Homemade Birthday Tees

I was browsing through Mariah's Wanelo list before her birthday this year, and she had a ton of tee shirts listed as gifts she wanted. Some of them were running $25 or more. I'm cheap. I don't want to pay that much for a tee shirt. Jason suggested I try making her similar shirts using my Silhouette Cameo. Honestly, I've never used it for more than cutting out vinyl stencils and a few paper crafts, but I felt confident it couldn't be that hard. I was right, and now a new hobby is born. I picked up a few blank tee shirts for $4 at Meijer, then went to town crafting!

I'm a little late to the party showing these since her birthday was last month, but better late than never, right?

 I was able to make these 3 shirts for what the cost of what 1 would have been!

Since I didn't pack my Silhouette back up to store away in my craft room yet, I decided to make her a belated birthday coffee mug the other day. Trying to find a plain blue coffee mug was a pain, but I found this one for $6 at J.C. Penny, and made her a The Fault In Our Stars mug.

I have used vinyl on plastic tumblers before and have had no problems with it coming off in the dishwasher. However, the first set of stencils I did on this mug started to peel off when ran through a cycle. I would recommend hand washing any glass/ceramic dish you apply vinyl to, otherwise you'll be reapplying another set of your stencils to your project. 

Do you like to make your own custom tee shirts? What has been your favorite handmade gift you have ever given or received?

The Fault In Our Stars Cake

I got this brilliant idea in my head that I wanted to make Mariah's birthday cake this year. Since she loves The Fault In Our Stars, it would only be logical that would be the cake's theme. Now, I love messing around with polymer clay. After browsing around on Pinterest and Googling how to work with fondant (something I have NEVER done before!), I figured it couldn't be much different than working with the clay. Yeah, I don't care what those tutorials tell you, it is different! Rolling out that fondant and shaping it was such a pain in the ass, by the end I wanted to chuck the whole ball of it out the window. The fault doesn't lie in the stars. It lies in my inability to cake decorate.

Since I had already committed to making the cake, wasted too much time in trying to figure out what I was doing, she got it served to her on her birthday anyway. I think she was probably trying to be nice when she said she liked it ;)

I swore- never again! Of course, Allison loved it and demanded a Frozen themed cake for her birthday. I hope she forgets by December!

The Fault In Our Stars (Craft)

I can't ever remember reading a young adult book when I was a kid. I pretty much skipped over that whole genre and went straight into adult novels. Harry Potter was actually the first YA books I read, and I was surprised that I liked them. My niece has introduced me to a few more that I love since then, so I guess I am more open to the young adult genre than I thought I would be.

My teen daughter has been obsessed with the book The Fault In Our Stars for the past year.

Around Christmas I decided to look up some quotes from the book for some personalized gifts I was making her. Some seemed a bit weird. "My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations." I sat there thinking "What the hell does that even mean? If the book is full of shit like that, it's probably stupid!" But, then I came across more that resonated with me- "That's the thing about pain, it demands to be felt." And "I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once." Awe.

I made these The Fault In Our Stars friendship necklaces out of polymer clay for my daughter's stocking at Christmas. She loved them!

The movie version will be released in theaters soon. Last month my daughter, who thinks she is going to DIE if she misses a day of school, asked if she could go to the midnight showing on opening day, then skip school the next day. I figured if a book was good enough to actually have her make that kind of request, I should give it a shot.

It was a quick read. A little sad, but predictable. Where the vocabulary of teens today is all about "yolo" and "swag", I didn't find a lot of the dialogue between the teenagers believable, but the book is filled with some pretty great and memorable quotes. By the end of the book I did finally get the whole "thoughts/stars/constellations bit. It did read a lot like a Nicholas Sparks novel, but overall, I enjoyed the book. And yes, I will be letting her go to the midnight showing when it comes to the theaters.


Have you read The Fault In Our Stars yet?