Kelley

Easter Breakfast – Cinnamon Roll Bunnies

April 2, 2013 by Kelley

I wanted to make a quick post to share the fun Easter morning breakfast that we tried this year. I found this post on Pinterest for making “Cinnabunny” Rolls out of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. We love Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for the occassional weekend breakfast treat, so I thought it would be a fun surprise for my daughter on Easter. They were a hit, but I made mine a little different than the original post for a few reasons.

From http://www.bettycrocker.com/tips/tipslibrary/baking-tips/cinnabunnies

First of all, I bought a different variety of cinnamon rolls as used in the original post. She used the ones with Cream Cheese icing, which I’ve never tried, but if her recipe is correct, must be *quite* different than the ones I bought. The original post clears shows the cinnamon rolls being un-rolled to make the folded over ears, but the kind I bought are not rolled up at all – they just have cinnamon mixed into the dough and don’t have any sort of layers that can be unrolled.

Since I couldn’t un-roll mine, I just cut 4 of the cinnamon rolls in half and then shaped each half into an ear that pointed straight up, instead of the folded over ears that were shown in the original recipe. I still think they made cute bunny ears though.

Here they are about to go into the oven. By the way, if you don’t have a Silpat for non-stick baking, you should go get one. Now. They are so amazing, and MUCH better than cheaper varieties of silicon non-stick liners I’ve tried over the years.

And I didn’t think raisins and almonds would go over very well in our family so I just left them plain and then iced the whole thing after they came out of the oven. I thought about adding a little red food coloring to the icing to make them pink bunnies, but I was in too much of a hurry. We go to the early service at church, so we are always a little pressed for time on Sunday mornings. Good news is that we all loved our Easter bunny cinnamon rolls, and it was fun to do something a little different for Easter breakfast. I think we’ll make this an Easter Sunday tradition. (Although I’ll probably find a variety that actually rolls up next time to try the folded-over ears.)

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

Busy weekend!

April 1, 2013April 1, 2013 by Kelley

I’ve been absent for a few days, because we had a really busy weekend and everything else had to take a backseat for a few days, but I’m back in the saddle today and getting things done. Just some of what’s been going on around here…

I’m designing a new web site for one of my customers, who is starting up a new business. They need it done quickly, so I’ve been working on it almost daily.
Just over a week ago, I agreed to photograph a friend’s wedding that was being held Saturday (my first paying photography gig!). Because it was a last-minute thing and my first time photographing wedding, I had to spend a good bit of time preparing for that – getting my gear together, borrowing some extra gear from a friend, making a shot list, reading up on wedding photography, scanning through professional wedding galleries, etc. Then Saturday was spent at the wedding, and Sunday I started culling through the photos and taking a first pass at editing them.
My daughter was off school for Good Friday, and we had some friends coming over for a playdate and dinner at our house. Then some family stayed at our house overnight on their way home from a Spring Break trip to Florida.
On Easter Sunday, we went to church, then hunted eggs in the house from the Easter Bunny, and in the evening, we went next door for an Easter egg hunt and dinner with our friends in the neighborhood.

Between the wedding and several other big events lately (school field trip, a friend’s birthday, Easter, etc.), I’m way behind on editing pictures, but hope to catch back up on that in the coming weeks and start sharing more pictures here. Today I’m just trying to get caught up on the regular stuff like dishes and laundry and tidying.

Oh, and I can’t share any pics from the wedding yet, but it went very well, and I’ve decided that I do want to start doing some professional photography (children and families, though, not weddings). My mind has been spinning thinking about all I need to do to get that started. But last night, a neighbor asked me to do a Spring photo shoot of her two kids, so maybe things really will start happening on that front…

I will leave you with a belated “Happy Easter” photo from yesterday. Enjoy!

I’ve got soooo many ideas in my head for blog posts that I can hardly wait to share. I hope you’ll follow the blog on Facebook, Twitter (@kelley_today), or via RSS. FYI: Now that Google Reader is going away, I’ve been trying out bloglovin’ and feedly and, although they aren’t quite the same as Google Reader, I can recommend both.

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

Easter Egg Paper Craft for Kids

March 27, 2013March 27, 2013 by Kelley

My daughter loves to do crafts, and we figured what better way to break-in the new craft table in her playroom than to do a fun Easter craft together! I was inspired by this post that Kelly (not me) posted over on The Pretty Bee. Kelly and her son made some cute Easter egg decorations with strips she cut out of scrapbook paper with her paper cutter. I don’t know the age of her son, but my daughter loves to cut paper, and it’s a good readiness skill for Kindergarten, so I just handed her a stack of pastel office and scrapbook paper and let her go to town cutting the paper into strips.

Here’s what she ended up with…
I printed out an Easter Egg template that I had from last year on to white card stock, and I cut out the center. Then we glued the strips on to the back of the template. On The Pretty Bee, Kelly glued the strips to a plain piece of cardstock and then put the template over it at the end, but I somehow missed that detail. I wish we would have done it that way that way though, because I think the strips would have stayed down a little better. She also glued them horizontally, but my little artist wanted them to be vertical stripes, so that’s how we did it.

The one fun part about doing it upside down though is that we could only peek and see how it was coming along. When we were all finished, Andrea flipped the paper over and gasped and said it was “sooo beautiful”! It was priceless. I love how excited she gets about her crafts and artwork. I’m not very artistic myself, so I wasn’t sure what I’d think of the crooked cuts on her strips of paper, but I actually think the imperfections from having her cut it on her own really make it unique.

To give it a little more structure, I then glued a solid piece of cardstock to the back of it. That’s when I realized I should have done it differently in the first place, but oh well.
Here’s the final product (before I trimmed the excess paper off).

Then, as often happens, Andrea was inspired by our craft to do another Easter egg craft on her own. While I was cooking dinner last night, she made this:

That’s a sleeping moon in the middle of the egg with a nose and a smile, and no eye, because his eyes are closed, she says. She wanted it to be for the Easter Bunny, so she cut out some other paper to write a note to go with it. She asked us to help her spell out her message, and then she drew a tiny bunny and carrot in the corner for the Easter Bunny. (All this has her wondering if the Easter Bunny is a boy or a girl bunny, by the way. Anyone know???)
All in all, it was a very fun and successful afternoon/evening of crafting I thought.
Andrea can’t wait to do another Easter craft on her new table, so I’m sure we’ll be doing more over the next few days.

Happy Easter!

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

Kitchen Table to Kids’ Table

March 26, 2013March 26, 2013 by Kelley

We moved last August and since the move, I’ve never taken the time to get my combined office and craft really functional. It had too much furniture in it, and needed more shelving. Last Friday, I had enough and started changing it all up. I was going to post about the progress I’ve made in that room, but instead decided to focus this post on the first thing I changed, which actually involved a table that I moved OUT of the room. Moving the table out and freeing up that corner of my office was the first step and it made a huge impact in my room. And I was so excited about how it turned out that it motivated me to keep working on the rest of my office.

In our old house, we had a pretty generic kitchen table with the natural wood top and white painted legs (similar to this). I bought the table shortly after graduating from college for cheap at a discount furniture store, but it worked, and it actually looked pretty nice in our last two houses. But the new kitchen has darker wood floors and cream colored wood trim, so the table was just NOT going to work anymore as our kitchen table. So I had the movers put it in my office/craft room, thinking I could work on craft projects with my daughter there. But that never happened, as she preferred to work in her playroom. So the table just took up a lot of space in my office and junk got piled on it. I also realized Andrea was outgrowing her little kiddie table that Santa brought when she was just 2. Brainstorm! I realized I could cut the legs down and move it into her playroom. It’s got a lot more real estate than her kiddie table, which is never big enough for her sprawling arts and crafts projects these days. The only problem was that I didn’t like the idea that if I cut all the legs, I couldn’t easily put it back to its original state again. So I went to Home Depot and looked for replacement table legs, but they were pricey and would have cost over $60, which was more than I wanted to spend. But then I found some primed square balusters for only $9 and they were long enough (42″) that I could buy two and cut them in half to make shorter legs for the table. So I brought them home, pulled out the circular saw and cut them in half. Then I took the legs off the old table, lined up the new legs, marked and drilled holes in them, and then screwed them in to the table similar to how the original legs attached.

Here’s the final result:

My daughter LOVES it. She has so much space for her projects now and there’s room for her bins of markers, and crayons, and colored pencils to be on the table with her while she works. The table is also a little bit taller than her previous table, so she won’t outgrow it anytime soon, and it’s a little easier for me to sit with her so we can do projects together. Success!!!

The office/craft room is coming along quite nicely, but I will have to post about that later this week.

I’m linking this up to the weekly One Project at a Time link party hosted by A Bowl Full of Lemons!

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

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