For my son's personal aide I made a special frame

Now, I had this crafting frame from Michael's and a puzzle I had bought at a thrift store for like 50 cents with the idea of doing this very project "one day".

First I took out the puzzle and painted a bunch of pieces in primary colors. I just used paper plates to set them on for drying and this took much longer than I thought it would.

 .While those dried I pained the frame with a very light coat of red, because, well, I like red :)






Then I sat down and used a storage bin lid for my work space and got my glue gun plugged in and ready.

I didn't really know what I wanted to doa s far as a game plan. I thought about just using all but the red pieces randomly placed around the frame on an even, flat plan. But as I started gluing, I decided it would look much better and waaaaaay more fun if I just kept adding and adding until it stacked up and had a nice collection of puzzle pieces to look at so .....

I went with it and doesn't it look FUN?! I took some cardboard stock and cut it to fit the pic hole, using the paper that came with it for a guide. Then I took his school pic and did my version of homemade laminate, packing tape! lol

Once I had it all set, I gave it a heavy couple of coats of clear coat to seal it and I am in love with it. I would make myself one too but I used almost all the pieces I painted and I have too much left to do to paint myself some more. Maybe after the holidays. lol Here it is shiny with the clear coat added....

And here it is with his photo and the little candles I made her in her favorite color :)

Teachers, aides and bus driver gifts. CHECK :)

OK, for the bus driver I decided a pretty little smelly jelly would be great to have for the bus. I had these perfect plastic containers already, I just needed to decoupage them and it would be adorable!

So, take ugly little containers and coat with goo like so....

Then I used wrapping paper to coat it and smeared it down good with more decoupage and commenced doing the top part which was not
as easy or as fun as the bottom portion :)

I made up my jelly beads while this dried and added the scent. Then when it was all done, I hot glued some ribbon around the outer edge and added some sparkly snowflakes for flare and ta-da! We have smelly jelly :)

Now, I also made mugs for the 3 aides that are in his class but aren't so much involved with him. I bought 3 mugs at the $1 store. I had thought about printing his school pic in black and white and decoupaging it on there, but I wanted the mugs to be dishwasher safe so I used hobby enamel and did some free hand snow flakes. Not my best artistic talent but hey, it's homemade with love right? lol

 and gathered up some plastic spoons. I melted some almond bark and gathered up some fun stuff for dipping them in.

I used crushed peppermint, heath bar pieces, mini choc chips and butterscotch chips.

Now I apologize for not getting pics of the process but, working with melted chocolate doesn't really give me an opportunity for photo ops. 

But, here they are all coated with yummy things....

Well, I put a few in little holiday treat bags and added several packs of hot coco with marshmallows and wrapped all that up in tissue paper...ta-da! anther gift down.

Smore's Pops for holiday treats

Yet ANOTHER cute idea I found on Pinterest. I saw this adorable pin on there and decided it would be a fun treat that wouldn't be another cupcake or cookie. Although I am doing some cute cupcakes, I decided to send a treat every day of this last week instead of making everyone separate goody bags so...here is one of the 5....

First, I lined my cookie sheets with foil and laid out graham crackers along them. A marshmallow on one side, a couple of chocolates on the other...set my oven for 400 and popped them in for about 5 minutes, but I watched to be sure.

 Now I thought letting them get kind of brown would make them better but I think it made it harder for them to stick together so....just get them soft then pull them out.

Also, I tried just laying my sticks on top, but it worked better when I shoved them up in the middle of the gooey part.

OK, smores are assembled. I popped them in the freezer which helped them hold waaaay better than not freezing them, and melted my almond bark. I just set them down in the chocolate and spooned it over the whole thing then gently scraped my spoon over the graham as I pulled it out so it wasn't too much chocolate on them.

Then I laid them on wax paper and added some festive sprinkles just for fun.....

And there they are! Fun little smore's pops!

All wrapped up and ready to go! <3

Triple Chocolate Peppermint Treats....my style

So, I always do mad holiday baking and this year, with my new Pinterest obsession, I decided to stray from my traditional line up of goodies to package for friends and neighbors.

A pin led me to this tasty looking recipe that I just happened to have all the ingredients to make already here at home.

Now, I have a TON of baking going on so I didn't make the cookies from scratch like the recipe calls for, I already had a package of double chocolate chunk mix for another idea I scrapped so I just added about 1/4 cup of Coco to the mixture to make sure they were super chocolate tasting. I also decided that making them in mini muffin pans would make icing and covering them in crushed mint would be much easier so...I made mini muffin cookies. Baking them was a bit tricky since I had to gauge how long to cook them, I think these took about 12 minutes.

Now, the icing. The recipe calls for 4oz of softened cream cheese and 3
cups of powdered sugar. The directions say mix until smooth. Well, mine wasn't smooth so I just added the other 4 oz of cream cheese and then we had magic. It also calls for 1/2 cup melted white chocolate morsels which seized on me so I added about 1 1/2 tbsp of shortening and it was nice and liquefied to add to my still stiff icing.

Once I got the icing set, I went about crushing the mint candies. What a mess! But, I got them crushed and put them in a small bowl.

Then I iced my lil muffins, and gently rolled each one in my crushed peppermint. I know myself and this was much less of a mess than me trying to sprinkle the mint on the cupcakes. That candy is very sticky and I am glad I went this route.

There you have it! I am not a mint fan so I haven't tasted them yet but, they look pretty stinkin' cute and will go with my other mix of goodies quite well. I should have more goodies to post as the evening goes on, I have about 5 things in process right now :)

Oreo Turkeys, I am SO late getting this posted!

So, someone on my Facebook posted these adorable little turkey treats and I thought they would be wonderful to make for my son's classroom rather than the usual cookies or cupcakes.

Preview of the disaster...

I will not mention where I found the tutorial because I was furious when I set about making them. She made it sound like it took 15 mins or less and was just a pinch to put these little darlings together. Um. NO. Not even a little bit.

Now, I am going to post my little adventure and the end result which would be MUCH cuter if I ever made them again, which I WON'T be, but I will add my suggestions as I go along.

First I took a package of Oreo cookies (if you are going to try this,be sure to get the double stuffed ones), I only bought one because my son's class is small, and ended up needing to do MUCH reconstructive surgery to get what I needed out of that. By her instructions I gently worked candy corn pieces between the 2 cookies so that they are just barely into the white center to hold them.

Sounds easy right? Nope. Maybe if I had the double stuffed ones it would have helped but you would NOT believe how fragile these cookies are when you are trying to do anything other than eat them! :)

Now, I put 5 candy corns in each cookie, but you can do more if you like. Then I laid them all down with a separate section for the broken ones that needed put back together. She said just put a dab of black icing on either side to hold and let that dry while you work on the other parts. HA! I knew icing takes hours to dry "hard" so I decided to use almond bark for faster drying and more sturdy hold.

* I think if I were to do them again, besides using double stuffed ones, I would just take off one cookie, add the candy corn, put some melted chocolate then reattach the top cookie. Less trouble, stronger, faster hold.

Next we attach the tail feather part to the "base". Again, I used almond bark rather than icing and put the base cookie against a wall then dipped the "feather side" in the chocolate and set on the base, also against a wall. Sounds backward I know, but I wanted to be sure my "feathers" were even and had the right placement. Sorry I didn't get a photo of this but I was trying to work quickly with melted chocolate :)

Once I had all my lil turkeys lining my kitchen counter walls, I set about getting the other parts ready. First I took my mini Reece's (actually I used a less expensive and easier to unwrap store brand) and cut off just a little fraction of one side so it would sit down nicely on the base.

I also set out my malted milk balls since I was going to do assembly line style construction with the melted chocolate. Once the base parts were dry, I laid them all flat on my work space and dipped the peanut butter cup in my melted chocolate placing the cut side down on the base with the back attached to the feather cookie. I added the milk ball heads as I went along because it's pretty fast and easy if you have everything lined up.



While this dried, I cut the ends off of candy corn to use for the beak. I cut larger pieces than I thought I wanted because I was tired and didn't want to fool with tiny white pieces and melted brown chocolate, but, I like the way it looked with the extra color!

Once I had enough cut, I attached the beaks to the malted milk balls and used tube icing to add the eyes, feet and neck thingie. I know it does not look polished or post worthy but I had so much time and energy in this project, NO WAY was I not going to blog it :)

Now, I think I ended up with about 18 turkeys from one pkg of Oreos and that is with putting many back together with the chocolate. They are rough for sure, but, his class liked them and it was something different than the normal treat routine.

I added some orange food coloring to rice krispie treats and formed little pumpkins with tootsie roll stems and a bit of green icing for vines to finish up this Thanksgiving endeavor. Not my most shining turn out but, I think they are pretty cute considering....