Crafty Christmas

The Girls Team spent the majority of the weekend decorating our house for Christmas. The tree is up, the lights are on the house, and snowmen have taken over our interior decor! Christmas comes and goes so quickly, so we are taking full advantage of the season for our blog. Tonight we decided to make Christmas gift tags.

One really great thing about getting crafty in the age of the internet, is that you don't always have to rely on your own creativity or artistic abilities. It is very easy to be inspired and helped by others. Using templates we found from other blogs, we made very cute, festive and easy Christmas gift tags.

Our supplies for the evening: cardstock, string and raffia.

Scissors, a ruler and a hole punch.

We found our first gift tag template at a really awesome blog called Eat Drink Chic. Every once and a while, the creator provides free, printable PDF templates for her readers to use! Click here if you want to print them for yourself.

After printing two copies of this design, for 12 tags total, we cut the tags using a paper cutter.

Next, we hole punched the tags at the top, and used matching string to complete them!

Here is the final product. The backs are plain white, perfect for a short message.

Next, we made these ornament gift tags from Martha Stewart, click here for the template.



Cutting all of the circles may have been the most time-intensive part of this project!

We then used a push pin to make holes in the ornaments for the string.

Using a needle, we then strung red and white string through the tops for the final product!

The Girls Team is very happy with how our homemade gift tags turned out! This project took about one hour to complete. The Christmas season comes and goes so quickly, so it's nice to be able to take time out to have fun and make something that will add a special touch to our gift giving this year. 

No Sew Infinite Scarves

This week's Make It Happen Monday project was inspired from a post we saw on Pinterest, our new favorite website. We made No Sew Infinite Scarves out of t-shirts. Here's our easy step-by-step process:

Buy an XL or XXL t-shirt from the craft store; ours were $2.50 from Joanne's.

Cut the bottom seam off. 

Then cut a straight line from under one armpit to the next, leaving the rectangular mid-section of the t-shirt to work with. 

Stretch, stretch, stretch!!! 

Finished product draped around once...

Single loop, pink infinite scarf.

Double-looped black infinite scarf. 

These cute and comfortable scarves took 10 minutes to make, literally! They are a quick, easy and cheap pop of color for any outfit. Overall, the Girls Team was impressed! 

Cake Pops Anyone?

For this dark mid November Monday we decided to go with a cheery project! What is cheerier than a cake pop? The cake pops we had seen and tried were cute, bright, and clever! On Youtube, Bakerella, the queen of cake pops told us that although there were a lot of steps to making cake pops, they were simple.

So on this Make It Happen Monday we decided to go for it!

First you bake a cake in a 13x9 inch pan. We went with chocolate.

After it is completely cool, cut it into quarters.

Simple!

Crumble the cake and mix with 2 cups of frosting.

Simple!

Roll into balls and let set in the freezer for about 15 minutes.

Messy but simple!

Melt candy melts, we used white chocolate, in a double boiler.

Simple.

The next part got a bit tricky. So tricky we forgot to capture it in photos!

You take a lollipop stick and dip it in the white chocolate. You insert it half way into the chocolate cake ball. Then you dip the cake ball into the melted white chocolate, making sure not to stir it around in there or push the stick all the way through the top! Be careful taking it out of the coating because sometimes just the stick comes out! Then carefully tap off the excess coating, but don't take too long because then the candy sprinkle won't stick! If you don't get all the extra coating off the pop it will just drip down the lollipop stick!

Tricky.

Our finished products.

Messy.

The aftermath.

Messy.

The girls team has a whole new appreciation for cake pops! 

How does Bakerella make them look like muppets, turkeys and monkeys? We could barely get the sprinkles on them! Even though our finished product did not live up to our vision of what we wanted to do with our cake pops, they were still cheery! They made us cheery. We cheered at how bad we were at this! We think we will stick with pie pops.

Check out Bakerella.com to see how a professional does this.

Cheese Stuffed Shells

Tonight the Girls Team whipped up a classic favorite, Cheese Stuffed Shells. While this meal has been a tradition around our house for many years, we've never attempted to make them from scratch! At first I was intimidated by the number of steps and ingredients between the sauce and stuffing, but making this proved easier than I thought!

The meat sauce was very flavorful and such a positive step up from store bought red sauce. Although the recipe calls for sausage, we used ground turkey for a healthier option.

We boiled the shells for 7 minutes:

And then made the stuffing: ricotta cheese, parmesan cheese, and romano cheese, basil, parsely, one egg and salt and pepper to taste. Cheese, cheese, cheese!!!!

Then the fun part begins! Stuffing the shells, placing them over meat sauce and topping them with more sauce and cheese...

After baking the stuffed shells for 25 minutes, they were perfect! The filling was cheesy, melted and warm, and the shells were soft - not tough or overcooked at all! 

If interested, we found our recipe here. Enjoy!