We love hummus, the kids, me and even the hubs. I used to buy it every once in awhile but couldn’t justify spending that much money on those small containers. Then I remembered that in the 90s I used to make it, you know before you could just buy it everywhere. I worked on a recipe for a while to perfect it – well at least I think it’s awesome.

Hummus

1 Can Chickpeas (rinsed)

4 Tablespoons Lemon Juice

4 (or more) Cloves of Garlic (crushed)

2 Tablespoons Tahini

2 Tablespoons Olive Oil

1/2 Teaspoon Salt (to taste)

Pepper

1/4 Cup of Basil (chopped) (optional)

Put everything in a food processor and blend until smooth and re-season to taste.

Serve with veggies, cut pita, tortilla chips or whatever floats your boat.

Another option is to add dill instead of basil (that’s what I made this weekend and then again yesterday – so yummy)

You should really give making hummus a try, it’s easy, it’s inexpensive. It’s an easy last minute snack since you can easily stock all the ingredients. We usually have a few cans of chickpeas around, we have a huge thing of tahini and well everything else is just basic pantry items.

Enjoy

The top vases are made from recycled milk cartons that have been covered with coloured construction paper and store bought tulips. Here’s the original post on the vases.

Or make Mom her own personalized pretzel mix. This the kids and I made for my husband for Father’s Day but I know I would love if it I got it as a gift. The jar is from the dollar store and then the kids and I took a trip to the bulk store and selected a bunch of yummy treats that we thought Dad would like. At home we mixed them all up and put them in the jar with a box – super easy.

And lastly I have an awesome recipe for a spiced salt mix that I make all the time. A few years ago I made jars of it for friends and family as Christmas gifts. On the original post, I share the link to the recipe and directions to make the gift box I made.

I hope you have a great Mother’s Day and enjoy the weekend.

We started with raiding out collection of boxes to find ones that would fit the toys that we each picked out. Then I cut out the front of the boxes with an x-acto knife and glued the end of the box closed.

Then we selected some printed paper, you can use scrap booking paper, wrapping paper or decorate your own paper. Cut out the paper to fit the inside and the outside of the box and glue in place. Then you can add accessories to the room, stickers, pipe cleaners, cut outs. To finish them off we decorated the edges with pipe cleaners and paper trim.

You can glue your toy in like I did with the Paul Frank monkey or just place them in the boxes so you can still play with them.

Lilo picked out a printed Kleenex box for her room so she didn’t need to add any paper to the outside. For the inside she had fun with the prints and selected a different one for each wall. Then she made an easel from a pipe cleaner and a little picture to look like Hello Kitty is painting her self portrait. According to Lilo this is Hello Kitty’s Paris art studio.

Isla made a winter wonderland for her Hello Kitty. She picked her papers and I helped her cut them out, but she glued them in and accessorized the inside with stickers and hand drawn windows and skating rink. She also insisted that she didn’t want to trim her’s with anything – she loves it just the way it is, so do I.

I picked the Paul Frank monkey – back in the day I loved Paul Frank and anything monkey. I found the umbrella that one of the kids had made out of those melty beads, I can’t remember what they’re called but thought it would be fun to use. Before I glued the paper around the outside of the box I made pipe cleaner rain drops and poked them in to the top of the box. The trim I added is a ridged paper that I cut using fancy zig zag scissors.

I also made the Sponge Bob vignette. I love the fun pineapple paper and bright blue. I cut out a window and pineapple from another print and glued them on too. Then for some reason I glued the empty tape roll in, just thought it looked cool. I added this mini straw hat from an old broken craft, I didn’t glue it down so Sponge Bob can wear it or it can fit on it’s hat rest. The zig zag pipe cleaner adds a fun pop of yellow to match Sponge Bob that finishes his room off perfectly.

I’m trying to figure out where to display them. I was wanting to hang them on the wall but the toys are a little heavy. Right now they live on the window sill and look pretty cute.

So have fun and play with your toys.

I hope you guys enjoy celebrating these wacky days with me – check them out on Instagram or Facebook. Save this photo on your IPhone and use as your wall paper so you can follow along all month.

Hope you’re having a beautiful spring day like we are. Happy May Day.

With the warmer temperatures finally here, the flowers are starting to bloom. I love the vibrant colours of flowers. Last summer I would bring my camera on walks so I could take pictures of all the pretty blooms. I noticed that there wasn’t any flower colour that didn’t look beautiful against it’s green back drop, kinda like fashion where everything looks good with black. I wondered if you could translate green as a basic in fashion.

Funny that this is what I was thinking last year and now this year Pantone’s colour of the year is Emerald. I guess they think green can be a back drop in fashion as well.

Emerald coat with red top and fuchsia skirt

With colour blocking trend still big this year, the emerald works perfectly. It’s a little more daring way to wear green but it looks so great. The colours I see the most out there are the fuchsia, magenta and purples together with green. An easy way to do colour blocking is to get a bright jacket or purse, super fun for spring and summer.

Tangerine tank with emerald maxi skirt

Deep green colours work great for pants, and maxi skirts and pair them with a bright pop of yellow or orange. I love how the yellow sweater has a similar texture as the yellow flowers. The lower picture paired the bright green and orange combo with neutral accessories so it’s not too over the top and childish looking.

Coral red blazer, green pants with a bright yellow shell

Red and green combo might make you think of Christmas but choosing a pinky cherry or coral red and pair it with a green mini skirt. The bare legs makes it look fresh. Or even better throw a pop of yellow underneath and now it’s totally spring.

Green maxi skirt with white tank

These combos are so easy. The 2 tones of pink with the green jeans have such a pretty preppy look. And I love the emerald green maxi skirt with the bright white shirt, and she even has a pop of yellow on her nails.

Nature not only is great inspiration for colour combinations but also textures. When I saw these leaves that had been eaten by bugs I loved the lacy texture and the layering of green colour. 

So why not try green, on it’s own or pair it with a bold colour. I know I’m dying to find myself an emerald maxi skirt.

One for your Mom and your Mother-in-law, or keep one or both for yourself (I won’t tell)

To enter you simply LIKE my Facebook page (Vone Inspired) and leave a comment on this photo on my Facebook page to be entered in the giveaway.

Winner will be selected by random draw on Sunday, May 5th.
Shop now to receive 25% off all RENEW by Vone
www.renewbyvone.com products by using discount code: MOMSDAY

Offer ends May 12th.

My little girl turned 5 last week and this weekend she had a Lalaloopsy Tea Party with a small group of friends. I had a great time decorating and getting everything together to make this party super cute and fun.

Decorations were a combination of bought, handmade and stuff we already had. I found a great link on Pinterest from Design Every Day to make these awesome tissue paper flowers. There is a great tutorial on her blog. The buttons are made from small paper plates and black construction paper circles. The other flowers on the wall I bought for a buck at Michael’s.

From the dollar store I bought the paper plates, napkins and felt flowers in the mini vases (the vases are actually vodka glasses that we got for our wedding, I think they have been used for flowers more then vodka. I mean I like vodka and all but I usually don’t drink it straight).

The tea pot I found at the good will (second hand shop) for $4, it’s perfectly cute and simple. The lace table cloth is a round crochet one that my Oma made that I’ve folded in half – it works perfectly for pretty setting.

And the pretty neon flowers are from Walmart, the girls have oohed and aahhed over them before (they are soooo pretty). They just matched the colour scheme so well I knew I had to get them.

Above the china cabinet I edited our display to fit her theme, filling the ice bucket with tissue paper, large lollipops, felt flowers and another confetti 5 I made. The buttons in the vase are from the dollar store and were used for a craft at the party as well as decoration.

I think all the little touches worked together so well, I was really happy with the colours. And this afternoon I put the tissue paper flowers up in Isla’s room above her bed, it looks super cute and I’m glad to reuse the decorations.

I’m also in love with the cupcakes, they were fun to make. They are a combination of large and mini cupcakes, decorated with icing, sprinkles, jelly beans, jube jubes and chocolate buttons. I found a chocolate mould at the Bulk Barn along with melting chocolate wafers so I made many batches of buttons. The icing is simple butter cream that I coloured with neon food colouring.

I made the cupcake cake stand with a combination of stuff around the house. The bottom layer is a lazy susan which made it easy to arrange all the cupcakes, then I have an old cookie tin to lift that layer and then used a cake board that I covered and glued paper confetti to the edges. The top layer is a glass vase (actually the ice container for the vodka shot glasses). I put white glue on the top (or bottom) of the vase and covered it with paper confetti also, thinking the white glue would dissolve in water so it can be removed afterwards (I just soaked the confetti in water and they all came off along with the glue)

Also I made tea cup ice cream cone cups – another cool Pinterest find from Disney Family. I made them a little different based on what I had available but still think they looked super cool. The other tip I saw was to pre-scoop the ice cream and put in cupcake tins in the freezer. So at the party I just had to put the ice cream in the cups – much faster.

All the treats were a big hit with the kids.

The party was so much fun. I’ll share some of the games we played in another post.

Am I the only one that felt that you didn’t get enough time with your Easter decorations? I love my Easter wreath and wasn’t ready to put it away, so I thought I’d make it a spring wreath and more specifically I thought it would be fun to make this wreath work for Isla’s birthday party this weekend – it’s a Lalaloopsy Tea Party.

First I removed the Easter eggs from the wreath, they came off fairly easily but left big chunks of glue gun residue. I cut out what I could and then tried to cover those spots with clusters  of buttons. (buttons as from the Dollar Tree, I bought or really my sister-in-law bought a bunch of different coloured packs that I added together so make a fun assortment of colours) I also replaced the mini white flowers with pretty bright flowers. The whole wreath had really faded from last spring so the new bright buttons and flowers bring new life to it. It makes me smile and much better then our plain black door.

To make it a birthday wreath I made a funky confetti number 5 to hang from the middle of the wreath.

I saw these super cool confetti numbers used as cake toppers on the blog, Aunt Peaches, I took her idea and made my own version using slightly different materials. First I made my confetti, I used 5 different coloured pieces of paper. Layer all the pieces on top of each other and then make a fringe through all layers about 1/4″ wide and cut up a few inches depending on how much confetti you want. Then cut across the fringe and let the confetti pieces fall in a bowl. You can get lighter confetti by doing this with tissue paper. Then I made the base of my number 5 with a pipe cleaner. I outlined the 5 in 2 pipe cleaners and then wrapped another around to add stability  Then I started to cover with hot glue and poured confetti on top of it. I did sections at a time, front and back and then went back and got the sides and any missing areas.

Isn’t it super cool looking?

Now I can just hang the number 5 in the middle of the wreath for party day and it will set the entrance for our fun Lalaloopsy tea party.

So here we go – the last 3 letters of our alphabet…..

X for X-ray

I’m pretty sure I took a bunch of photos of us making this X but I can’t find them so I’ll just explain. We did our standard Google Image search for a x-ray of hands, arms and feet. We then cut up and laid out Q-tips to represent the bones in the x-ray. Our x-ray is suppose to be a hand and a foot, they look similar but you can see that the foot has longer bones near the ankle and shorter ones for toes. Isla thought it was neat to see what the bones look like under the skin. We had fun making this one.

Y for Yellow

For Y we glued a collection of yellow things to our yellow Y. I always collect junk, broken toys bits, old marker caps, and other colourful plastic stuff cause you never know when it will come in handy – like here.

Isla sorted out all the yellow stuff from the pile of colourful junk and laid it out on the Y that she glued to the red paper. Then we glued them all down – I did the glueing with my glue gun so they would stick better. Another fun letter done, only 1 to go.

Z for Zebra.

So this one took us forever to do. I think by this point Isla was already done with this project, she already knew we were going to do Zebra so the fun of figuring out what to do was gone. So I finally just made it happen so we could hang them all up and we’d be all done and able to move on.

It started with me drawing out the Z on a piece of white paper and Isla drew zig-zags all over the Z. Then cut out and glued to the background. As I worked on the tail that I made out of pipe cleaners and craft foam, Isla drew the grass with flowers.

Then she tried out a few different sized eyes to find the right ones, added a smile and a mane of pipe cleaners. And Isla’s final touch was the stars since with the black background and grass it must be night time.

And we’re done!!! This was a fun project to work on, it took longer then expected but that’s ok.