The Great Christmas Card Decision of 2011

I have been in Christmas card planning mode for ages, just not for us.  We send out an obscene number of cards during the holidays at work, and this year the task of designing those cards fell to me.  It was actually a nice diversion in the midst of a very busy season.  We ended up going with Tinyprints.com, partially because my aunt had just used them to send out some very cute Thanksgiving invitations, and partially because their prices and selection were the best I found.

Our work cards.  We decided not to use this family's photo, though, cute as they are.

So now it's time (some might say past time, but I've never been super on top of it when it comes to sending out Christmas cards) to pick ours.  I just can't decide which ones to pick!!  Some options:

Pretty and swirly but sort of subdued

Peppy and bright and almost Seussian

Sort of soft and snowy.  Maybe too snowy for a California Christmas card.  False advertising.

There are so many more too... and then comes the picture decision.  We didn't actually have pictures taken this year, so I have to choose from candids, almost none of which include all three of us!  Why, oh why, are we so terrible at posing for pictures at important family events??  Thankfully we have some cute ones from J's birthday and my birthday that will probably suffice.

Anyone have any awesome Christmas card tips and/or ways to actually get family pictures with everyone in the frame occasionally?  I could really use both!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  I can't believe it's already almost here!  Yay for a four day weekend!

{pretty, happy, funny, real} ~ Birthday Fun

We've had lots of happy, funny and real with plenty of pretty thrown in lately.  October ends with my birthday and Juliana's birthday so we've been go-go-going the past few weeks.

{happy}

For my birthday we went to a pumpkin patch that had hayrides and a real working farm and a maize maze and pumpkin chucker and a hay pyramid (I didn't know this was a thing).  We had a blast!  We ended up with one of my favorite family shots we've taken in a while:

So happy!!  They're hard to see, but note her pigtails.  They stick straight up... hilarious.

{funny}

Once we brought our pumpkins home (note: we didn't buy that giant one above... that thing was just monstrous) J decided they were for eating.  Just the stems, though.

{real}

I posted yesterday about her Halloween costume and she looked SO cute in it, but it took lots of prep.  She has a whole team:

Cuteness like this takes time.

Go check out Like Mother, Like Daughter for more {p,h,f,r}!

Halloween 2011, Pinterest-Style

Since Monday was my Jellybean's first "real" Halloween (the first one in which I was no longer recovering from childbirth, that is), I felt compelled to make her a costume.  Now, I don't sew.  At all.  It's kind of sad.  I wish I did sew, though!  I have TONS of pins on Pinterest with sewing projects just sitting there, taunting me with their cuteness.  So I had to find something that was very light on the sewing, otherwise my "making" the costume would have consisted of me asking my mom to make it for me.

In my search I found so many incredibly cute ideas:

via Pinterest

I thought this was beyond darling, but would require all kinds of sewing machine time.  Not to mention skill.

Then there was this:

via Pinterest

Oh my gosh I almost died at the cuteness. Plus it links through to a real tutorial.  Alas, though, it not only required sewing skills but some sort of plasticized belt action that was way out of my skill set.

And this is clearly awesome, but there's no way my kid is going to be willing to sit in a bucket all night.  Too big:

via Pinterest (Seriously if you're not on Pinterest I don't even know where you get your ideas.  You are awesome.)

But this.  When I saw this I knew:

Via Pinterest via Ashley Ann Photography

It has all the qualifications: 1) It's ADORABLE 2) It's completely awesome 3) It's very, very light on the sewing. Plus it has the added bonus of being a superhero costume, which meant the hubs was TOTALLY on board.

I wasn't sure how I was going to pull off the shirt, as hers was a retro printed one from Old Navy, but I figured maybe an iron on or something would do it.  

So I set out, an intrepid explorer on my lunch break and braved the Walmarts.  There I found the perfect shade of tulle, the white felt and the red felt (for the stars on the cuffs and crown) and, randomly, the last 12 month plain red t-shirt in the store.  I didn't find any suitable gold fabric, though, so that had to wait for a trip to JoAnn's.  

(I took no pictures of the progress, sadly)

The tutu was no problem.  I watched this tutorial and that was it.  Two hours one evening and done. It took me a little longer to sew in the white stars, but I just did that little by little.  I then decided on puffy painting the logo onto her t-shirt and then added lots of gold glitter, which worked great. 

The last hurdle was the actual sewing.  I ended up running down to the last minute and had to figure out how to hand sew the thing at work on my lunchbreak.  So keep that in mind!  It came out fairly well, but not exactly like the inspiration.  And the cuffs had to be sacrificed.  Just no time at all.  Oh well, she looked cute anyway!  Behold, the finished product, with some leggings added for warmth:

Aren't I cute, flying in my invisible plane?

The pink diaper sticking out really adds the effect.

She had a great time and looked adorable... all we could ask for really!  Happy November everyone!

To see tons of other actualized Pinterest ideas, check out Young House Love today!