to order the supplies this year, but bookmark this tutorial and source of materials for making your own Christmas crackers for next year.  These are the supplies and directions I used for the ones I made for the Sugar Plum Fairy party.  It was easy and fun, and I loved being able to make my own custom fillings.  Fill them with noisemakers, notes with hopes for each person in the new year, a pen and paper to write down a resolution, and of course, a silly party hat, and you have a perfect New Year's Eve cracker!  (And do I have to mention what a marvelous DIY favor homemade crackers would be for a December wedding?)

Our oldest has always been incredible at staying up late--never cranky or difficult, so she'll easily make it to midnight.  Our 19 month old...no way.  So I'm going to use the brilliant idea over at the Frog Prince Paperie blog for an early celebration for little ones.  Inspired!

Wishing the happiest of new years to everyone!  See you in 2011.

Silhouettes Capture a Moment in a Truly Classic Style

There aren't many true silhouette artists out there any more.  Artist Judith Housel is one of them, and I was lucky enough to have a sitting with her a few weeks ago.  She's amazing.  She sits her subject in front of her, looks at the profile, and simply snips away with a delicate pair of scissors and a sure hand.  Even my wiggly 18 month old presented no challenge to this gifted artist.  Just look what she was able to do in just a few minutes:

No shadows.  No digital work here.  Just an amazing artistic gift.  And her prices are remarkable--only $12 for the initial silhouette and only $6 for duplicates (all cut at the same time).  We ordered a set for ourselves and for each set of grandparents.

My friend Eva (who introduced me to Judith and first told me about her amazing work) had the brilliant idea to scan the images, shrink them down, and put them in photo frame ornaments.  I have a collection of photo ornaments on the tree already, starting with a picture from our wedding, and including one of each of the girls from each year of their lives.  I was so excited to use these images for this year's ornaments!

They're so striking, so beautiful on the tree.  I just love them!

I can see an entire wedding built around a set of classic silhouettes, and in case you can't find one of these rare people nearby, Judith Housel says she will work from photographs by mail.

Do you remember the great silhouette mugs I found on Etsy and profiled in our homemade hot chocolate favors post?  That just scratches the surface!  Take that graphic white and black as an elegant color palette, add an accent color, but use the silhouettes of the bride and groom in the decor.  As the table cards for everyone at the head table?  Printed on velum and wrapping votives and larger candle enclosures?  A silhouette of the two of you leaning in for a kiss?  How about hiring a silhouette artist to create incredible favors for the guests (the way that some people hire caricaturists)?   What an elegant way to incorporate a bit of Victorian elegance, but in a very modern way.  You could take the silhouettes and go clean and modern, completely romantic, or even steampunk.   So many ideas!

How to Make Whimsical Fabric Flower Hair Clips

One of my favorite elements from the Sugar Plum Fairy party was the flower hair clip I created as a gift for each girl.  They had a whimsical, fantastical look to them that was just perfect for the event.  I loved the flowers so much, in fact, that I stole one of the extras and have worn it several times myself.

The best part was that they were incredibly easy and inexpensive to make!  You just need a little fabric, some hair clips, and a flame.

Materials for Fabric Flowers:

• synthetic fabric in whatever colors and styles catch your eye.  I used 1/8th of a yard each of five different types of complimentary fabrics, some sheer, some opaque.
• a candle
• scissors
• something for the center of the flower.  I used Swarovski crystals, but rhinestones, buttons, sequins, anything would work.
• needle and thread (or glue, if you prefer)

Instructions for Making Fabric Flowers

First, cut your fabric into circles of varying diameters.  Don't worry about being precise, or getting the circle perfect.  Really, you can just freehand it and be awfully sloppy about your cutting technique.  Put your kindergartner on the task and it will be just fine.  It's that easy.  I want to make a quick comment about the type of fabric here.  You really need to be sure that you get completely synthetic material.  No cotton or silk can sneak in there, or the technique won't work.  I found a great selection of shiny synthetics in the formal dress section of Joann Fabrics.

Look, I really meant it!  The circles can be jagged and imprecise.

Next, light your candle.  Hold the cut edge of your circle close to the flame, and you will see it start to melt and curl.  This is what we want!  (I had total flashbacks to my 4th grade science fair experiment on flammability of synthetic versus natural fabrics when doing this step.)  Melt and curl all the edges, and you'll have not only sealed the edges from fraying, but you'll have a perfectly shaped layer for your flower.

Stack the circles so that you have a nicely layered flower. Again, this is incredibly easy. I put my first-grader in charge of this job. There are no real rules, just stack from biggest to smallest, and you'll have a beautiful flowers.

Use a needle and thread to secure the stack of petals and to sew any center in the flower if you want to. You could also easily use glue to stack the layers together and glue a center in the flower if you want a completely no-sew project.

Glue the completed flower to a headband, a pin, or a hairclip for an easy and gorgeous accessory.

I only spent a little over $6 on the materials to make about 20 of these flowers.  They would make spectacular bridesmaids' gifts, flower girl accessories, shoe clips, corsages for the mother of the bride, or even boutonnieres and bridal accessories. (I'm getting inspired now!  Just itching to make something with feathers, fabulous Swarovski rhinestones, and flowers in this style.  Paired with a visor veil--wow!)

Giant Quilled Snowflake Tutorial on The TomKat Studio

Want to know how I made the large quilled snowflakes for my Sugar Plum Fairy party?

 

Head over to the tutorial I wrote for The TomKat Studio for all the information you'll need to make them for your own winter celebration!

They're easy, they're incredibly inexpensive, and they're so elegant and dramatic.  Just the kind of craft I like!

How to Make a Custom Cookie Cutter

I knew I wanted sugar cookies in ballet pointe shoe shapes for the Sugar Plum Fairy party.  I even bought a cutter from the local cake decorating store.  I didn't especially like the one I bought, but it was the only one they had.  I settled.  But when it came time actually to make the cookies, I couldn't find it anywhere.  I still haven't found where I put it several weeks later, in fact.   I didn't have time to drive all the way to the cake decorating store all the way in Phoenix proper (it was closed, anyway), but Lowe's was about a mile away and still open.  I decided, in desperation, to try my hand making a custom cookie cutter.

I already knew I wanted the shape of a classic pointe shoe, and I wanted to hang them from a small white Christmas tree on the dessert table.  So I headed to Lowe's in search of likely materials, and was surprised at how easy it turned out to be.  To make your own cookie cutter, you'll need:



Homemade Cookie Cutter Materials:

• aluminum flashing (in the roofing section of your local hardware store)
• some scissors you don't care about making seriously dull, or tin nips if you want an excuse to buy a new tool
• pliers (I just used small jewelry pliers I already had)
• metal adhesive or epoxy (I used some metal jewelry glue I already had around, but epoxy is easily bought at the hardware store)
• pencil and paper for sketching your idea
• ruler, for tracing a straight line
• utility knife (optional--you could use the scissors instead)
• clamp

How to Make Your Own Cookie Cutter:

• First, use the ruler and utility knife to score a strip of the aluminum flashing, approximately one inch wide.  I just used the width of the ruler.  It's important to make the strip perfectly consistently wide, if you want the cookie cutter to work well.  Cut the strip using the old scissors you no longer care much about.  

• Next, I scored another line a few millimeters in from the edge of my strip, and used the pliers to bend it over to create a smoother edge so the cookie cutter wouldn't also be a hand cutter.  This worked fairly well, but next time I make a cookie cutter, I think I'll skip this step and instead try running a bead of caulk or glue on the top edge.  
• Use a paper and pencil to sketch a to-scale version of the cookie cutter shape you'd like to make.  Carefully bend your strip of aluminum to match the shape of your sketch.  I mostly used my hands, but sometimes the pliers came in handy, especially for sharp turns.

• Trim off any excess aluminum, but be sure to leave some overlap for gluing the ends together.  Glue the overlapped portion with an adhesive designed to work with metal.  Use the clamp to hold the edges tightly together while it dries.

There you have it!  Once the glue dries, the cookie cutter is ready to use!  Mine cut very nicely, and was exactly the shape I'd imagined when I came up with the idea of ballet shoe cookies hanging from their ribbons in the Christmas tree.

Need a custom cookie cutter, but don't quite feel up to doing metalwork yourself?  Check out the exceptional cookie cutters from the E Crandal company.  I have some of their cookie cutters, and they are extraordinarily well made, and gorgeous in their own right.  

How to Make Cupcake Wrappers

When I was planning the Sugar Plum Fairy birthday party, the birthday girl requested cupcakes instead of one large cake.  I knew this would be a perfect opportunity to try my hand at making cupcake wrappers!

I've loved the concept of cupcake wrappers since I first saw those gorgeous laser-cut ones pop up sevenish years ago.  So pretty!  So intricate!  And so expensive!   They're often a dollar or more each, and I've never been willing to pay that for a cupcake wrapper.  So I decided to try making them myself.

I don't have a fancy laser cutter, but I do have some pretty snowflake punches, and decided to improvise.  Here's what I developed.

Cupcake Wrappers Materials:

• template
• cardstock in chosen colors (I used three shades of purple for interest)
• punches (I used two different snowflake punches)
• pencil
• glue
• Swarovski rhinestones (optional)

Instructions for Making Homemade Cupcake Wrappers:

     1)  Print out a template for the basic wrapper shape.  I used the one I found at Skip to my Lou, and it was absolutely perfect for your standard-sized home-baked cupcake.

     2)  Trace template on the cardstock you chose for your project.  I could get five out of a 12x12 piece of paper.  Cut out the basic shapes.

     3)  Use the scraps leftover from cutting out the basic cupcake wrapper shapes to punch out the snowflakes.

     4)  Glue the snowflakes to the top curved edge of the cupcake wrapper.  If you want to (and who wouldn't want to?) glue a tiny Swarovski rhinestone in the center of each snowflake to add extra fun and sparkle.  I admit, this could quickly drive up the price if you don't buy them 20 gross at a time wholesale like I do, but a pretty little seed bead or inexpensive sequin would also look gorgeous.

To use the cupcake wrappers, simply wrap around your decorated cupcake and use a piece of tape to secure.  It's that easy!  Never again will I be without cupcake wrappers because I'm feeling too stingy, now that I've discovered how simple it is to do it myself!

At a big event, especially something like a wedding where there are often more than 100 guests, buying cupcake wrappers can quickly add up to a meaningful amount.  Mine came out to approximately 5 cents each.  That's affordable for any event, no matter how large!

Swedish Themed Gingerbread Party Part 2: the Sweet Stuff

At any gingerbread party, of course, the most important things are the gingerbread houses and the candies to go on them!

I had 29 kinds of candy available for people to use while decorating their houses this year.  I'm all about a good selection and variety, and start buying the candy slowly, a bag or two at a time, as soon as the Christmas candy hits the stores.

I particularly loved the apothecary jars I found for the table for several reasons.  First, the price.  Only $10 for a set of TWO, and they came filled with the silver truffles you see in the forefront of the image above.  Second, I loved that they weren't huge.  I adore the look of big apothecary jars, but most of the ones I've seen for sale are massive!  It would cost so much money to buy enough candy to fill just one of those, far more than I'd need for a gingerbread party!  Third, they're plastic.  Sure, I love nice glass objects.  But it felt good, with all those kids tearing around in a candy-induced-frenzy, to know that I didn't have anything particularly fragile or valuable on the table.

Candy canes are a must for a gingerbread house decorating party!

It's good to have a lot of small candies for gingerbread house decorating.  Some larger items are nice, but it's the smaller candies that end up being more useful and interesting.

And I even carved and painted the giant dala horse that decorated the candy table.  Really.  See, here I am, trying my hand at carving for the first time:

Now, I have to admit that I didn't make it just for the party.  No no no no.  My husband had wanted a large scale dala horse for years.  Usually they're about five inches tall.  He thought the large ones were amusing in their unusual scale.  But they cost $800 or more, and I didn't have that in my gift-giving budget.  So with my father's help and use of his  woodworking workshop, I decided to make one myself!  It was an adventure, it was fun, I'm exceptionally proud of what I did, and I'll never do it again.  I now understand exactly why they cost nearly a thousand dollars.  ;-)  That sucker took me weeks of work.

The kids needed a way to ferry the candies from the sweets table over to their decorating stations.  I knew when I saw these sweet buckets at Michael's for $1 each that I had the perfect solution:

And finally, the kids (and parents) enjoying it all!  This is the fourth year for a lot of these kids at the party, and they're getting really good!  I love seeing them progress over the years.

Enjoying a popcorn break after squirting icing directly into her mouth for a while:

Thank you, dear friends, for sharing our gingerbread tradition and annual celebration.

A Swedish Styled Gingerbread House Decorating Party

If you read the gingerbread tutorial we wrote for Frog Prince Paperie's blog, you know that we take gingerbread houses very seriously in my family!  We've made literally thousands of houses over the years.  This year I made about 70 houses, and threw five separate gingerbread house parties.  That's a record for me, but I'm only ramping up to what my mother used to do at the height of Operation Gingerbread!  It's a lot of work, but some of my fondest memories are of my mother making gingerbread and throwing parties for my preschool, my girl scout troop, and of course my friends and family.  I'm passionate about continuing the tradition, and giving that same gift to my two beautiful daughters.

I'll get back to the Sugar Plum Fairy party tutorials again tomorrow, but I wanted to interrupt that line of posts to bring you photos from our annual friends and family gingerbread house decorating party.  This year I went with a Swedish theme--so pretty with its handcrafted elements, and simple red and white color scheme, with accents of silver.

The first thing you have to realize about a gingerbread house decorating party is that the LAST thing you'd ever need is a dessert table.  People nibble a candy here, swipe a bit of icing there, and before you know it, they're all practically in sugar comas.  So I decided to create an Antidote Table instead.  A table styled in the same way I'd make a dessert table, but full of savory snacks.  We served asiago cheese sticks, crudites, tortilla flats, spinach artichoke dip (a healthy low fat version that I like better than most recipes!), cheddar puffs, a cheese plate, apples, cashews, chex mix, and popcorn.  And pizza from our wood-fired oven, of course, but that wouldn't fit on my already-crowded anti-dessert table.

I made Chex mix and put it in these incredibly cute cones I found at Ikea.  They were perfect, and even came with a plastic lining so that I didn't have to worry about the butter from the Chex mix making unsightly grease spots!  I needed a way to display the cones, so I spray painted some sticks silver, secured them in a vase filled with silver rocks (a happy accident from the overspray, and looked so much better than the plain rocks I needed to create enough weight to make the display stable).

I wanted to use the adorable gingerbread themed printables from Frog Prince Paperie for my party, but between a computer blowup and the fact that my nice color printer evidently can't handle the new Windows 7 OS, I didn't have time to figure it out and use them.  Next year!!  Instead, I used one of my snowflake punches with a Scandinavian flare to make simple table signs like this:

It may not have been as glorious and adorable as the Frog Prince Paperie's designs, but I loved the way the simple graphic look worked for this party.

I knew from the moment I conceived my Swedish-themed savory table, that I wanted somehow to use the Swedish cookie tree my dad made for my mother years ago.  Usually, gingerbread men, decorated sugar cookies, and sometimes apples are hung from these simple cookie trees.  I eventually decided to make traditional Swedish woven heart baskets, fill them with popcorn, and hang those from the cookie tree.  

I over-booked myself (as always) and my mother came to my rescue, making a few extra gingerbread houses for late RSVPers, the tortilla flats, cheddar puffs, and my favorite Asiago cheese sticks for me.  Thanks, mom!

You can also see in this picture one of the table runners I made.  I actually just used some wrapping paper I also bought at Ikea.  It was fast, looked fabulous, and couldn't have been better for cleanup!

Other decor included little dala horses scattered around the tables, silver dupioni silk curtains as the backdrop (stolen from my master bedroom, where I'm working on a new gray and yellow color scheme), and swags of white and red paper chain made in various sizes and hung haphazardly  over the tables.

I was also particularly happy with how the vases turned out:

I bought a red and a white sweater from the thrift store for just a few dollars, and cut off the sleeves and slipped the knit tubes over vases I already had in the house.  So easy, and such a fun way to customize absolutely every element of the table!

I set up two separate beverage stations for this party:  one full of kid-friendly drinks, and the other with decidedly more adult libations.

I always make mulled cider at my holiday parties.  It's delicious, it's thematic, but best of all, it makes the whole house smell absolutely amazing!  Using a percolator for this task makes in an incredibly quick and easy element to throw together for any celebration.

I found the perfect paper cups and plates at Target!

I tried to get red and regular cream soda for the party, but I wasn't able to find red cream soda in bottles anywhere.  Who knew it would be so hard to find?  I settled on cream soda and green apple soda, instead.

For the adults, we had a selection of wines and beers...

...and I couldn't resist making glögg, a traditional Swedish mulled wine drink, especially popular at Christmastime. I expected it to mostly be a novelty, but it turned out to be quite popular, even here in Phoenix, where it was unseasonably warm that night!

Next year, if I can manage to order a sugar loaf in enough time, I'm going to try the flaming version!


This post seems to have gotten quite long enough already, so I'm going to break it down into two posts.  Tomorrow, you'll see the main event:  the gingerbread houses and the candy table!!