Hulk Birthday Cake

I can't believe my oldest, Buddy, is 4 years old!  Of course, like most four-year-old boys, he loves superheroes, so this year he requested an Avengers cake.  After searching around on Pinterest, I decided that a Hulk cake would be the easiest Avenger to create in a cake design.  I know, that's not a very good reason to choose your son's birthday cake, but I justified it by telling myself that I have a 5-month-old baby, so I don't need to spend hours on a cake.

Last year, Buddy requested a Spider-man cake.  And, he's already told me that he wants a Hawkeye cake next year, and that his little brother would like an Iron Man cake for his birthday (in October).

To start I made a regular two-layer cake and coated it with bright green buttercream.  I piped on the hair and face with a writing tip using black icing.  For the teeth, I used a basketweave tip backwards, so the teeth look smooth with jagged edges.  Then I piped Hulk's eyes in green icing with a writing tip.  Super easy for how awesome it turned out!

Teacher Gift: Class Signature Quilt

I've been so bad about posting all my quilt finishes recently.  I don't want to forget this signature quilt, because I love this idea for a teacher appreciation gift!  The customer convinced all the parents in her child's kindergarten class go in together for a gift.  Rather than everyone buying a small (and often rather useless) gift, they all went in together on these awesome quilts!  The customer picket out and bought the frog fabric.  Then she secretly had all the kids in her child's kindergarten class sign it in two different places with a fabric maker, then sent it to me. 

To assemble the quilt, all I did was add borders with corner squares.  I wanted the focus to stay on the center panel and the adorable 5-year-old signatures, so I kept the piecing simple and used solids for the border.  After basting, I added teacher's name and the year with fusible web.  Then I appliqued with a zig-zag stitch. 

I outline-quilted the border and corner squares.  I also highlighted all the signatures with quilted boxes.  Then I decided it needed more quilting, so I outlined some of the fun frogs, too.

I love how the outlined signatures turned out! The back really shows off the effect of the random-box quilting:

I also made a similar wall-hanging sized quilt for the teacher's aid the same way as the larger quilt.  I just added hanging tabs, and did a turn-out and topstitch finish on the edges rather than binding. 

Gender Neutral Thank You Cards

When I was pregnant, I knew that we'd get some new-baby gifts.  So, I whipped up these gender-neutral thank-you cards when I had a burst of nesting energy in the last weeks of my pregnancy.  Now that we know that BT is a boy, it's a little weird to think back to just a few months ago when we were guessing!

I wanted these to work whether we had a boy or girl, so I used red/yellow/brown for the colors. They were ready and waiting to be sent when I had the baby and couldn't do any crafting for a few months.  I also kept them really simple, with no ribbons, buttons, stitching that you usually see on homemade cards  It was nice being able to crank these out assembly-line style in under an hour!