Birthday party craftiness

My youngest boy turned 3 this month and I threw a big, dragon themed party for him.

First a mundane project: I planned on making kool-aid and serving it in my orange cooler with a towel on the floor to catch drips. My friend, Morgan told me about this drip catcher she pinned, so I looked it up and made one. Unfortunately, my cooler decided to start leaking where the spigot screwed into the cooler, so I didn't get to try it out, but it seemed to work before my cooler soaked my counter.
Also, for #3's birthday, he requested a dragon pinata. I followed my mom's instructions, found here and worked on it little by little for most of October (it seemed). My husband and I finished it the night before the party. Since the birthday boy was still awake, I dragged him out of bed before we stuffed it with candy (and made it heavy) for a picture.
It was a big hit and my older boys (whose birthdays are in July and September) are already deciding what kind of pinata they want for their birthdays next year.

The picture below is when my son was starting to open presents at his birthday party, but in the top left corner, you can see another of "my" craft projects. I say "my" because it was my idea, but my husband really did it. We decided to do "pin-the-flame-on-the-dragon", so I had my husband pick a clipart dragon and make it poster size. When I suggested he color the background (so it wasn't white), he decided to do a whole scene, complete with a castle, sun, clouds and a tree. We added a 'shadow' of the flame to show where the kids were supposed to try to stick the flames. I had it printed as a poster at Sam's Club, along with 12 flames on a separate poster. I cut out each flame and then had the whole thing laminated. It was a big hit, though my son was the only one who wanted to get the flame on the shadow. Everyone else picked other spots, as you can see. I see many birthday parties in this game's future.
The party was a hit and enjoyed by all.

Master Bedroom Nightstands, After

I finished my nightstands about a month ago. So, here's the before again:

I wanted to see if I could get a nice metal look without going to the trouble of silver leafing them first, so I spray painted them with Krylond silver spray paint. After that dried, I painted the surface with black glaze, wiped it off and rubbed it in. In the picture below, the body of the nightstand is glazed, but I haven't done the drawers yet. It's a subtle, but important difference, I think.

Here's a close-up of the drawers pre-glaze and the nightstand post-glaze.
And here's my afters!
We moved them to our bedroom and stuck them in the corner soon after I finished them. I finally emptied our old nightstands and moved them out to the hall (where they still are) and put these lovelies in place a couple weeks ago. I LOVE how they turned out and can't wait to see the rest of our bedroom come together (eventually, we're s-l-o-w around here).

Where have I been?

I haven't posted in almost 2 months and here's why:

My 4 sweet kiddos take up so much time that I just haven't gotten to the computer much. Have I done projects? Yep, lots of them. I've even taken pictures of most of them. A week ago, I sat down (finally) at the computer and uploaded and resized all my pictures... just before my computer decided it didn't like the internet anymore. No joke, the internet died, but only on my computer. My husband's 2 laptops and our wii were fine, go figure. So, 2 reformats (for some reason the first reformat my husband did, didn't really work) and one week later, my huband is the best and my computer is back to normal (mostly).

So, between life, kids, hubby, and projects my computer time is almost nil right now and I'm really liking it. I will continue to try to post my projects as I finish them, or eventually anyway. I have a lot of stuff I'm hoping to do in the near future and over the next year. I found THE fabric for my living room and I can hardly wait to make the curtains. I'm also working on finishing the 1 billion+ projects I've currently got supplies for but have yet to start/finish. Here's hoping that by next November, I'll be able to say most of that stuff is done! (And maybe even blogged about...)