The Origins of "Keep Calm"

Doubtless you've seen something with the Keep Calm and Carry On slogan, or some other play on the slogan. Well now you can read up on it's history. I knew it was a WWII poster, but didn't realize that they were never actually released. Find the article here.

Flickr photo by mediafury. 

 I love learning the history of such things. Do you? Pin It

Happy Valentines Day

This year we decided to keep it fairly simple. He got flowers for me, I made a cake for him (and Ava made a card). It's a 4 layer cake (2 layers strawberry cake and 2 layers white cake) with a mousse frosting. The frosting is what makes this so delicious. Two cups of milk, two cups of Cool Whip, and two 4oz boxes of pudding*. I was out of red food coloring (oops!) so I improvised and added a little strawberry Jello to the frosting to give it a hint of pink. Refrigerate the cake for a few hours and that moist pudding starts to soak into those layers and Mmmm, it's delicious. We also went to a movie tonight, which is something we haven't done for about a year and a half. Quite enjoyable. Hope your day was too!

*I usually don't care for processed ingredients, but I've tried this with real whipped cream and I prefer the less rich, light and fluffy taste that the Cool Whip gives it. Homemade pudding would probably be better, but who has the time? Pin It

Disney Family Fun

I'm so excited to share with you this next project! Are you familiar with Disney's FamilyFun magazine? (they also have an iPad app) It's loads of fun. And for the last several months they have been doing something called Badges of Fun. The idea is that the kids collect a new badge each month when they complete a specific "challenge", and put it on a printable poster. Each badge represents an activity the kids are to do.
Are you wondering why I'm telling you all this? It's because I got to design the badge for the month of March! They have been approaching artist/bloggers to design these badges and there is a wonderful variety of them. For March, the badge represents Eat Dinner Together as a Family. Using my Colored Spoon technique, I created a family of silverware to represent family mealtime. And here's the badge:

From their website you can download each badge and cut it out and put it on your poster, like so:

It was a fun project to do and they were really great to work with. When I was in high school my plan was to study Illustration in college and then become an animator for Disney. Though my plans changed some, I guess you could say that in a sense I've now fulfilled that dream of working for Disney! So thank you, Family Fun Magazine! Pin It

Antilop Highchair Cushion—Take 2

You may or may not remember that I previous had made a highchair pad/cushion for my IKEA Antilop high chair (see here). Now I've made a boy version, since I can't have my little guy eating in a girly chair.

I used the same pattern as the first time, but forgot to make one change. I wish I had sewn some ribbon straps on where the back meets the seat. Sometimes when I put him in the chair, the cushion slides forward under him, and it would be nice to have some ties to tie the rear in place (there are 2 slits they could slide through—where the buckle straps feed through).
The fabric I used was left over from my crib skirt, and I've gotten a lot of mileage out of that material. It's from the Joel Dewberry collection called Modern Meadow. For the back/lining I just used an old navy blue t-shirt and recycled it into this. The whole thing cost me $0. Pin It