Silhouette Giveaway!

To all my crafting friends check out this give away that Tatertots and Jello is doing. I love this blog and want to share with all my friends!

They are giving away a Silhouette machine. It is similar to a cricut but only better! :) They are similar in price but you don't have to buy expensive cartridges. You hook it directly to your computer and can use any image you want or have. How awesome is that?? You can also make vinyl cutouts, etch glass, make your own iron transfers, and so much more! I am so excited and am hoping to own one of these myself!

Christmas season

Hey friends,

It's been one heck of a crazy fall for us so this year. I feel like as soon as I see a break coming something else quickly slides itself into that slot. I have definitely loved the business of this season but I am ready for a nice relaxing stay-cay with my family with nothing on our agenda but play with Maddie. :)

Thanksgiving is coming up quickly and I am so excited to go home for a few days and celebrate with our family. Holidays are always crazy with my mom's side of the family but I love every minute of it. That is one of the many qualities that I get from my mom. She LOVES to entertain not just entertain, I mean pull out all the stops every time she has people over. Sets the table with centerpiece and place settings (the whole nine yards), makes the whole dinner and dessert herself, cleans the entire house in case people want to get snoopy :) , etc. I am just like her in this regard. There is something in me that kicks my brain into becoming a "Martha Stewart" hostess. It will bother me something fierce if I don't make the dinner/dessert from scratch, have the whole table set up and have the whole cleaned.

Anyways, all the to say I can't wait for the craziness of Thanksgiving with my mom and families. It's exhausting but so worth it. Danny and I are looking forward to the Cockrell Thanksgiving this year too! It's been awhile since his family has been able to do something big so we are looking forward to that.

This is going to be a really random and all over the place kind of blog so bare with me.

Danny and I have gotten the opportunity take a trip to Ecuador with Compassion International. For those of you who don't know anything about CI here is a website about them. http://www.compassion.com/

They basically find families all over the world and provide food, shelter, education expenses with the help of people whom have more than enough income to sponsor a child every month. So we are very excited to go on this trip and see first hand just how CI runs and see how they interact with the families that are being sponsored and the families who are in need of being sponsored.

Now moving onto Christmas. This year thanks to our wonderful and sweet friends took our "family pictures". They turned out amazing. Thanks to those awesome pics we can now send out our on and off again Christmas Cards. They usually get ordered too late and sent out the week of Christmas or I plum forget but not this year.

This year I am ordering them early and having them sent out soon after Thanksgiving (fingers crossed) and thanks to my go to place Shutterfly I have already created a few cards that I like. There are soo many different cards to choose from so I must admit that I have spent a little more time than I should have playing around with our Christmas card. Here are couple of my favorites... here, here and here. I am so excited to get ours made and sent off to our friends and family. I highly recommend you check out shutterfly.com for your own Christmas cards if you haven't made them yet. You most certainly won't be disappointed I assure you that! Here are a few of my favorite products they sell.

· Christmas cards to http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/christmas-cards

baby shower invitations to http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/baby-shower-invitations

· photo cards to http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery

Potterybarn knock-of

It has been waay too long since I last blogged. It has been quite a year and pretty busy. We absolutely love Vegas and are so blessed to have such awesome friends here.

Anyways, I just wanted to share my newest project. I have been really getting into a "susie homemaker" kick and I'm loving it. :) I recently was flipping through a Pottery Barn Kids catalog and came across the cutest cupcake costume.

http://www.potterybarnkids.com/products/cupcake-costume/popup/more-views.html

I thought this would be the perfect costume for Maddie, until I read the price. $59.00. WHAT??? A costume made completely made of felt. What a rip off.

So I got to thinking that I could totally make this myself. So I borrowed my friend Karyss's sewing machine (she also has her own Etsy shop with lots of cute handmade bows and necklaces. Go check out her website.)

http://www.etsy.com/shop/LoveStitchedBoutique?ga_search_query=lovestitchedboutique&ga_search_type=seller_usernames

So like I was saying, I borrowed her sewing machine and headed over to Joann's fabrics and picked up approximately 7 or 8 yards felt for $13. Awesome. I had enough fabric left over that I was able to make a second costume for my niece.

$7 compared to $60. Not bad...not bad at all and I am pretty proud of myself. I hadn't used a sewing maching since 7 grade Home-Economics. Here is the finished product.




What do you think?

I also thought I would post of few pics of Maddie. :)